278 CHAPTER 6CINEMATOGRAPHY
solid sense of cause and effect is essential to devel-
oping a sequence, the long take permits both the
cause and the effect to be recorded in one take.
Conventional motion-picture technology limited
the fluid long take that these directors were striv-
ing for, but digital technology has enabled a direc-
tor to achieve it. Using a Steadicam fitted with a
high-definition video camera, Russian director
Aleksandr Sokurov made Russian Ark(2002; cine-
matographer: Tilman Büttner), a 96-minute histor-
ical epic filmed in one continuous shot—the longest
unbroken shot in film history.
A very effective use of a long take combined with
a close-up occurs in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth(2004;
cinematographer: Harris Savides), a thriller that
skirts the boundaries between the believable and the
absurd. Anna (Nicole Kidman), a young widow, is
torn between memories of her husband, Sean, and
her obsession with a ten-year-old boy, also named
Sean (Cameron Bright), who claims to be the rein-
carnation of her dead husband. At a concert that
she attends with her fiancé, Joseph (Danny Hus-
ton), Anna listens intently to a selection from an
opera that is concerned partly with the incestuous
relationship between two mythical characters. This
theme obviously invades Anna’s thoughts, as does
her unnerving sexual attraction to young Sean. Cin-
ematographer Savides devotes a full two minutes to
a long take of Kidman’s face, capturing the subtle
shifts in her expression in a way that seems inspired
by cinematographer Rudolph Maté’s adoration of
the face of Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s
The Passion of Joan of Arc(1928; see page 326). On one
hand, Savides’s haunting, long take is a declaration1324The long take and the close-upGreat cinematographers
love great female beauty, as demonstrated by these four
images from Jonathan Glazer’s Birth(2004), in which
cinematographer Harris Savides holds the camera steady
on Nicole Kidman’s face for two minutes. The slight changes
in her expression and the position of her head, eyes, and lips
as she listens to music that absorbs her attention reveal,
however slightly, the depth of her thoughts.