The two hour journey is strangely elemental, as soldiers crawl through dirt, run through fire or rest in water after a skirmish. ![]() “It doesn’t do well to dwell on it,” a nearby officer advises in the aftermath. At one point, a soldier who is bleeding out gradually loses the rosiness in his cheeks he dies with a pale and expressionless face, his fist clutching a faded family photo. Likewise, the use of texture and lighting is dumbfounding: one can feel the bulk of cloth and leather on the soldiers’ uniforms and can sense the roughness of stone and the stiffness of bodies. The browns of sandbags and backpacks, the yellows of buildings and craters, the grays of ash and dust all pop like visual artillery blasts. ![]() Deakins’ acute management of color distinguishes moments that would otherwise blend together and keeps the action vivid without letting it get too colorful for a war story. His eye contributes most to the film’s immersiveness. “1917” was launched to the Academy Awards not only by a thrilling plot, but also by going above and beyond the typical action film: It makes history feel hyperreal, it deftly condemns war and aggression, and it relays that soldiers are just terrified people who have been dressed up to kill.Īs mentioned, Roger Deakins won best cinematography for his hand in “1917”, and rightly so. The result is a story that breathes compelling intimacy into the experience of soldiers on the ground in the Great War. The most recent example of a one-shot film, “1917” comprises a series of long shots that are expertly stitched together to create the appearance of two continuous takes. Since the phone lines have been cut, these young men are tasked with venturing across no man’s land and the nearby towns to reach the threatened companies before daybreak. Tom Blake and William Schofield (Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay, respectively) are informed that a nearby group of British battalions is set to charge into a German trap the following morning. In real time, we follow two young soldiers in the British Armed Forces stationed in France. To bring the film based on the stories of his grandfather Alfred Mendes to the screen, the director faced a compelling challenge: how does one make a contemporary action movie about a famously stagnant war fought in trenches, with months and years of attrition where little forward progress was made by either side? In “1917,” writer-director Sam Mendes breathes new life into a chapter of history that is rarely examined in cinema. This series of reviews takes a look at several films in each category: some that fly, some that flop. There are two kinds of one-shot films: “edited one-shots,” where the film gives the appearance of a continuous take but is actually a string of longer shots that are edited together, and the less common “true one-takes,” where the entire film is a single unedited take that plays out in real time. Most films are filled with thousands of cuts that show us different angles, but all that goes out the window with this genre. ![]() However, despite the rarity of the practice, one-shot films have been around for decades-the progenitor being Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” (1947). I was originally under the impression that the challenge approached in “1917” was something of a first for cinema. The marketing intrigue of the recent box office hit “1917,” which won best cinematography at the 92nd Academy Awards, was that the film appears to be shot as a single continuous take. Like a masterfully crafted album with songs that bridge together seamlessly, one-shot films are compelling undertakings not only for the compositional skill they require, but also for the immense level of planning that goes into camerawork. Holy mackerel, Slim Shady is right! Cinema is already a ridiculously complex art form, but somehow there are directors insane enough to ask, “what if we did this whole thing in one go?”
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