Stills from the movie "1917"
The recently released movie "1917" has made "one shot to the end" a topic of discussion again. 1948's "Soul Reaper" comes from Hitchcock's "crazy idea", presenting the entire film in one shot, which is the originator of a one-shot movie.
A shot is the ultimate performance of a long shot, extending the shot indefinitely until the end of the movie. The first shot is undoubtedly to fight against the editing rules, refuse to omit, and create a continuous unified space-time. In this sense, one shot to the end is the kind of film that the Italian neorealist screenwriter Chaivattini dreamed of: a continuous film showing a person's 90-minute idle life.
At present, a mirror has evolved from a myth of a complete time and space to a magic trick that can reshape time and space.
Poster for the movie "Soul Reaper"
From a technical point of view, the realization of one shot to the end requires a high degree of cooperation between character performance, positioning, scene, object, light source, scene scheduling and camera movement, tight seam and incomparable precision. The error of any link may lead to the abandonment of the previous achievements in the final shot. From the beginning of its birth, film has been a highly dependent art form on technology, and one shot to the end represents the ceiling of film technology development at every stage of film history. Hitchcock's 1948 "Soul Requiem" was questioned by some as a veritable "one-shot to the end" only because it was limited by the physical properties of film, which at the time was only about 10 minutes long.
Stills from the movie "Soul Reaper"
With the evolution of the camera from bulky to lightweight, to the current GoPro new camera, the realization of one shot to the end is finally no longer limited by technology. The dazzling cinema of the last 20 years shows how difficult it is to achieve visual spectacle anymore. The development of digital technology has made it even easier - digital special effects can eliminate the traces of invisible editing between several shots, and finding hidden editing points has become a kind of "find different" intelligence game for movie fans.
Poster for the movie "Silent House"
In the context of digital technology, the one-shot discussion is more focused on whether it can bring some new narrative possibility to the film. From the perspective of film aesthetics, from the first "Soul Reaper" to the present, the narrative potential of one shot to the end has long exceeded the basic goal of maintaining the integrity of time and space, and even rushed in various opposite directions, and was excavated into unlimited space-time narrative potential. In recent years, some small-budget, limited technical conditions have been proof of this: the Uruguayan horror film "Silent House" (2010) with a linear narrative cost only $6,000; "Victoria" (2015) without the help of CGI technology, shooting 138 minutes with a digital camera without discounting; the non-linear narrative "Fish and Cats" (2013) can actually recreate the same event in a maze-like shot with different character perspectives; "Ice Cream and the Sound of Rain" (2017) freely transforms space-time in one shot to the end.
Not to mention the Oscar for Best Picture Birdman (2014), whose complex and exquisite shot is a perfect demonstration of the mature technology of today's film industry system.
Stills from the movie Birdman
A shot in chronological order to the end: it is the ultimate expression of the aesthetics of the long lens, and it is also a complete reproduction of reality
To this day, the greatest temptation for one shot is still the kind of film theorist Bazin's dream of a complete film myth, that is, to present a complete space-time continuum, which is also the most original, simplest and purest aesthetic concept of a shot in the end. Cinematic storytelling is often seen as an art of omission, and the basic grammar of cinematic art is editing, whose function is to cut, omit, and reassemble time. However, Bazin believes that the use of montage (editing) destroys the integrity and unity of space-time, so he promotes the aesthetic of long shots, which is intended to maintain the integrity of space-time and respect the objective subject. As a result, one shot has become the ultimate expression of long lens aesthetics, and has become the original dream of the film to completely reproduce reality.
The most common is still a basic time-time linear one-shot movie that maintains the consistency of time and space, such as "Silent House", "Victoria", "Birdman", "1917" and so on. In this type of film, time advances synchronously in the extension of space, and the passage of time has a strict consistency with spatial displacement. The story unfolds uninterruptedly over a limited period of time, usually consistent with the length of the film, often without jumps in time and place, and its coherent present tense creates a complete space-time body.
