Abstract
Drawing on the writings of Lutz Bacher, David Bordwell, Brian Henderson, and Barry Salt, among others, this chapter provides a historical overview of scholarship on the long take, its constituents, and its nomenclature and history. In doing so, it draws attention to long take filmmaking in Europe in the 1910s, and the adoption of long takes in Hollywood, especially in the late 1920s and the 1940s and 1950s, even though the term “long take” was rarely used. It also pays attention to the pre-war and post-war films of Kenji Mizoguchi, and includes 1960s and 1970s avant-garde filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman and Andy Warhol, as well as art film directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Miklos Janscó, and, more recently, Béla Tarr, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Hou Hsiao-hsien.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank John Gibbs and Douglas Pye for inviting me to write this essay and David Bordwell for sharing a number of sources, suggestions and ideas.
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Neale, S. (2017). Introduction 2: The Long Take—Concepts, Practices, Technologies, and Histories. In: Gibbs, J., Pye, D. (eds) The Long Take. Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58573-8_2
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