Space and Long Takes in Paranoid Park

Abstract

Gus Van Sant likes long takes: ‘I think, he says in a 2003 interview, that there’s a lot of things about not cutting that we don’t really get from a lot of modern cinema, because everyone — fashion-wise — is really into cutting like every half-second.’ Talking about Elephant and its very long takes, he mentions Kubrick’s way of not cutting and the importance of Russian and Eastern European filmmaking as examples of films that refuse the contemporary continuous cutting:

I think that Kubrick, I suppose, was drawing on the cinema of Russia, as when he was making 2001. I think that being a Russian man and probably viewing [Tarkowski] films, there was something; somehow he was being influenced, because the films before that were more traditional. And the same with me; the long pieces of film in Elephant are directly influenced by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr and also other Eastern European filmmakers.¹