17 - DeLillo and the Cinematic Long Take

Summary

The long take, a cinematic device that consists of a lengthy, unbroken shot, is present in Don DeLillo's fiction from his first novel, Americana (1971). In the opening scene, during a party attended by television executive David Bell, a character is heard to remark of the gathering, in reference to one of cinema's most famous exponents of the long take, ‘It's like an Antonioni movie’ (4). Bell's own passion project, which he carries out discreetly during a road trip to shoot a documentary about the Navaho tribe, is ‘a long unmanageable movie’ (205) consisting of a series of long takes, shots ‘extended to [their] ultimate limit in time’ (263), which for Bell approximates something approaching autobiography.

The reference to Michelangelo Antonioni in the first pages of his first novel indicates that DeLillo is positioning his work in relation to film directors as much as to other novelists. Antonioni's films belong to a specific moment in cinema when the prevailing European post-war form of neorealism was curdling into something stranger and more existential. Antonioni's unofficial trilogy, L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962), broke with his beginnings in neorealism to depict the lives of aimless middle-class Italians benefiting from the post-war boom. In these films Antonioni allegorically stages the existential boredom of post-war Italian modernity through a series of oblique scenarios, most famously the unresolved disappearance of a young woman on a boating trip in L’Avventura. One of Antonioni's signature methods of creating this atmosphere is lengthy, unbroken shots, which downplay action and melodrama in favour of a sense of social and temporal dislocation.

This shift in filmmaking is famously theorised by Gilles Deleuze in his two-part study Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, albeit in a strongly Eurocentric fashion, as the difference between ‘movement-images’ and ‘time-images’ (Cinema 1 12). For Deleuze, this change occurs when European filmmakers break with earlier traditions of depicting action through montage (though he sees this process continuing in American cinema) and move towards ‘a mystery of time, of uniting image, thought and camera in a single “automatic subjectivity”’ (Cinema 2 56).