Birdman's director of photography Lubezki did it with his already-famous 17-minute opening gambit in Gravity. But the reel changes every 20 minutes would inevitably have disrupted any perfect attempt at continuous flow, so there are four unmasked cuts you can spot at these intervals.īeginning your film with its longest take has always been a favoured badge of auteur showmanship, as well as a grabby device to lead an audience by the hand into the opening phase of its story. The camera magazines would only allow 10 minutes to be shot at a time, and Hitchcock masked exactly half of these transitions by panning behind actors’ backs, switching magazine, and then continuing the camera move. As with all the films on this list, it involved fiendish choreography: prop men had to continually shift furniture and sections of wall out of the way to allow the bulky Technicolor camera to move about, while the actors had to hit their marks perfectly. This adaptation of the Patrick Hamilton stage potboiler gave the superficial impression of gliding about a single set for 80 minutes. But the granddaddy of the single-take picture – illusory and compromised as it necessarily was – is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. Mike Figgis’s Timecode (2000) beat this to the punch in quadruplicate, with a split-screen, real-time conceit that used four cameras simultaneously and had them nosing in and out of each other’s scenes. Digital technology has been an enabler here: Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) famously made its entire journey through St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum without a single edit. The illusion of Birdman being shot in one continuous take, through a combination of computer-generated sleight-of-hand and wizardly photography by Emmanuel Lubezki, is just the latest advance in a venerable cinematic tradition.