Today's Video Daily Double piggybacks a bit off of an article I was reading about long takes in film. The long take is an editing technique that has, for various reasons, fallen by the wayside in modern film. Part of it is the influence of "MTV" editing from the 80s and 90s, when it was fashionable to incorporate very quick cuts (admittedly, this isn't something unique to the time period, as any sequence analysis of Hitchcock's Psycho will tell you) which became increasingly popular as video directors transitioned to film, upping the ante by making scenes shorter and shorter, and editing accordingly tighter. Audiences are supposedly "bored" by long takes, and the general argument is that they belong in "art" films.
Of course, when you do see them, they tend to stick with you as a result. As the "long take" becomes rarer, the effect actually performs the opposite function of being "boring." The article mentions some of the best long takes there are, and I thought I'd add a couple of my own choosing. Not all of them were on YouTube, so I couldn't include long takes from Moon, The House of the Devil, or 44 Inch Chest, although I did locate one of the best "long" closeups from the film Birth.
As the Cap'n conveniently blanked on other titles that came to mind while hunting for those clips (always write your titles down, kids!), I'll dispense with the chatter and skip directly to the videos.
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Our first video is an excellent example of the "long take," and it frames the film by juxtaposing what we expect when we hear "Jean-Claude Van Damme" and the actual story of JCVD:
Our second video is also the opening credits / sequence, this time of Robert Altman's The Player:
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