Sorry, I posted late last night from my tablet, and couldn’t tell that that link to the BOTV shot was so low-res. Here’s a much better version.
One of Jim Jarmusch’s films–it might have been STRANGER THAN PARADISE–is three or four extended shots.
I remember an impressive one-take shot of the activity on the Atlantic City boardwalk in Boardwalk Empire (I think in the pilot) which Scorcese directed which reminded me of this.
CineFix has covered this topic, and I think that they have revisited it more recently.
Had never heard of this before but thanks to your mention watched it last night. After finishing I had to go back and immediately re-watch the first part with a totally different perspective. Brilliant.
If we are listing music videos, you can’t miss Sentimental Journey by Yuki.
I just stumbled across this recently: an analysis of how Stephen Spielberg uses one-take shots. There are a surprising amount of them, though they are relatively short and don’t call attention to themselves.
Recognising that this a somewhat old post, I may as well still straighten out the story here. The anecdote doesn’t concern the famous opening shot in Touch of Evil. No, because there’s another spectacular unbroken sequence in the film that nobody ever notices.
It’s during the scene when Quinlan (Welles) and his policemen search the suspect’s apartment. Not really as elaborate as the opening, since it’s done on an inside set and the camera just largely linearly tracks back and forth from right to left, without any vertical movement. But it is long and required a set where they could move walls on the fly during the shot to allow the camera to pass.
He did the scene as the first day’s shot. Now by this stage he’s only got the job because Charlton Heston has insisted on him as the director. He’s got the vast reputation in Hollywood as the unreliable genius. So the execs are nervous and insist on regular reports from the set from a spy to see whether the reputation is true. So the spy spends the day phoning up that nothing has been shot. Disaster looms. Then, right at the end of the day, the report switches to “he’s just shot [however many minutes]!”
In terms of the discussion of the purpose of such shots, this is a nice example of the seamlessness serving a narrative purpose.
At some point we see a bathroom cabinet (?) that’s innocent, only for someone to discover some incriminating dynamite in the same a couple of minutes later. Evidence that has to have been planted during the shot, which narrows down who’s tampering with the scene. Which is one of the major plot points.
Almost nobody will notice this without it being pointed out to them, but it plays utterly fair.
Not mentioned in the thread so far is the shot at the end of Antonioni’s The Passenger. Very much a head-scratcher on first viewing.