The Long Take and its Prototypes

The article considers possible ways of describing the genesis of the form and function of the long take through the preceding experience of working with duration in static images and other media. The long take becomes a form that accumulates the strategies developed for static images: multiple layers, stretching and compressing time and space, contemplative practices, dramaturgy of viewing, and so on, all of which is combined with the expressive potential of the “duration” of the moving image, thus achieving various aesthetic results — intensification of dramatic effect or, on the contrary, complete de-dramatization.