What Time is it There?


Sergei Eisenstein theorized that the meaning of cinema as an art form lay in the use of montage. The juxtaposition of image A with image B to create a separate, and singular, effect. Films are built around the idea that the images they contain relate to one another to create new meanings. If a character looks in a certain direction, and the movie cuts to a different image, the audience assumes that the new image is what the character is looking at. Classical Hollywood editing works in this way; the story or the characters dictate the nature and timing of the cuts. With the exception of the dramatic close-up, very rarely will you see a typical dialogue scene in a classic Hollywood film cut into more shots than is absolutely necessary.

Modern filmmaking is often identified with a break from this type of editing. Watch Godard's Breathless, for example, and you will notice that the camera seems to have a mind of its own. The editing follows its own rules and calls attention to itself as editing (Godard always wants to put himself into the viewers mind). The use of the "jump cut" (where the film cuts ahead in time on the same image so that the actors seem to jump ahead), for example, is an obvious intentional break with classical editing rules. Due mainly to Godard and his French cohorts, this theory of cinema, the idea that in montage lays the meaning of the art form, represents the dominant strain of filmmaking today (just watch a standard action film). Hitchcock's Psycho, and that film's murder scenes, perhaps places this style of editing into mainstream entertainment for the first time.

There is, however, another way of editing that I identify with the film critic and theorist Andre Bazin. Bazin called Citizen Kane the greatest film ever made due Orson Welles' use of deep focus photography, a method that allows the audience to find meaning within the image because both the foreground and background are in focus. Kane's long takes and deep focus, then, open up a cinematic world that is more concerned with a kind of phenomenological take on reality, a belief that the camera can capture a kind of existential truth. Rather that create meaning, the artist of the long take seeks to record it.

One of the greatest proponents of this style, which I like to call anti-montage or long-take style, is Andrei Tarkovsky. A Tarkovksy shot can last so long you go past boredom into something else--in a way you have to learn to watch his movies in a new way. As a style it seems to have been most at home in the Asian cinema of Mizoguchi and Ozu, while in the west Tarkovsky, Bresson, and a few others, always in the minority, carried on the style. For recent examples check out Gus Van Sant's Gerry, or the films of Bela Tarr (good luck finding them!)

There is a shot in Tarr's film, Satantango, that pretty much sums up the power of the long take: a early morning shot of a window from inside a house. After a few minutes of staring at a seemingly static image, I grew restless, but soon I noticed the curtains were swaying from a draft in the house, and eventually I was startled to realize the sun was coming up! This kind of moment, almost a magnification of ordinary experience and a force for changing the way we see the world, is the magic moment that the long take strives for.

What Time is it There? is a gorgeous film in the anti-montage tradition. The shots usually last anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes (one shot even includes, as a joke I suspect, a clock in the background). It's an almost oppressively sad film, but there is a gentleness too, a slight and weary comical take on existence, that makes it a worthwhile film, maybe even a transcendent one.