The theater tends to be a bit more abstract in its scenary. Movies also tend to have much of the emotion and erergy of the scene conveyed in how it is edited together, something that you don’t have in the theater.
What makes long continuous takes so impressive in a film like Goodfellas or Children of Men is that there is so much that needs to be coreographed and prepared. The lighting has to be set up so that it looks seamless as the actors move through the scene. In CofM, you have tanks and soldiers firing, extras running around, explosions and squibs going off, all the while the actors are acting the scene in a bombed out city. In Goodfellas, there’s a whole restaurant full of actors who need to hit their cues at just the right time.
So in other words, there’s little to no room for the director to yell “cut” and edit out any mistakes.
I neglected to mention that the unbroken 10- or 12-minute opening sequence in Werckmeister Harmonies, which takes place in a small Hungarian town, entails the protagonist positioning the drunks in the local tavern as celestial bodies in a bid to explain a recent (or upcoming, one or the other) solar eclipse. Haunting musical score.
The beach scene in Polanski’s Cul de Sac is a wonderful one-shot scene. And I suspect that the Herzog/Kinski collaborations have produced quite a few of these. I can’t think of any specific scene, but I am certain there are plenty in both Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, Der Zorn Gottes, and Woyzek. Come to think of it - the opening scene in Woyzek, where Kinski/Woyzek is drilled in the courtyard is probably one shot. Amazing.
And Russian master director Tarkovsky has what I consider the most beautiful one-shot scene ever in Andrey Rublev, where they are testing the newly cast bell. Actually Tarkovsky has made a lot of great one-shot scenes.
Peter Greenaway’s movies often include long shots that are either static, or extremely slow pans or dolleys, with actors in either bizarre monologues or bizarre dialogue. And, since, it’s a Greenaway film, they may well have to do it naked. (God bless you, Dame Helen Mirren.)
Season 1, episode 10 of Scrubs has a cool long take about 10 minutes in; Dr. Cox chastising Eliot and then JD. I just checked and it’s actually only 1:30, but it’s pretty cool, because the camera movement is so well choreographed, I didn’t notice it was a single take until my 5th viewing or so.
Another vote for Russian Ark, which really is virtuosic filmmaking at its best. Just… wow.
I haven’t seen it yet, but there’s a long, uninterrupted shot of British troops under attack on the beaches of Dunkirk in the Keira Knightley film Atonement that I’ve heard is pretty amazing.
Woody Allen has a lot of these. They’re one of his hallmarks. I think my favorite is the one in *Annie Hall * in which he and Tony Roberts are walking up the street from FAR away, you can’t even see them yet, you can only hear them talking, and Woody’s going on about an imagined religious slight. “You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC, so I said, ‘Did you eat yet or what?’ And Tom Christie said, ‘No, JEW?’ Not ‘Did you?’…JEW eat? JEW? You get it? JEW eat?”
The phenomenon depicted has actually been identified in the Urban Dictionary as the Jew Eat Syndrome, with Woody given credit for being the first one to expose it to mass culture.
Let me also add to the explanations another difference between stage and movie acting. Rather small, simple point.
In stage acting, your reaction may depend on who you’re watching at the time. Hence, you may miss bad or inferior acting or reacting.
In movies, especially with DVDs, you get to watch the same scene over and over again. Flaws and flubs that you may miss on stage not only become magnified, but commented on. You can watch a scene a hundred times and mark exactly what everyone is doing.
If all else fails, simply watch some terrible movies. (For an example of poor pacing, I’d recommend “Hogfather”. After awhile, you’ll be snapping your fingers, telling the actors “pick it up, pick it up FOR GOD’S SAKE MOVE ON”.) You’ll appreciate the good movies more.
The effects are’nt as good because it was made in WW2 but the acting in the Laurence Olivier version is incredibly better.
Due to wartime financial constraints Olivier had to show the Irish extras how to fall off of horses and eventually damaged himself in the process.
So he was not just a great actor.
Try watching a film with bad editing, like Michael Bay’s Armaggeddon: I couldn’t find a single shot in that film that was longer than 5 seconds. Not that fast editing is necessarily a bad thing, but in that movie it was clearly a case of “let’s in stick as many explosions and shouting as we can as fast as possible.” Then watch a movie with good editing, like Francis Coppola’s The Conversation, where shots take as long as they need to tell the story and frame the character: there’s a wonderful scene where Gene Hackman, in long shot, throws away an envelope containing bribe money, walks away, and then without pausing turns around, walks back and picks it up again. No dialogue, no cuts away, no close-ups, no “acting”, almost, but that single perfectly paced shot, with its smooth unbroken transition between disgusted rejection and resigned pragmatic acceptance tells you everything you need to know about Gene Hackman’s character, and cutting to a close-up of Hackman’s face, the envelope, or Hackman picking it up would have detracted from conveying the distancing of a distant man.
I’m not sure this qualifies as acting, but there’s no doubt it’s impressive. The shot(s) in Lawrence of Arabia that give some sense of the vastness of the desert and Lean’s intention to show that feature. The one where we don’t see anything but sand and heat waves for some time, then a speck on the horizon, then the growing size of the speck until we can see it’s an animal with a rider, until the rider comes into view. How long does that shot run? Seems like minutes.
Theres one shot showing the beaches during a lull where nothing major is happening but there are lots of different little events going on,a shellshocked soldier,the hero,a group of naked oilcovered men being doublemarched towards the sea to get cleaned off and a group of soldiers standing in a bandstand singing a hymn etc.
The director said that he was amazed that he did the long sweeping shot with a single camera in one.
What amazed him was that everyone was looking in the right directions,stayed in character and ignored the camera.
He was particulary impressed with the men in the bandstand who were’nt apparently professional actors but were choiristers in real life.
