Cinema: Montage or Long Take?

Which is the true language of film?

Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) | Images: Wikipedia, Philosophical Film Festival.

Pioneering filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein asserted that cinema works through the cut:

Eisenstein felt the “collision” of shots could be used to manipulate the emotions of the audience and create film metaphors. He believed that an idea should be derived from the juxtaposition of two independent shots, bringing an element of collage into film.

Another Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky, in his monumental book Sculpting in Time, later maintained that film’s essence lies not in the cut but in the passage of time within the shot. Here, a camera holds the shot as events, the world, or simply time itself, pass before our eyes.

Robert Bresson, it would seem, disagreed with Tarkovsky. Like Eisenstein, he proposed that the essence of cinema lies in the cut. Unlike his counterpart though, he was not for any collision of shots but — in accordance with his aesthetic of the uninflected image — stated that the poetry is in the joins and not to be found within each of what he thought should at best be neutrally presented frames.

I’ve heard it posited that the long take reflects our perception of the world.We look one way, look another, at one thing then something else but we don’t cut in between. Instead, we experience an uninterrupted flow. A notable actor once told me that estimable filmmaker Gus Van Sant, with whom he’d just worked, incorporates this insight in his approach to shooting.

Does the contention bear scrutiny through? I’m an enthusiastic admirer of much of Van Sant’s movies and am fortunate to have met the man when he generously visited one of my classes but I seem to recall that editing master Walter Murch, in his book In the Blink of an Eye thinks quite the opposite. That when we look one way, then another, we reflexively blink as our eyes pan.

The cut, he suggests, is intrinsic to human perception.

Perhaps it’s true at deeper levels also, true of our inner “seeing” even? I’m sure I dream in cuts. (Although there’s one camera move I conjure in my sleep that dollies around some dark corner and leads me — with no cut I’m aware of along the way — to encounter whatever terror might be concealed, in menacing wait for me.)

Talking of the subconscious, in the days after major surgery several years ago, while awash in oceans of painkillers, I was jump-cutting from my inner world to the outer, from an interior, weird, self-concocted version of Chinatown to my attending surgeon, nurses, and hospital staff.

Polar opposites: noir on the inside, healthcare on the outside.

Perhaps those jarring transitions from imagination to the witnessing of what was actually happening around me constituted an extreme manifestation of our constant daily switching from thought to vision, from imagined image to perceived event, on and on, on and on? Perhaps, I find myself wondering, the cut is fundamental to consciousness itself?

Even if this were to be the case though— and perhaps it’s a fanciful notion on my part — need the language of film be restricted to the mimesis of our mind’s processes? Shouldn’t the filmmaker be free instead to form and utilize a cinematic language most appropriate to their movie and their sensibility? To expand consciousness rather than merely adhere to it. Why shouldn’t filmmakers invent, innovate, explore, and subvert?

If a visual language functions, if it communicates, creates wonder in us, horror, astonishment, and above all emotion, if the poetry of its imagery shines (or shadows), if it simply tells a story, surely its validity is authentic?

Entire movies may consist of a single shot — or what appears to be one. From Hitchcock’s Rope, to Russian Ark, to Irréversible, to the more recent Birdmanand 1917 (nothing there in the list by Tarkovsky, oddly) the canon continues to expand along with the capabilities of the editing technology that enables this aesthetic. It’s become easier to move the camera too. To begin with, Steadicam appeared, then cameras themselves became much more portable so that individual takes can be achieved with an ease denied to directors of previous eras, saddled as they were with weighty 35 mm Mitchell’s, Arriflexes, and Panavisions.

Yet, montage remains as potent as ever.

Let’s take a look at two scenes from masters of film that illustrate the contrast between the opposing maxims:

Firstly, some opening moments from Bresson’s 1959 Pickpocket:

From Bresson’s Pickpocket, Cinematography Léonce-Henri Burel

Starting with the arrival of protagonist Michel at the racetrack, where he stands behind the woman he’s about to rob… (Not a word of dialogue is spoken throughout.)

1 — Over Michel’s shoulder as he arrives behind the woman. She turns, looks at him.

CUT

2 — 3-shot. Woman. Michel. Man. Woman turns from Michel to the front. Michel looks from her to the front. (Hold shot.) Man looking through binoculars. Michel glances down (to woman’s purse), up, then down again.

CUT

3 — Purse. Michel’s fingers edge toward, feel and loosen catch, edge back.

CUT

4 — Repeat 3-shot, Michel looking to the front. Hold shot.

CUT

5 — Repeat purse shot. Michel’s fingers pop catch of purse open.

CUT

6 — Repeat 3-shot. Michel blinks, looks to the front, glances down then up, looks to the front, again glances down then up.

CUT

7 — Repeat purse shot. Michel’s fingers enter purse.

CUT

8 — Repeat 3-shot, Michel looking to the front. Everyone’s looks from frame right to frame left as they follow the horse race. Man lowers binoculars.

CUT

9 — Repeat purse shot. Michel’s fingers take out a bundle of bills from purse, transferring them to his jacket pocket.

CUT

10 — The scene moves on, everyone heading for the exit.

You could write this in a paragraph as a series of sentences, each describing new steps in the action. Bresson stated:

To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks.

See my article “Cinema’s Currency of Looks.”

For Robert Bresson, the cut consummates the binding, not as Eisenstein’s clash but as connective tissue. Michel, the woman, her purse form an integral triangulated drama. Hard to see how any fluid camera could capture this as well. Even moving rapidly, it couldn’t arrive at each image in time.

