The shot and the cut are the two basic elements of film, and the issue of the balance between them has long been a fertile area of argument in film theory — or it was when film was still discussed in such terms. There was a belief that the long-duration shot was somehow morally superior to an edited sequence of shots, which was regarded as a sophisticated manipulation of reality that carried with it a slight aura of mendacity. Certainly, avant-garde film-makers such as Jean-Luc Godard found in Hollywood’s seamless editing style (its découpage classique) a deplorable desire to hide the processes of cinema in unselfconscious illusion.
Yet the relation between the shot (film’s lexicon, as it were) and editing (its syntax) is more complex than a simple oppostion. Max Ophüls in the Forties and Michelangelo Antonioni in the Sixties devoted their film-making styles to long, sinuous moving-camera shots showing that the motion of the camera was in itself a kind of editing, as well as a very interesting way of animating a space. Others (Godard among them) demonstrated that editing didn’t have to be so seamless, and a certain amount of disruption in the grammar of découpage classique could add dramatic values to the film as well as just startle the viewer.
At any rate, it was Alfred Hitchcock who, in 1948, conducted the most thorough early experiment with long-duration shots — and this from a consummate master of the editing sequence. With Rope he set himself the task of cutting only when it was made necessary by the end of the roll of film. In those days, he had about 10 minutes per shot and he made Rope in a way that tried to conceal each cut. Apart from its visual interest, this technique adds considerably to the claustrophobia and menace of the scenario.
Orson Welles used a famously long tracking shot at the start of A Touch of Evil, and since then directors have vied to create the ultimate single-take opening shot. Robert Altman did it in The Player, while simultanously making some ironic comments on the tradition, and Brian de Palma pulled out all the stops for a really mind-boggling one in Snake Eyes. Godard, of course, had done his best or worst with an apparently endless track past a queue of stalled cars in Le Weekend.
Now, with digital technology, it is possible to transcend the limits of the roll of film altogether. In Time Code, British director Mike Figgis not only makes each shot the full length of the movie, but gives us four of them simultaneously. The screen is divided into quadrants, with four developing storylines that begin to overlap and intersect. The whole revolves around a Los Angeles film company in mid-production; the people involved include a philandering producer, his married lover, an aspiring actress, a jealous lesbian, a fashionable young director, and so forth. The actors improvised around a basic narrative structure, and the movie was shot in four simultaneous single takes on a single day.
That Time Code — a genuine experiment — works at all is a testament to the actors’ skill and to Figgis’s vision. He uses the sound-levels to direct our attention to whichever frame is most important at any given moment (a form of editing?), and once one has got used to the basic format the story becomes very compelling indeed. In terms of both freewheeling naturalistic performance and doing interesting things with the camera, this is a fascinating extension of the kind of film-making pioneered, particularly, by Robert Altman, and if I were Altman I’d be rather envious.