and in Raging Bull(1980), Jake La Motta (De Niro)
fondly remembers his wife, Vickie (Cathy Mori-
arty), in slow motion. Both films were shot by cine-
matographer Michael Chapman. Finally, slow
motion can be used to reverse our expectations, as
in Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix(1999;
cinematographer: Bill Pope), where Neo (Keanu
Reeves) dodges the bullets shot by Agent Smith
(Hugo Weaving) while shooting back with a spray
of slow-motion bullets as he does cartwheels on
the walls—a scene made possible, of course, with
advanced special-effects techniques.
By contrast, fast motionaccelerates action by
photographing it at less than the normal filming
rate, then projecting it at normal speed so that it
takes place cinematically more rapidly. Thus, fast
motion often depicts the rapid passing of time, as
F. W. Murnau uses it in Nosferatu(1922; cinematog-
raphers: Fritz Arno Wagner and Günther Krampf ),
an early screen version of the Dracula story. The
coach that Count Orlok (Max Schreck) sends to
fetch his agent, Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim),
travels in fast motion, and although this effect may
seem silly today, its original intent was to place us in
an unpredictable landscape. In Rumble Fish(1983;
cinematographer: Stephen H. Burum), director
Francis Ford Coppola employs fast-motion, high-
contrast, black-and-white images of clouds moving
across the sky to indicate both the passing of time
and the unsettled lives of the teenagers with whom
the story is concerned. In Requiem for a Dream
(2000; cinematographer: Matthew Libatique),
director Darren Aronofsky uses fast motion to sim-
ulate the experience of being high on marijuana—an
effect also used by Gus Van Sant in Drugstore Cow-
boy(1989; cinematographer: Robert D. Yeoman).
Perhaps no modern director has used and
abused slow and fast motion, as well as virtually
every other manipulation of cinematic space and
time, more than Godfrey Reggio in his Qatsitril -
ogy: Koyaanisqatsi (1982; cinematographer: Ron
Fricke); Powaqqatsi (1988; cinematographers:
Graham Berry and Leonidas Zourdoumis); and
Nagoyqatsi (2002; cinematographer: Russell Lee
Fine). Although Reggio’s sweeping vision of the
cultural and environmental decay of the modern
world is lavishly depicted in poetic, even apocalyp-
tic, images, he often relies too heavily on manipula-
tion to make his point.
Whereas the average shot lasts ten seconds, the
long takecan run anywhere from one to ten min-
utes. (An ordinary roll of film runs for ten minutes,
but specially fitted cameras can accommodate
longer rolls of film that permit takes of anywhere
from fourteen to twenty-two minutes.) One of the
most elegant techniques of cinematography, the long
take has the double potential of preserving both
real space and real time. Ordinarily, we refer to a
sequence as a series of edited shots characterized
by inherent unity of theme and purpose. The long
take is sometimes referred to as a sequence shot
because it enables filmmakers to present a unified
pattern of events within a single period of time in
one shot. However, with the exception of such
extraordinary examples as the opening of Orson
Welles’s Touch of Evil(1958; discussed earlier), the
long take is rarely used for a sequence filmed in one
shot. Instead, even masters of the evocative long
take—directors such as F. W. Murnau, Max Ophüls,
Orson Welles, William Wyler, Kenji Mizoguchi, and
Stanley Kubrick—combine two or more long takes
by linking them, often unobtrusively, into an appar-
ently seamless whole.
Coupled with the moving camera, the long take
also eliminates the need for separate setups for
long, medium, and close-up shots. It permits the
internal development of a story involving two or
more lines of action without use of the editing
technique called crosscutting that is normally
employed to tell such a story. Furthermore, if aTypes of shots in The Birds(Opposite) In this action-
packed scene from The Birds(1963; cinematographer: Robert
Burks), Alfred Hitchcock orients us by manipulating types of
shots, camera angles, and points of view. It includes [1] an
eye-level medium close-up of Melanie (Tippi Hedren) and two
men, who [2] see a gas-station attendant hit by a bird; [3] an
eye-level medium shot of Melanie and another woman, who,
through high-angle shots such as this close-up [4], watch
gasoline run through a nearby parking lot; [5] a slightly low-
angle close-up of a group warning a man in the parking lot,
seen in this high-angle long shot [6], not to light his cigar,
though he doesn’t hear the warning; [7] the resulting
explosion and fire, seen in a long shot from high angle; and
[8] Melanie watching the fire spread to the gas station [9],
which the birds observe from on high [10].
SPEED AND LENGTH OF THE SHOT 277