Working Space: Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) and the Digital Long Take

Abstract

The digital long take has been celebrated as an expression of the artistic and technical virtuosity of today’s auteur directors, and derided as a betrayal of the Bazinian long take’s capacity for realism. This chapter will interrogate both perspectives, examining the digital long take’s highly mobile camera movement, and its relationship to questions of labour, aesthetics, and narrative, in a comparative analysis of two key long takes from Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013). It will suggest that Gravity’s characterisation of movement through space as laborious, and its gradual subversion of normative notions of vision and technology as superior forms of knowledge, construct a platform from which Gravity can explore alternative ways of negotiating the world of the film, and the digitally mediated world beyond it.