Not yet mentioned is the very impressive single shot in the Oscar-winning Argentinean film The Secrets in Their Eyes
One of my favorites. Although not a real continuous take, it is certainly an impressive piece of film making. Especially when,… well just about anywhere. This is a really good movie too, in case you haven’t seen it.
Don’t forget the 17 minute opening scene of “Gravity”. This movie has it’s flaws, but that portion really made me feel like I was in space with the astronauts.
This opening shot from Rouben Mamoulian’s 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is mostly POV, with a long single take from 1:02 to 2:22 with a LOT of movement and choreography that still blows me away. A lot of the first minute is POV, too, but there are a few intercuts.
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/222833/Dr-Jekyll-and-Mr-Hyde-Movie-Clip-What-is-it-Poole-.html
They clearly constructed a second mirror-image room on the other side of the mirror for the shot where Jekyll (Fredric March) looks directly into the mirror. The actor playing Poole clearly had to run around the door quickly. Twice I don’t think they used a double.
(Christopher Reeve must have done some similar rushing in the single take between flying away from Los’ apartment after his interview and showing up as Clark at her door seconds later in the 1978 Superman)
A couple of memorable ones:
Henry V Henry V: Non Nobis and Te Deum - YouTube
The Longest Day The Longest Day - Harbour - YouTube
The scene was one of the first attempts (if not the first) to do a complicated one-take scene. They had been done before (and with greater length), but those were basically a single shot with a static camera. Touch of Evil has a camera that’s constantly moving from one place to another.
It also doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s not unusual not to notice it’s one shot because it’s not gimmicky. It sets up the bomb and shows people going about their business. You’re too busy following them (and seeing the car and wondering when the bomb will go off) to pay attention to the technology.
But when you start looking the second and third time, the technical skill in shooting it is breathtaking. Note how much ground the camera covers, how it moves at different heights, how everything is perfectly timed so the the actors fit in with the camera movement. And that is amplified by the fact it hadn’t been done before. Nowadays, you can do this easily with Steadicam, but back when the film was made, it had never been seen.
There’s also a shot in the film that shows two people driving in a car and talking, but which doesn’t use back projection, which was standard at the time and probably hadn’t been done since talkies came in. Welles was an innovator
I think it’s important to note that there’s a difference between a single shot and a single take. Russian Ark was done with one shot, but it took three takes to get it. According to Wikipedia if the third take had been a bust they would have had to scuttle the project because they only had access to the museum for a certain amount of time.
A single take means they nailed it the first time and didn’t have to do it again. It could still be done with multiple shots from multiple cameras.
A single shot means the whole scene (or film) was filmed with one camera nonstop from start to end. If there’s a goof, they do another take, but the next take is single shot as well.
Do we know if any of the longer scenes mentioned in this thread are one take by that definition? Some of them could be, but I bet virtually none are.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned John Woo’s Hardboiled. There’s a crazy 3 or 4 minute one-take action scene with guns and explosions and squibs and squibs and squibs.
Came in to mention the already mentioned Gravity.
The famous opening sequence to A Touch of Evil’s I read this was Orson Wells’ ‘fuck you’ to those who complained about his elaborate and over budget scenes. He took weeks to set it up, had many, many rehearsals and scared the hell out of studio execs. Then shot it all in one take, saving tons of money.
One of my favorites from The Longest Day. It does start with a cut but what a view of the battle!
beat me to it on that one.
There’s a great 11-minute shot in Polanski’s “Cul de Sac” with Donald Pleasance and Lionel Stander having an ugly drunk on the beach. The great cinematographer Gil Taylor had it timed for when the plane eventually passed over them, near the end of the scene.
Creepiest extended tracking shot: Rusk, in “Frenzy”, leading a victim up his two bending flights of stairs and into his apartment, as Hitch’s camera then silently tracks backwards, the same path, back down the stairs and back out into street, followed by her scream, inside.
The Anna Kendrick video for Cups, starts a one shot at 1:09 in until about 3:20, including some tricky steadicam work in the diner.
And such a classic!
Actually, the great part of that shot was that the street noises covered up the scream.
The original “Gun Crazy” had a great long cut of the bank robbery scene (which may also have been the opening scene, I can’t recall).
Here’s the scene. Perkins looks around as though he’s looking at the crew and thinking “Oh shit…”
I read it in Stephen Rebello’s* Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho*, which is supposed to be the definitive work on the film.
Editing together footage of the car sinking and Perkins watching it sink wouldn’t be terribly difficult.
For Hitchcock,* Psycho *was a low-budget film, so the idea that they only had one car wasn’t so far-fetched.
Not from a movie, but The Man Who Walked Around the World is a breathtaking six-minute long single take ad for a blended scotch. What is most incredible about it is how Carlyle flawlessly delivers the lengthy speech walking toward a back-tracking camera. Granted, the camera probably has a prompter scroll over it, but half the time, he is not looking at it.
That’s a good one. It really stood out to me when I saw the movie.
Silent House is another film that uses the illusion of being a single shot. I spent most of the movie trying to spot the cuts.
Cool. In spite of its 5.3 rating on IMDb, I now intend to watch this film.
Kylie Minogue’s video for “Come Into My World” seems to not only be one long shot, but composite piled onto composite. It’s fascinating. And so are the hip-huggers.
The song? Meh.