The subjectivity and immersion of the shot to the end seem to be naturally suitable for horror films, and the audience is more likely to bring in the perspective of the protagonist to experience. The Uruguayan film "Silent House" is a typical murder horror film, the heroine in the claustrophobic space, encountered an unknown horror force from the depths of darkness, a mirror is limited to a relatively fixed and narrow space, the camera seems to be as difficult as the characters, there is nowhere to escape, thus creating a terrifying atmosphere of fear. The camera that follows the heroine has been misleading and deceiving the audience, until the end, the audience discovers that the hidden murderer in the movie is actually the schizophrenic heroine.
Stills from the movie "The Silent House"
Japanese director Yuki Mitani's "Big Airport 2013" is a family comedy about a family trapped in a small airport due to flight delays, each with their own little secrets that they don't know - infidelity, sexual orientation, and money calculations. The camera follows the gossipy airport groundwork girl, shuttling between multiple characters, constantly flipping funny plots, high-density dialogue, complex character relationships, through exaggerated performances, is presented as a gag but incomparably exquisite farce.
Another film that also doesn't rely on CGI technology at all is the German low-budget film Victoria, a 138-minute film that seems to hold the record for the longest shot to date. On the streets of Berlin at night, we follow the heroine Victoria on an unforgettable journey that will change her life. The unbridled freedom of youth is mixed with the thrill of crime, and the loose and aimless wandering of the first half of the film suddenly transforms into a highly tense and dramatic bank robbery in the second half, and the sense of urgency brought about by the real-time gallop during the escape process has also been oppressing the audience's nerves.
Birdman and 1917 are the perfect products of a mature industrial system, and they are also examples of the use of digital special effects to hide editing and artificially create a shot to the end. The war film "1917" presents a continuous battlefield space in one shot, allowing the audience to feel the war landscape of World War I in an immersive experience. The audience is able to follow in the footsteps of the protagonist, through the silent battlefields, and carefully examine all the details of the material reality presented on the screen, all the visual landscapes that can be seen and felt- the spaces destroyed by artillery fire. Craters blown out by shells, stagnant water, huge, skinny horses, rotting and swollen soldiers. "Birdman" is in a one-shot to the end, using the alternating presentation method of drama in the play and real life, so that the characters can shuttle between reality and fiction.
In these films, the one-shot to the end or the pseudo-one-shot created by digital technology to the end are chronological and linear, and there is no attempt to reshape or change the time inside the continuous long shots. However, in terms of audiovisual thinking, this kind of film is no longer simply using long-lens thinking to construct narratives, but in the long shots of continuous movement, it integrates montage thinking. The long lens aesthetic opposes the creator's subjective emphasis on interfering with the free presentation of external reality, while montage, instead, emphasizes the aesthetic value of subjectivity and artificiality. Contemporary linearity is a mirror to the end, and it has merged these two opposing aesthetic concepts, not only will not become a kind of narrative shackles, but will reveal new aesthetic potential.
This visual thinking of adopting editing in one shot to the end is in line with the long-shot ideas of classic Hollywood narrative film masters Hitchcock, Pleminger and others, connecting different viewpoints with smooth camera movements. For example, through the change of the position of the character and the lens, various scenes are formed, or it can be deduced from a panorama into a close-up, or even a character turning to face a character to construct a two-person dialogue composition. Or from the objective perspective of the character, push to the subjective perspective of the character.
This kind of fusion of one shot to the end, processing the movement of the characters in the single picture of the lens, with deep focus, depth of field, layer, scene scheduling, to create the richness and change of the picture, not without intervention to present the reality in the picture, but to join the creator's subjective emphasis and intervention on objective reality - such as pushing to close-up. This will have a psychological effect, if you are not always alert, sometimes even unaware that this is a shot to the end. For example, in "Big Airport 2013" and "Birdman", the creators constantly add clever visual changes to the end of the shot. The camera is sometimes on the back of the character, and sometimes it shifts to the front of the character. Or, by transforming the subject of the lens, from one character to another. These deliberately designed changes, like the visual punctuation marks in long shots, bring about a certain pause and division at the perceptual level, creating a sense of visual rhythm inside the long shot.
