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.
By Raz Rotenberg, made with AI
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.
Made with OpenCurate.