Long-take Prospects

The long take has been associated with the very earliest motion pictures and with two recent periods in the history of documentary. In the cinéma-vérité and Direct Cinema films of the 1960s it was used to record extended events and conversations. In the political and biographical films of the 1970s and 1980s it was used largely to record interviews. These latter films were strongly influenced by television journalism, which produced its own special use of the long take in building programs around eminent talking heads. The long take proved equally serviceable in discovering these heads in European cathedrals, on Andean railway journeys, or amidst the flora and fauna of African jungles.

In each of these cases, the long take has been used for quite specific and, arguably, quite narrow purposes. Even so, some of these uses have been equivocal or self-contradictory. In the period of cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema, an important model for documentary was Italian neorealist cinema—films like La Terra Trema (1948) and Umberto D (1952), which themselves borrowed ideas

from earlier styles of documentary. But the attempt to reproduce in documentaries the literary qualities of fiction (as in Salesman , 1969) tended to confine the use of the long take to largely narrative, quasi-fictive, or authenticating functions. Paradoxically, many of the other potentialities of the long take—for articulating space and time, relating people to their environment, exploring human personality—were being more adventurously investigated in fiction, in the work of directors like Godard, Antonioni, Resnais, and Rossellini. In the second period of interview-based documentaries, the long take seems to have been devoted almost entirely to creating an oral narrative and establishing the authority of the interviewees.

There have of course been alternative tendencies and exceptions to this pattern. Leacock's Queen of Apollo (1970), Rouch's Tourou et Bitti (1971), Wiseman's Hospital (1970), and Kildea's Celso and Cora (1983) all use long takes in distinctive and sometimes idiosyncratic ways. Experimental (and "underground") films have provided other kinds of explorations. One should include here, along with the films of Andy Warhol, the work of Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. In other recent documentaries, film-makers like Amos Gitai and Claude Lanzmann have used the long take to subvert the traditional construction of foreground and background. However, for most film-makers there remain serious obstacles to developing these possibilities. Film length is one of them. Films must either conform to conventional lengths, using fewer shots, or develop into much longer films. But who will watch longer films, especially if they willfully include the dreaded "dead spots" of ordinary life as legitimate content?

Segmentation suggests one possible strategy. There have been a number of experimental documentary series for television, such as Craig Gilbert's An American Family (1972), Roger Graef's Police (1982), and Melissa Llewelyn-Davies' Diary of a Maasai Village (1984), but so far these have tended to reproduce in documentary the interlocking story structures of drama series or have been composed of essentially self-contained episodes. In neither case has segmentation led to a noticeable expansion of conventional film time to allow for longer takes.

Ultimately the problem of film length is related to the larger problem of how to articulate longer shots to produce meanings. Without commentary, conventional documentary editing usually finds long takes intractable unless they are tracing a clear narrative line, as in Graef's films. Using longer takes gives fewer opportunities to signify by means of the cuts between them. Longer takes are also likely to be complex entities, creating problems of intellectual focus. They characteristically contain ambiguities, interruptions, and competing centers of attention. The content is mingled in ways which make it difficult for the film-maker to isolate "signal" from "noise." In scripted fiction,

"noise" is generally present only when it is put there on purpose to create verisimilitude, but documentary footage is rarely so tidy. Voice-over commentary has traditionally provided one means of superimposing meanings upon such material, but always at the cost of distancing it and reducing the viewer's engagement with its physical immediacy.

These obstacles are of course only obstacles in the context of a specific set of film-making conventions and viewing practices. The real test is whether long takes can find a place in quite new communicative structures. New technologies and shifts in popular culture at least open up certain possibilities for this to happen.

First, viewers' expectations of films are likely to change as some film-making practices which are now marginal enter the mainstream. This could alter the ways in which people actually "read" long camera takes. At the moment, the tendency in commercials and music video seems toward ever shorter takes, but this could contribute to a greater tolerance for associative, non-narrative editing and eventually for more films patterned on structures other than conventional stories or arguments. Films may emerge which require greater retrospective reconstruction in the mind. Against this current must be put the way in which the formats of television journalism seem actually to have narrowed the structural repertoire of documentary.

Second, unexplored opportunities exist for combining words with images, perhaps especially with long takes. One could cite the use of multiple voices on the sound track, voices used in less regular patterns, voices addressing us in new registers. There is no equivalent in documentary, so far as I know, to the whispered commentary which accompanies live golf telecasts. Words may also be deployed more effectively in titles and intertitles, as they once were in Soviet silent films and have been occasionally since, in such films as The Village of Furuyashiki (1982), by Shinsuke Ogawa. The history of documentary contains other experiments worth examining and pressing further, such as the use of spoken verse in the documentaries of the 1930s. One might expect certain parallel developments to evolve from the emergence of rap videos.

Third, one can imagine more complex layerings of sound and image. As precedents one can point to Godard's "middle period" films (British Sounds , 1969), Clément Perron's Day After Day (1962), and several of Gitai's documentary films (Ananas , 1984; and House , 1980). Sounds can make us reinterpret what is nominally background and, on some occasions, reconstitute it as thematic foreground.

A fourth strategy open to documentary is to make a much more consciously analytical use of the camera. Reframing with the camera resembles a form of montage which selects, connects, and juxtaposes different images, but in "real time." In fiction films it is possible for such an approach to be scripted, as in

Hitchcock's experimental Rope (1948). In documentary the situation is very different, requiring on the film-maker's part an ability to impose a process of thought on the camera's movements while filming unpredictable material. So far few film-makers have adopted such a demanding interpretive stance while filming or have developed the skills to accomplish it.

But camera movement within a shot allows for certain kinds of irony which are not possible with shorter takes. In Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), the long take makes particular reference to the fact that however long one pans over landscapes where atrocities took place, one still sees only landscapes. In effect, one looks in vain for the signified in the signifier. In a number of Godard's films (Weekend , 1967; British Sounds ) long tracking shots, instead of following characters, as is usual in fiction films, track past them, fixing them not in relation to the film but in relation to their physical and social setting.

Lastly, it is worth noting that new technologies may have a profound effect upon viewing practices and, eventually, upon film form. We have yet to absorb the full implications of television. Video, an even more recent phenomenon, combines the privacy of television viewing with much greater control over the selection of viewing material. This could make possible longer works, organized in chapters or clusters of related films. Video also makes it easier to recast old films in new forms, or produce new commentaries on them. As for interactive video, it may, by giving the viewer even greater control over the investigation of material, generate much more exploratory viewing practices and eventually stimulate the new film-making practices that would allow for them.

Neither film-making nor documentary will be revolutionized by the long take alone, nor should it be claimed that the long take is in any sense the special province of documentary. But the question of what to do with the qualities which are found in long takes, and yet not found in the films derived from them, is perhaps the quintessential problem of documentary. It brings us closer to the paradox of reduction which lies at the heart of all representation, but which has none of the same implications in fiction that it does in documentary. For within every documentary is a kind of cavity, the negative imprint of the missing persons and events which are not there. In struggling with this material, the documentary film-maker is struggling not only with signs but quite literally with the shadows of the living and the dead. If photography does not steal the soul it steals something very like it, something deeply enough felt to generate the fraught ethical debates which uniquely surround the making of documentary films and photographs. These debates more commonly concern what is shown than what is left out. But for the film-maker the problem is truly one of disposing of the human remains.