Of the many categories for one-upmanship in filmmaking, a special place has long been reserved for any director who can pull off a ridiculously long take. The lengthy walk-and-talk shots in films like Preston Sturges's Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) are largely practical and cost effective, one may surmise, in that they make short work of long sections of script. Jean-Luc Godard helped push the long take up to the level of a bona fide political intervention—recall the supermarket shot near the end of Tout va bien, his 1972 collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin—and more recently Steve McQueen showed his mettle in staging an epic ten-minute encounter in a single long shot, a passing moment in his larger effort to neuter real political history via a cocktail of stylized filth and suffering rendered chic (Hunger [2008]).
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