A shot that disrupts the timing to the end: the boundaries of time and space, the division of real fiction
A non-linear one-shot film shows the potential of a spatio-temporal narrative that far exceeds expectations. In a seemingly coherent mirror to the end, the identity of time and space is broken, and the finiteness of spatial displacement and the disorder of time flow create an unprecedented space-time narrative art. Reshaping and changing time in a seemingly coherent space-time continuum, the creator uses a shot to eliminate the boundaries of time and space, the distinction between reality and fiction, and space and time can be freely squeezed or extended, broken or continued.
This is no longer the continuity and integrity of time and space in the aesthetic sense of Bazin's long lens. In the end, a mirror is, to a considerable extent, the pursuit of a psychological reality (perceptual reality) rather than the real coherence of the real space.
Stills from the movie "Russian Ark"
Alexander Sokolov's Ark of Russia (2002) is the most ornate and complex visual spectacle ever created in one shot. A contemporary filmmaker (always the camera's subjective perspective), and another French diplomat from the 19th century, wander through an ornate palace in St. Petersburg, sometimes invisible and sometimes visible. They witnessed the angry Peter the Great whipping his generals; the private life of Empress Catherine; the Last Supper of the last Tsar's family and the last glorious court ball of 1913. More than two hundred years of Russian history were compressed in this short and aimless wandering. Doors are pushed open or closed, dividing history into stage dramas. A mirror that seems to have the limitations of time and space in the end actually creates a magnificent epic sense.
Stills from the movie "Ice Cream and the Sound of Rain"
The Japanese youth film "Ice Cream and the Sound of Rain" reconstructs the boundaries of time and space, reality and fiction with heavy weights, and becomes a genius work that seems to be incomparably light and flexible, but the text level is particularly rich and complex. Six young people rehearse a play that will be released a month later, real life, the process of rehearsing the play, the play within a play, and the three narrative time and space form a nested structure. In motion, the camera breaks the boundaries between fiction (play-in-play) and reality, film and stage play, and multiple realities are constantly intertwined and mixed. Although the change in the format of the film distinguishes the real/fiction by the physical attributes of the screen, it is still difficult for the audience to distinguish whether the characters are rehearsing or in their own reality, because the real world will always transform into a play-within-a-play story without warning. The names of the characters in the play, the names of the actors who rehearsed the play and the real names of the film actors, the three are consistent, including the director himself who starred in the stage play in the movie, all of which make the story more indistinguishable.
Jumping, confused, and confused time breaks free from the shackles of continuous space, and even brings a new kind of temporal and spatial narrative relationship - freely reshaping time in space, which is also impossible to do with any previous film and literary narrative methods. A more extreme embodiment of this new type of space-time relationship is the non-linear circular narrative films "Fish and Cats" and "Time Code".
Stills from the movie Fish and Cats
People can't step into the same river twice, this single, linear, order of time is the basis of all narrative works, even if the flashback in the film, it is only to cut off the narrative, to reproduce a previous event, is a kind of lost time. In the Iranian thriller film "Fish and Cats", people can not only step into the same river twice, but even return to the same time and again. Time is distorted into a time labyrinth that cannot be walked out in the movement of the characters to the end. The camera constantly changes the subjects it follows, from A to B to C, but when the camera follows C back to the same place where A departed, we find that time seems to be stuck on that spatial node, and we experience the same event again from the perspective of different people, as if time is stolen in the space movement. It's a bit close to the time and space of a video game, and when you go back to the same place, the characters are still saying the same thing, and the events still haven't changed. It's like a nested nightmare of not being able to wake up, or a labyrinth of time that can never go out.
This kind of time labyrinth does not seem to be new in the novel, but the film as the art of time and space, time and space have a certain identity, and the actual visibility of the film space also makes the film time unable to be as free as in the novel. However, in this seemingly more homogeneous space-time body in one shot, contemporary creators have broken the narrative limitations of the film, reshaped time and space with long lenses that change freely, and realized the transformation of the complete space-time myth to reshape the magic of time and space.
Author: Liu Qi (Ph.D. in Film Studies, Assistant Researcher, China Federation of Literary and Art Film Art Center)
Editor: Lu Shuwen
Editor-in-Charge: Li Ting
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.