I don't want to bother you with the 3212405th review of Welles' unbelievable perfect classic noir – here I'd like to talk only about the famous opening scene, the illustrious long take (I had to watch it again after it was honourly mentioned in the even more precisely planned opening (...long) scene of Altman's
The Player).
Nothing's new with it, what happened is that yesterday I checked how long is exactly the run of the camera. But first let me give immediately a remark with the help of David Bordwell: ""long take" is not the same as "long shot"; the latter term refers to the apparent distance between camera and object. (...) a
take is one run of the camera that records a single shot" (Bordwell:
Film Art: An Introduction, 1997, 259). Flaherty's
Nanook of the North (1922), Welles'
Citizen Kane (1941), more recently Joe Wright's
Atonement's
Dunkirk scene (2007), or the often cited, visually tricky last scene of Antonioni's
Professione: reporter (
The Passenger, 1975) are the classic examples for the use of the long take without montage. You know them very well. (Here I don't want to mention the difference between the long shot and the tracking shot – which is rather obvious.. On the other hand I believe it's unnecessary to know all the existing cinematographic terms – since they vary in different books, it's much better to understand only how they cue emotions...)
So how Touch of Evil's first long take looks like? Fact: the camera follows the ride of a bomb from its detonator's set until its explosion, so it rolls 3 minutes and 20 seconds without a single cut. It's definitely not a world record, which is more interesting is that the villain who starts the bomb ticking (notice Henry Mancini's bomb-ticking score!) sets the detonator around 3:20 too (as far as we can see that clearly).
And here is the entire scene:
One could argue about the difference between its felt and real time – I would say with the Hitchcockian planted suspense (see below •) I felt the situation much longer than 3:20 (The same happens – without any suspense at all – during Béla Tarr's uunnbbeelliieevvaabbllee ssslllooowww opening take in Sátántangó (Satan's Tango, 1994)). No more words on this since this post is not about the psychological-cognitive differences of the perceived time.
More important is to watch Uncle Joe Grandi's (and Hank Quinlan's, whose "intentions", "hunches" are just painfully, even suspiciously right...) plan which is – as the film's ad says "one of the strangest vengeance ever", but which is the darkest noir for me.
"A real sweet setup."
10/10
• “There is a distinct difference between “suspense” and “surprise”, and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean. We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, »Boom!« There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: »You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!« In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story” (Truffaut's interview with Hitchcock, 1984, 73).
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