In addition, this sequence of shots forms a purely cinematic universe. The physical world here is an impossibility. The relationship between hand and purse is designed for those individual frames. From where Michel stands, the movement of his hand in those shots would not be possible. The actions could not be shot in single take because they couldn’t exist in the real world in the precise configuration shown.

Another virtue of montage then: cinematic precision.

(The use of sound is also vital. Listen to the thunder of the horses’ hooves and where this comes in the scene.)

Next, an example of the converse: the long opening take from Max Ophuls 1953 Earrings of Madame de…

From Ophuls’ Earrings of Madame de… Cinematography Christian Matras.

Here, the extended take could be thought of as the equivalent of onesentence, although the shot is far more elegant than any lines on the page might be. Watch the clip to see how immeasurably superior the shot is to my attempt to describe it in a single sentence (here taken from my first book):

The shot begins with the image of jewels in an open drawer as a woman’s gloved hand points at, and hovers over a pair of earrings before opening an adjacent case of jewelry and effects, again hovering, then reaching to open a closet opposite — in the mirror of which the audience does not see the woman herself — to reveal more drawers, closed but with an extrusion of ostrich feathers, after which — the camera pulling back to show the woman’s shadow — she moves on to open a second mirrored door that like the first fails to reveal her reflection, disclosing a row of dresses and a top shelf of bric-a-brac before she continues to a third mirrored door that once again permits the audience no view of her, inside of which are fur coats on hangers, one of which she takes down, fondles, then replaces before returning to the previous closet — the audience catching a fleeting glimpse of her partial profile now, and also of her other, ungloved hand — to reach for a hat on the top shelf, knocking over in the process a bible, which she retrieves (as again the audience catches sight of her profile) before taking the hat and returning to the dressing table — evidently where she was first situated — and in looking at herself in an ornately bedecked mirror provides the audience with its first view of her face, tries on the hat, lowers its veil, takes up and poses with a jeweled necklace, which she rejects in favor of a crucifix that in turn she discards for the earrings she originally hesitated over, tries them on, slips them into a pouch, rises, and pushing shut one of the closet doors she passes, heads for a bed from which she picks up a handkerchief before crossing to the door of the room and exiting.

End of shot!

How effortless is Ophuls’ mise-en-scène and camera and what they create on the screen compared to my cumbersome prose? (We experience the shot but read the sentence.) Despite shooting the scene with a heavy 35 mm camera, or perhaps because of it, there is a precision in this work that in its own way parallels that of Bresson.

(And I haven’t mentioned the complex use of sound and how that informs image…)

Here’s what this single take achieves: 1. The introduction of the earrings of the film’s title 2. The introduction of Madame de, searching… 3. The camera has the audience follow and accompany her in that search. 4. The audience wants Madame de to achieve her goal even before it knows what this is. 5. The revelation, through her belongings and wardrobe, of her tastes and lifestyle. 6. The misdirection of the audience, who will later come to understand she is far from affluent and has financial problems. 7. The teasing of the audience by the withholding of the character’s face. 8. The introduction of the notion of moral transgression, implied when she knocks the bible from the shelf. 9. The revelation of her sensuality as she strokes the fur of a coat. 10. The eventual introduction of the protagonist as she looks at herself in the mirror, a moment when the audience shares and invests in herbecause it’s been made to wait to see her face. This brings the audience into her Narrative POV. 11. The showing of the environment of her bedroom and its decor — further insight into her world. 12. By not cutting but “editing” with a fluid camera and so utilizing real time, the director places the audience in Madame de’s temporal experience and compels it to follow her.

A couple of consummate examples of each approach then: montage and long take.

Some consideration of rhythm, whether fast or slow, is also central to any discussion of the two cinematic philosophies. With cuts, rhythm can be readily modulated. With a long take, the filmmaker has to be sure they have it right on the day. If they haven’t, they’re going to need to insert cuts anyway. So an inordinate amount of shooting time might well have been take up to achieve an ambitious shot that never makes the movie in its unbroken form.

The notion of rhythm itself deserves exploration. Are we talking about the rhythm of the screen or the rhythm of life? The cinema of Eisenstein and perhaps Bresson, or that of Tarkovsky? Are the two equally valid? Are they mutually exclusive? Is the rhythm of a Tarkovsky slow, long take somehow more “authentic” than the screen tempo of an Eisenstein montage? Why would that be? Because there’s no manipulation of the passage of time, as there will often be in a montage? And so on and so forth… So much to think about.

I’ve also tended to skate over the use of fluid and static cameras, although either can be used for both approaches. With a long take, a fluid camera generally facilitates editing in camera whereas with static camera in such a take, it is the unfolding of the action itself which must offer increments of information.

With montages meanwhile, cuts on the move, particularly when planned, offer a versatility of orientation and energy flow harder to execute in a long take.

In conclusion, I’m not personally prepared to forgo either the Eisenstein/Bresson or the Tarkovsky concept and enthusiastically settle for both. Indeed, most filmmakers adopt whichever method a scene requires, although they may have chosen one particular aesthetic over another in their formulation of the style of their film. There are those, meanwhile, who will go for the long take solely to show off prowess or make innovative use of new technology purely for the sake of it — opportunism which can easily undermine the authority of a film’s visual language. That doesn’t however undermine those examples of the method’s best articulation.

The purists and the visionaries, for that was what the three filmmakers earlier quoted were, reveal to us fundamentals and essence of cinema. The collision or the poetry in the cut. The passing of time in the shot.

Perhaps though, it is in the irreconcilable contradiction of these concepts that the ultimately inexpressible genius of cinema lies…

Peter Markham

November 2024