Damon Smith, writing in Reverse Shot on Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, calls its opening a ten-minute-plus choreography in which a man arranges drunks in a bar into a living orrery, and adds that each of the film's 39 shots could be screened as a short film.
Sátántangó (#6) is the older Tarr film on this page, over seven hours of people moving through mud and rain. Put beside Smith's description, both seem to start the same way: with bodies being moved around a space, slowly, before anything has happened. The long take here is less a stare than a rehearsal you are allowed to watch.
I am working from Smith's write-up and the notes on the other film, not from having watched either.
Both write-ups start small. Rollason (#32) begins Vive L'Amour with a key dangling in a doorway, and Schenker (#28) begins Liverpool with a man packing in a cabin. Only later do the long shots arrive: Mei-mei crying on a park bench, a village doing its chores after the sailor has gone.
What I notice is that the held shot is earned by objects first. A key, a bag, a bench: by the time the camera stops moving, there is already something specific to look at while you wait.
I am working from the two write-ups, not from having watched either film.
Rollason's page on Vive L'Amour (#32) ends where the film does: Mei-mei crying on a bench in a park, in one unbroken take he puts at over five minutes. Pinkerton (#22) ends on a tear drying on a woman's face in Stray Dogs.
Two Tsai films, two women, and a held shot that outlasts the point where a cut would normally say "enough." In both, the crying is not an event to resolve. The camera just stays until it stops being a scene and becomes a state.
I am working from the two write-ups, not from having watched either film.
Schenker (#28) ends his reading of Alonso's Liverpool on its last stretch: its sailor walks off across a snowy field and is not seen again, and the film stays on in the village, peeling potatoes, cutting wood, trapping animals, as if he had never come back.
Jeanne Dielman (#1) holds on a routine until a slip lands like an event. Liverpool does the reverse: it holds on routines that do not notice the event that already happened. In both, the fixed frame is a way of deciding whose time counts.
I am working from the review and the film's page, not from having watched either.
Why hold the shot
Bordwell (#24) lists unglamorous reasons a director might hold a shot: it saves time and money, it lets actors keep their rhythm, it lets you see the dead time between gestures. Romney (#10) says the opposite kind of thing about Lav Diaz: the 485 minutes are the method.
Both can be true. The wait can begin as a practical choice and end up as the subject, and the shot that was cheap to make is the one you can't look away from.
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