That is an incredible film that holds several records. It’s 99 minutes long, has a cast of thousands (literally- more than 2000 extras), orchestras and bands, is set on a time-traveling tour of dozens of rooms in the Hermitage (in one room it’s Nicholas & Alexandra’s time, another will be Stalinist, another will be Catherine the Great, another will be modern day [2002 when it was shot], etc.) and it was literally all shot in a single continuous take.
I saw that movie in film class. In those days, movie film came in 10-minute reels. (That’s why 20-minute shorts like the Three Stooges were called “two-reelers.”) But Hitchcock wanted the illusion of continuity, so every ten minutes, he would have the camera pass by a black curtain, the back of someone’s black suit coat, etc., causing a total blackout of the screen. The next reel would begin with motion in the same direction and velocity, so it appears as if nothing had paused.
As for what it was about, it was a fictionalization of the story of Leopold and Loeb: the two rich college kids who killed someone, just to see if they could get away with it. (Naturally, the murder weapon was a rope.)
Personally, while I love these kinds of long tracking shots in movies like “Children of Men” and “Touch of Evil,” I found that an entire movie made that way was toooo distracting. I felt like saying, okay, we get it! It’s cool! Now quit farting around and just tell me the rest of the story.
Probably the best long tracking shot in recent history…Atonement.
And for comparison…“The Ten Best Tracking Shots Ever”
Imagine a TV show done like this. Take 24 to the next level.
Incidentally, let’s get straight the difference between a shot and a take. A shot is a single continous piece of film done with a single camera that’s running all through the shot. By looking at the finished film, you can count the number of shots in it (although a good filmmaker like Hitchcock could disguise things to make it hard to count the true number of shots). A take is any single attempt at making a shot. When a movie is made, each time the director finishes a shot and then reshoots it he is creating a new take. There’s no way to tell when watching a finished film how many takes each shot required. A long shot could well have taken many takes before the director was satisfied with everything in the shot.
Confusingly, a shot in a film that lasts for much longer than usual is often referred to as a long take. It’s true that the long shot in the finished film came from a single take (usually among many takes of that shot), and the take was obviously as least as long as the shot in the film, but that’s placing the emphasis on the wrong thing. The interesting thing about long shots (a.k.a. long takes) in finished films is not that it was possible to let a camera run that long. Anyone can turn a camera on and let it run for a long time. The interesting thing is that the director could get everything to work correctly for that long time. He has to make sure that nobody forgets their lines or actions, nothing falls over in the set or drops down from somewhere, no extraneous noises distract from the shot, the camera man moves the camera in precisely the right path, etc. I would guess that a long shot in a finished film that doesn’t look horrendously ragged requires lots of pre-planning, many rehearsals with the actors, and many takes.
Hitchcock did ROPE as an experiment, and I think he also would agree that it was a failure. He did use another 10-minute take in UNDER CAPRICORN, the movie that he made next after ROPE, and it’s much easier to take.
I suspect that there are some filmed versions of stage plays, where the cameras were just set still and tracked around the stage for the whole play, but I don’t know of such off-handed.
There was an episode of “Mad About You” with Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser that was one shot. It was even shown without commercials to preserve the novelty. It was the ep where they try to get their new baby to sleep alone at night for the first time.
Here’s Paul explaining it at the end of the episode. (YouTube)
I thought it was cute.
There is this ‘new wave’ of directors in Romanian cinematography (best known for ‘4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days’ and ‘The death of Mr. Lazarescu’) which uses frequently long shots.
The last three movies I’ve seen from them (‘Tuesday, after Xmas’, ‘Police, adjective’ and ‘Boogie’) contain several shots longer than 3-4 minutes. Each has at least one shot that goes for about 10 minutes or so.
For my amateur eye, the shots do not seem difficult from a technical point of view. The camera doesn’t move too much and there are no explosions, hundreds of extras, highly choreographed fights or car chases. Usually the whole shot takes place in one room and no more than several actors are involved in it.
On the other hand, it must be very though for the actors. They have to stay in character for a long time and, since the camera is always on them, they have no room for error.
It wasn’t until the fourth or fifth time I saw the Kenneth Branagh version of Henry V that I noticed that the lengthy “Non Nobis” scene near the end–when the king carries the dead boy across the field of Agincourt–is all one continuous take, from just before the singing starts until there’s a cut at the very end to close up on the king’s face. It’s mostly a tracking shot of the king, but he actually walks out of the shot at one point, to reappear later standing over the corpse of the Constable of France. It’s a long shot that doesn’t call attention to itself, and I like it all the better for that.
Is it really any harder than it is for stage actors, though? They’re regularly on for an hour or more at a time, and with no opportunity to re-do the take if they screw up.
My (very) uneducated guess is that is harder. The camera is sometimes really close (as if you’d be sited with the actors at the same table) and they must fully control their bodies, not only their facial expressions, otherwise the viewer will notice immediately that something is wrong. A glimpse in the wrong direction and they’d have to do a new take.
On a stage the actors are usually far from the public and their gestures are not really natural (hence ‘theatrical attitude’ 
), since whatever they’re doing must be clearly seen by the whole audience. So I’d guess that any misstep will have a better chance of passing unnoticed by the average person. I remember reading somewhere that stage actors do not always look good on film because they tend to overact.
This being said, AFAIK most actors from the movies I’ve mentioned above are stage actors. I’m sure their stage experience is very helpful, but my feeling is that long shots require some more skill on top of that.
The complication comes with every other crew member’s job having to be just as seamless and invisible, especially with all the paraphernalia required for a typical shot having to be avoided. It would suck to do a ten minute single shot, only to have, for example, the boom mic drop into view a few times, or the shadow of the cameraman appear on a wall, and ruin it.
From what I remember,** Lifeboat** seemed like one single shot.
LIFEBOAT was one confined and cramped setting, but Hitchcock uses the camera amazingly to make it interesting. I’m pretty sure there’s no really long take.
There is also a lot less “reality” to theatre. The audience can see the wings where actors come and go, they can see sets change, they can see the lighting, they can see that the actor is confined to a single physical space. Set up a camera in front of the stage when they perform Hamlet, it’s not going to fly as a Hamlet movie.
The other aspect is if someone does something wrong on the set of a play, it’s come and gone, there’s little repercussion. 1,000 people may have seen it, they’ll maybe recognize that it’s wrong, and they move on. Do that on a movie set, and a million people can see it, over and over again.
The terrible de Palma movie - Snakeyes - opens with a really long shot, but it calls attention to itself to the movie’s detriment.
Originally Posted by Susanann
From what I remember, Lifeboat seemed like one single shot.
Well…that** “one single scene”** where they are all in the lifeboat, sure seemed like a loooooooooooooong scene.
The video for Sugar Water for Cibo Matto by Michel Gondry is one shot, and splitscreen, and really damn clever.
A scene is not the same thing as a shot. Look up the difference.