Bugger! ... Bob Hoskins in the final shot from The Long Good Friday.
Film love of one kind and another has been pulsing through the movie blogs this week. The respectable face of cinephilia was presented via Michael Atkinson's Zero for Conduct, which paid tribute to that crown jewel of movie culture - the long shot. Although there's been debate over the exact nature of the phrase, the loose consensus seems to class it as a shot (either tracking or static) of one tableau held for enough time for the viewer to be all but hypnotised by it - the kind of patient slow-burn unheard of in modern Hollywood, but that when it works can be magical.
As someone whose attention span is pitiably stunted in many other ways, for me a good long shot is cinema at its most purely transcendental - the longer, and in many cases the less that seems to be happening, the more likely it is I can get truly lost in the movie. Many of the established classics of the form get a mention early on in Atkinson's post (the walk across the marshes in Murnau's Sunrise, Ray Liotta's nightclub prowl in Goodfellas, Welles' brauvara opening to Touch of Evil), but of course the pleasure with this kind of thing is nominating your own favourites.
As such, I'd happily add pretty much the entirety of both Bella Tarr's Satantango and Alan Clarke's Elephant, the deliriously deadpan airport lounge scene from Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor, and the final shot of The Long Good Friday, with the screen given over to the cosmically defeated face of Bob Hoskins' doomed ganglord Harold Shand. (Incidentally, almost 20 years later there was a similar and nearly as effective shot of Mark Wahlberg late on in the addled course of Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights).
Extending the remit a fraction, I feel duty bound to at least mention the mesmeric "city of the future" scene in Tarkovsky's Solaris - a five minute mélange of tunnels, junctions and skyscrapers as seen from a moving car (the footage was actually shot in and around Tokyo). Although obviously not achieved in a single take, it's probably the single most narcotic thing I've ever seen on screen; I could only feel relief that Steven Soderbergh didn't attempt a reprise in the remake.
But then we have the problem of misdirected film love - as exhibited in the bad habit of repeatedly quoting over-familiar chunks of movie dialogue, as discussed by QuigSpot via Cinematical. A trait only slightly less unappealing than answering your mobile in a crowded cinema, once more certain candidates are obvious here - but again, many people will also have their own longstanding bugbears. For me, the sound of Monty Python bawled across a crowded bar still has the power to kill all and any bonhomie I might be feeling at the time; that said, more than once I've been known to quote The Cable Guy at large groups of people to the amusement of precisely none of them.
(On a side note, the post also highlights the strange way in which projects satirising the sapping inanity of office banter are then seized on to be used in the workplace as sappingly inane office banter - the original blog cites just that fate befalling Mike Judge's Office Space in America ("looks like someone's got a case of the Mondays"), and of course in Britain much the same thing happened with The Office. Still, you can't help but be intrigued by the discovery from the comments box at Cinematical that in 2007 someone works in an office where the staff spend their days quoting Ghostbusters at each other).
And lastly, here's an understandably aghast pullquote on the recent homage to Ingmar Bergman from Camille Paglia in Salon - a tribute that featured the veteran provocateur revealing that, while "on a British lecture tour for the National Film Theatre in 1999, I asked to sleep with Persona - whose five reels, like holy icons, rested in two silver cans next to my bed." Sadly it would seem that for some of us, film love, like every other kind, will always end up going too far.
