From Hitchcock's Rope to 1917 to Athena. A working history of the most-debated technique in modern cinema.
The long take is the most-discussed editing decision in modern cinema, which is appropriate because it's a decision not to edit. A director who chooses to hold a shot for two minutes, or five, or twelve, is opting out of the standard grammar of continuity coverage and asking the audience to notice the absence.
This piece is a working history. We'll trace the long take from the silent era through to the contemporary blockbuster, with attention to what each major example was actually doing.
The long take's history is partly a history of camera magazines. A 35mm motion-picture camera could hold 1,000 feet of film, which at standard 24 frames per second runs roughly 11 minutes. Anything longer than that required a swap, which meant a cut. The 'long take', historically, has been a take approaching the 11-minute ceiling. Anything beyond that has required tricks — hidden cuts during dark passages or pans across blank walls.
Digital cinematography removed the magazine ceiling. By the mid-2000s, a single take could run for hours. This is part of why the modern 'one-shot film' — Birdman (2014), 1917 (2019), Boiling Point (2021) — became commercially viable when it did. The constraint that had made the long take genuinely difficult had been lifted.
Hitchcock's Rope is the first major American feature to attempt the appearance of a single continuous take. The film is built from ten takes ranging from 4 to 10 minutes each, with cuts disguised by the camera dollying behind characters' backs, into wardrobe doors, or onto dark surfaces. The result is a 80-minute film that looks like one shot.
Rope is also one of Hitchcock's most-criticised films. He himself called the experiment a 'stunt' in interviews. The visible problem is that, in service of the technique, characters are blocked to walk across rooms in unmotivated ways — to give the camera a place to find them. The single-take effect makes the staging awkward. The film is more interesting as a historical artefact than as a film, which is a problem the single-take format would not solve until decades later.
Welles's noir Touch of Evil opens with a 3-minute and 20-second crane-and-dolly long take across the Mexican-American border. A bomb is planted in a car; a couple gets in the car; the car drives across the border; the bomb goes off. The opening shot is the entire premise of the film delivered in one continuous movement.
This is the long take used not as a stunt but as a structural device. The audience watches the bomb planted; the audience watches the couple get into the car; the audience watches them drive, undisturbed, across the border. The duration is the suspense. A cut would have undone the effect. The Touch of Evil opening is the foundational text for almost every subsequent significant long take in American cinema.
The 3-minute Steadicam shot that takes Henry Hill and Karen through the Copacabana — through the kitchen, past the chef, to a table set up at the foot of the stage — is the most-imitated long take in modern American cinema. Almost every contemporary director has paid it tribute. P.T. Anderson opened Boogie Nights with a conscious response.
What the shot does, in Goodfellas, is establish what Henry's life provides Karen — and by extension what mob life provides to its participants. The Steadicam moves continuously past doormen who tip their hats, kitchen staff who clear the way, waiters who carry tables. The duration of the take is the seduction. By the time the camera arrives at the table, the audience understands why Karen falls for it.
Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men contains two long takes that pushed the technical possibilities further. The first is a 4-minute scene in which Theo, his ex-wife Julian, and three companions drive through wooded English roads and are ambushed by armed insurgents. The shot was done in a real moving car with the camera mounted on a custom rig (the 'Doggicam') that could move around the cabin and through windows.
The second is the 6-minute Bexhill battle, in which Theo runs through an active urban combat zone trying to protect a refugee mother and her baby. The shot includes explosions, bullets, blood splatter on the lens, and choreographed extras at multiple distances. It is one of the technical landmarks of 21st-century cinema.
Crucially, both Children of Men long takes are doing dramatic work. The road ambush establishes that the world's danger is unmediated; the audience is in the car. The Bexhill battle establishes that the war is total; there is no cut to safety.
By the 2010s, digital cinematography had made it technically possible to assemble a feature film from many long takes stitched together to appear as a single continuous shot. Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman (2014) and Sam Mendes's 1917 (2019) are the most-prominent examples. Both won Best Cinematography at the Oscars.
The technique is now mature enough that the question is whether it's serving the film or substituting for substance. Birdman uses the continuous-shot effect to express the protagonist's manic interiority — the camera never lets up because his mind never lets up. 1917 uses it to express the soldier's experience — the protagonist cannot cut to safety, so the film cannot cut either. Both choices are defensible.
The technique can also be hollow. Sebastian Schipper's Victoria (2015) is a 138-minute genuine single take — no hidden cuts — but the film's narrative does not justify the duration. The single take becomes the only thing the film is about.
The action film has, since about 2014, increasingly embraced the long take as a way to differentiate itself from the cutting-heavy template that dominated the early 2000s. Atomic Blonde (2017) features a 7-minute stairwell fight that includes hidden cuts but appears continuous. Athena (2022) opens with a 10-minute single-take riot sequence in a French banlieue that is among the best opening sequences of the decade. The John Wick films (2014-) have built their reputation on wide-frame, long-take action choreography.
The pattern in all of these is the recognition that audiences trained on YouTube content can now read longer sequences than they could in the early 2000s, and that the long take has become a marker of authenticity in action filmmaking — proof that the stunt actually happened, that the geography is real, that the performer is doing the work.
The long take is duration treated as content. Most editing techniques compress time — a hundred-day journey shown in a 30-second montage, a four-hour dinner shown in two minutes of inserts and reaction shots. The long take refuses to compress. It says: the time it takes you to watch this is the time the thing actually took.
That refusal is what gives the technique its weight. When Children of Men holds on six unbroken minutes of urban combat, the audience cannot mentally fast-forward to the resolution. When Goodfellas holds on three unbroken minutes of nightclub seduction, the audience has to live inside the seduction. The long take's power is that it makes the audience submit to the duration the film insists on.
It is also, almost always, a technical achievement that calls attention to itself. This is the running argument about the form. Some long takes are doing dramatic work that justifies their visibility (Goodfellas, Children of Men). Some are flexing for its own sake (Victoria, certain music videos). The line between the two is what every long-take film is, in part, being judged on.