Since we’re talking music vids, Tom Petty’s You Don’t Know how it Feels
Off the top of my head, music videos involving a single shot:
Massive Attack - Protection, Unfinished Sympathy
Eskimo Joe - Liar
I could probably think of a lot more, but it’s been a while since I went through my tapes.
There was a continuous music vid by Primus (Mr. Krinkle?) that was really neat! The lead singer/basist was dressed as a pig and behind him a continuous line of circus performers walked by, and then circled in the background. Jugglers, fire-breathers, acrobats, etc. It was one of the coolest videos I’ve ever seen.
Another music vid I just thought of:
Flaming Lips - Do You Realise
I’ll keep an eye out for the Primus one…
Was the Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony one shot? You know, the one with Richard Ashcroft walking down the street bumping into everyone?
I believe Warhol also had Sleep which was roughly 8 hours of a guy sleeping all in one shot. There is no way I could watch that though so I can’t verify it.
I thought the film was about a 30 second loop in the projector. AW just started it and let it run till people left.
(I personally think AW just wanted to screw with people’s heads)
Wasn’t one shot. Was one scene, but not one shot - they cut away to shots of faces, and a lot of Ashcroft’s feet. Still a good vid tho, one of my faves.
Cool, looks like Russian Ark is coming to the Cleveland Cinematheque February 14. Maybe I’ll go see it.
According to the Hitchcock Doc. I have on tape, "Rope " was filmed in 12 continuous shots, Their exact words.
No, no, it really was 8 hours of the Empire State Building. The movie was shot at 24 fps and played back at 16 fps. There is stuff happening, e.g. it gets dark, the city lights come on, etc. You can see the blinking clock of the Metropolitan Life Assurance Tower, which allows you to tell what time it is.
And don’t get too excited about Blowjob, it’s just a static shot of a man’s face (while he’s supposedly receiving one, though.)
The new(ish) Kylie Minogue video appears to be one continuous shot, though it is obvious that there is some serious special effects happening, it is not easy to see where/how they happen.
Weezer’s "Undone (The Sweater Song) has a one-shot video, directed by Spike Jonze of “Weapon of Choice” and “Sabotage” fame.
For the oldest continuos shot music video I can remember, how about John Fogerty’s “The Old Man is Down the Road” where the camera follows his guitar cable around the woods and streets.
I don’t know if it quite qualifies, but the television adaptation of Marsha Norman’s play 'Night, Mother was filmed in such a way that it looks (most of the time) like someone was filming the play. It doesn’t have the continuous tracking shots of Rope , but it’s in the neighborhood.
Another music video: Bruce Springsteen, “Tunnel of Love” (IIRC), just him sitting in a kitchen with a guitar. Really striking the first time you see it. Dull as pudding the third or fourth time you have to sit through it.
To send this discussion off track slightly, how about the first twenty minutes of Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes? It’s not a very good movie, so don’t feel bad if you missed it, but he designed a handful of angles and takes that would glue together and form the illusion of a single continuous take for the first act of the film. It’s a pretty neat trick, and serves to hide, at least for a while, how vapid the story is.
De Palma loves this stuff. The first five or six minutes of Femme Fatale is a single unbroken take, also.
You’re forgetting the ending, with Wallace Shawn in the taxicab travelling through the city, and narrating in voiceover.
At least at one point, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope doesn’t even pretend to be one continuous shot: when the maid announces that the dinner is ready, the film cuts from a group shot of the guests to a closeup of her.
In my experience, no dialogue in the trailer just means it’s subtitled, and they don’t want to scare people away with a foreign film. Although if you’re seeing the trailer anyway, you’re probably not the kind of person who would care.
As I remember Rope from the last time I saw it, it’s a mix of “trick” cuts where Hitchcock is disguising the join and about 4 explicit cuts. The oddity in watching it, at least for the first time, is that the myth of it being seemless is extremely strong: you really don’t want to believe that there are obvious edits and you’re not terribly sure that there are jumps, even when you’ve seen them.
This always seemed to be a distinctly Miramax ploy.