Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)
I have long had an obsession with long takes. In case you don't know, this is when there's no cutting: you turn the camera on, it films, and then you turn it off again. You can move it around, or not move it around, it's a long take either way.
Sometimes you see something like Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995) or Snake Eyes (Brian De Palma, 1998) and an interesting question appears. Both of these films open with complicated long takes, filled with movement and sound. They are what you might call hyper-kinetic ways of beginning a film. In Snake Eyes you're watching Nicolas Cage acting as hard as he can (which means: no blinking, shouting, etc) and in Strange Days the long take is consolidated by being direct POV. In the face of a cinema where takes are (overall) getting shorter and shorter, it's always heartening to see something that chooses to do the opposite. And, not only that, these two scenes (and films) exemplify a ramped up tension that might seem at odds with the concept of not cutting. Put simply, there's no editing, and they're exciting.
But here's the thing: both of those films *do* cut. It's just that it's hidden from you. The sequences they show were either too complicated or impossible to do well in one continuous take, so they are spliced together from a series of shorter takes. Then you get a film like... oh, let's say Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006) which *does* capture everything in one take. Or so we thought. Turns out that Cuaron was also stitching long takes together, as well as augmenting them with CGI. Compare this with the no-frills approach taken in Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) where a camera gets into an elevator with a group of people, and then gets out again. Hardly high drama. So who cares if a long take is done for real, or if it's a composite?
I asked a lot of people if they had any opinions on this, and they all said no. Sometimes the real thing is good, and sometimes the artificial one is good, and really anything other than that is much of a muchness.
However, recent events have shown to me that this is most decidedly not the case. And that doing something with no tricks has an extremely profound effect on a film that can in no way be attained by doing something phony. The long take exemplifies that you have no emotions invested in this, but I do. However, if we flip it to something you care about, or something that affects you emotionally, such as watching a baby being born, or someone die, or whatever, and then consider seeing that same event recreated with CGI, or puppets or whatnot, you'll see that there's a huge difference there.
This is nice to know. Sometimes, to be honest, I get a little fed up with you all: always wanting everything to be bright and shiny and hilarious, and not having any opinion on whether anything has any soul at all. So when you all tell me that you do have souls after all, well, that's rather pleasant.