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He then proceeds to tick off a handful of long-take faves—from Murnau’s Sunrise (pictured above), Welles’s Touch of Evil, Kalatosov’s I Am Cuba, Godard’s Weekend, Antonioni’s The Passenger, Sokurov’s Russian Ark—and proposes establishing a “Long Shot Hall of Fame” to honor the whole aesthetically malingering crew. “Any consideration,” he goes on, “would land soon enough before the busts of Mizoguchi, Jancso, Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos”—who from my point of view deserves a wing of his own—but then “what about the long shots we’ve forgotten about, or never heard praised?”
Got one of those for ya, Mike, from the incumbent master of the multiple-minute stare. The shot in question, from James Benning‘s 1977 experimental masterpiece 11 × 14, involves a single, continuous take from the front window of a CTA train (actually the Evanston Express, which operated more or less nonstop back then) running to the Merchandise Mart from somewhere around Wellington Avenue. Obviously the problem, assuming you’ve already caught on to Benning’s methodology—that no shot can come to an end before the completion of some “naturally” cohesive action—is that you know exactly what’s in store: approximately 15 minutes of the same damn footage, through the window, down the tracks … with an anonymous guy silhouetted against the glass, smack-dab blocking about a quarter of the view.
