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Originally posted by: Tosh
"Really like the beginning shot of the Mexican border town. The camera handling is extraordinary, any modern day comparisons, Franko?"

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The opening shot of TOUCH OF EVIL is arguably the most famous long take in cinema history. As one internet essay puts it: "The shot serves to accentuate one of the primary themes of the film—that borders are just imaginary lines, and that evil and corruption know no boundaries. Furthermore, the long take allows Welles to link his characters inextricably to their surroundings, thus giving the audience a clear sense of setting." Here's a link to another ultra-detailed but interesting essay on the two long takes in TOUCH OF EVIL if you feel like reading it: http://www.jeffmajor.com/film/essays/evil/

Hitchcock's film ROPE used disguised cuts to make it look as if the entire film was shot with one take, but because each film roll ran out after a certain amount of time, he had to include ten disguised cuts. From another internet essay:

"In 1948, Alfred Hitchcock made Rope, which seems to be just one shot running 80 minutes; actually, there are 10 shots, arranged so they appear to be one. (At the other extreme, Hitchcock's The Birds has 1,360 edits.) Rope concerns two university students who strangle a third student, stuff his body into a cedar chest, then use the chest as the buffet at a party. With the greatest difficulty, Hitchcock brought off a tour de force that most people find nearly impossible to watch. Living inside that one camera induces claustrophobia, and instead of thinking about the story we watch anxiously for an actor to blunder.

Hitchcock later agreed with the public's opinion that Rope was a mistake. It violated his own belief that movies are made by joining together little pieces of film. He couldn't imagine what possessed him. Probably it was an exuberant desire to exhibit his genius."

Jean-Luc Godard's WEEKEND also has one of the more elaborate long take's you'll ever see, as the camera tracks down an impossibly long traffic jam as the protagonist tries to maneuver around it.

More recent examples of beautifully choreographed long takes include Robert Altman's opening shot in THE PLAYER, in which an actor walking across a studio lot mentions both TOUCH OF EVIL and ROPE while praising the long shots made in the old days. But the actor himself (Fred Ward) is part of a take that runs more than eight minutes and encompasses everything from a tour group of Japanese to writers making pitches in front of a studio boss ("It's Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman"). Also see P.T. Anderson (the opening shot in BOOGIE NIGHTS as well as several in MAGNOLIA), Martin Scorsese (the famous kitchen scene in GOODFELLAS), Brian De Palma (the opening sequence in BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, any number of scenes in MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE, and the absurdly long and elaborate 24-minute take, that was rumored to include disguised cuts, that opens SNAKE EYES), and Night Shyamalan (several examples in his so-called "spiritual trilogy").

Of course, once the possibility of digital film rolled around, the door was open for long take experiments with no limit. The ultimate (failed) experiment in the long shot was Mike Figgis' TIME CODE. From an internet essay:

"Mike Figgis, who directed Leaving Las Vegas, seems to have decided that in Time Code (which appeared last year) he would trump Altman by combining a long take and a movie about movies with a split-screen experiment. He tells his story on four squares, showing four different scenes at the same time.

In each square the scene runs continuously for the 93 minutes of the film, the ultimate in long takes. Characters move occasionally from one square to another, and sometimes two cameras converge on one event, showing it from two angles. Had Time Code worked, it would have been a landmark in cinematic ingenuity. Figgis would now be heading for a place in the pantheon alongside Hitchcock.

Alas, as the London Observer critic remarked, Time Code makes a viewer feel like a security guard watching cameras in the condo lobby. Even though sound emerges clearly from only one square at a time (our cue to watch that one), we nevertheless find ourselves trying to keep them all in view. Viewers who stay to the end find it exhausting. I gave up after 40 minutes or so, nostalgic for the 1960s and Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls, which had simultaneous long takes but only two screens.

In Time Code we hear a director outline to an executive a multi-screen movie that sounds precisely like the one we're watching. The executive calls that pitch "the most pretentious crap I've ever heard," but goes ahead with it anyway. Hoping, probably, to become legendary. "

Another similar failure came with the 2001 Russian film RUSSIAN ARK which was 93-minutes long with no cuts.