One-shot wonder: The most ambitious technical wizardry in cinema

You don’t have to be the most dedicated cinephile to know when you’re watching something special.

You might be a few minutes into a scene and something dawns on you: Oh, the camera hasn’t cut away yet. Now, that’s impressive.

The one-shot is a single continuous take in which the camera moves along with the subject/s instead of cutting. It means a scene is not edited together with different cuts and frames, but tracks the carefully choreographed action.

Each episode of Netflix’s four-part series Adolescence is filmed in one take, a demanding process in which every actor and crew member has to in the right place at the right time. If you a critical mistake is made whether you’re two minutes or 50 minutes in, you have to start again.

It’s a very difficult thing to achieve which is why it’s so rarely done. When it is, it’s noticeable because its unconventionality shakes you out of the set-and-forget behaviour of viewing.

We’re so used to watching one actor talking and then cutting to the person they’re speaking to, then back and forth and maybe throw in a wide shot with both of them. Rinse and repeat.

Adolescence is not the first TV show or movie to have pulled it off, and some are “true” one-shots that really is one continuous take from beginning to end, such as that episode of The Bear as well as the similarly themed film Boiling Point, while others “cheat” by hiding its edits.

One of the first, most prominent examples is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 crime thriller Rope. All the action takes place inside a plush New York City apartment, primarily between its three protagonists, two former classmates and their old teacher, played by Jimmy Stewart.

The two boys have murdered another classmate, for no reason other than as an intellectual exercise to prove they could get away with murder because of their self-declared superiority. They hide the body in a wooden chest and invite everyone to dinner, even serving meals off the chest doubled as a dining table.

In choosing to make it appear as if everything is one long continuous take, it ramps up the suspense and the potential for discovery and refuses to give the audience a reprieve from the tension.

But the length of film stock was limited which meant the longest take was roughly 10 minutes. The edits would be hidden by focusing the camera on a dark spot so the frame becomes mere shadow, or by closing in on a character’s back in extreme close-up.

There were more obvious cuts too, which was supposed to help projectionists line up the reels in the correct order.

That Hitchcockian template came to be used in more recent examples such as Oscar best picture winner Birdman, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 2014 film about a floundering actor.

A lot of the movie takes place at the theatre as Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thomson gears up to tread the boards. It’s also a perfect space to deploy the one-shot with a theatre’s higgledy- piggleldy backstage layout which provides both a dynamic environment and plenty of opportunity to walk through doorways or around corners, which is where you can hide an edit.

The preparation for these shoots takes months, as it did for 1917, Sam Mendes’ World War I epic.

For that film, there were six months of rehearsals during which the team blocked out every movement before they started building the sets including war trenches. Every construction was done to the specifics of the scene and not the other way around.

According to actor Dean-Charles Chapman, the longest shot in 1917 was nine minutes.

Chapman previously said there were times when he was the person who the made mistakes at the eight-and-a-half minute mark.

But other blunders ended up benefitting the film. “What’s nice about this is you are able to welcome in mistakes because it makes it realistic and authentic. In the finished film, there are lots of mistakes – me slipping in No Man’s Land – but that only adds to it being realistic.”

One of the most famous shots in 1917 was a “mistake”, which is when George McKay’s character was running down the line as waves of soldiers charge from over the trenches. An explosion knocked McKay off his feet but he climbed back up and kept going. It ended up in the film to highlight the chaos of war.

War and action make for compelling subjects as one-shot because there’s always something to follow. They can be up-close and intimate such as the car chase in Children or Men or the knock-down-drag-out corridor fight scenes in Korean thriller Oldboy by Park Chan-wook and Marvel series Daredevil, which became renowned for those set-pieces.

Daredevil’s stunt coordinator Philip J. Silvera told The Observer in 2015 that they only had a few days to set up that first one-shot fight. He said, “(It) brough a grounded, real feeling to the whole thing. We were able to slow down the fight, and just have this animalistic feeling happening.

“There were no cuts in that fight. Every performer, the actors and the stunt doubles, were in there performing that fight, full-on. I’d say there was a minimum of 105 beats, and they killed it.”

Or it could be wide in scope, taking in scores or hundreds of extras as it did for that multi-room, multi-level, 10-minute long one-shot fight sequence in Atomic Blonde, the or the five-minute single take on the beaches of Dunkirk in Atonement, capturing the absolute chaos of war.

James Bond movie Spectre’s four-minute opening sequence through a Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City really announced that with 007, it’s always going to deliver something extra. In reality, there’s a handful of edits hidden in there.

Perhaps the most ambitious execution of this is the 2002 Russian-German historical drama Russian Ark, directed by Alexander Sokurov. Over its 87-minute continuous take, it moves from one room to another of the Winter Palace through 300 years of history, staged in scenes featuring the likes of Peter the Great, Joseph Stalin and Tsar Nicholas II.

The production had over 1300 actors and extras, elaborate sets and costumes, no full dress rehearsal and only four hours to capture the one take.

When it comes to cinematic storytelling, it was expansive and impressive, and Russian Ark wouldn’t have worked any other way.