A long shot is where a director points a camera at something and lets the action run for as long as possible. A stunning display of virtuoso film-making, everything has to be perfect in a successful long shot: the lighting, the sound, the performances, the direction, the framing, the lot. Multiple takes are usually required, so you know the end result to be a true labour of love, and the effects are invariably nothing short of mesmerising. It's a dramatic device unique to the medium of film. The literary equivalent would be a really long sentence Victor Hugo managed one of over 800 words but the resulting stream of consciousness can only really communicate either the minutiae of a complex scene or the frantic thoughts of an unhinged character. Similarly, a long guitar solo or extended improvisation surely the musical equivalent can be transcendent, but the loose nature of such moments in music is at odds with the meticulous construction required to pull off a successful long shot in a film. The closest equivalent would be the theatre, and certainly a dramatic monologue or a painstakingly assembled tableau can have a devastating effect on an audience. And yet, the theatre is constrained by circumstance. Things have to run in real-time, and the physical proximity of the audience must be taken into consideration. As a result, things can never get as spectacular as they can onscreen. I recently saw Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin for the very first time. The most memorable scene concerned Tintin's efforts to snatch a slip of paper from the beak of a bird soaring over Bagghar a very long continuous shot that seems to go on for ages and ends up feeling like a giddy, hyper-kinetic fireworks display. But as visually stunning as that scene is, it was achieved using motion capture technology and computer animation. As a result, it sort of feels like cheating. My favourite examples of continuous shots are all the more impressive having been achieved using real people in real places with real cameras.
5. Rope (1948)
Alfred Hitchcock's claustrophobic masterpiece is a tense exploration of Nietzschean ideas which sees two young men strangle their moral and intellectual inferior and hide his body in the middle of the very apartment in which they're due to host a party. Beyond a few blink-and-you'll-miss-them cuts, the action sort of takes place over the course of one single 80 minute shot. Rope is particularly impressive because, in the 40s, the maximum length of a film reel was about 10 minutes. Using a few instances of trick photography, Hitchcock was therefore pushing contemporary technology to its very limits in order to achieve his desired effect. It worked, and Rope remains a chilling classic which manages to take-in and fool even the most jaded of modern viewers. This is stripped down film-making at its boldest and purest.