(Credits: Far Out / Pedro-Marroquin)
Tue 9 September 2025 11:00, UK
The art of film editing is often woefully underappreciated for something that has the ability to make or break the final reveal.
Imagine a piece of slow cinema like Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, with its lengthy, uninterrupted takes substituted for some Edgar Wright-style quick cuts: A close-up of Dielman’s hands peeling the potatoes, quickly cut to the boredom on her face, then back to the chopping board. The whiplash would make for a completely different film, and I’d wager not nearly as good or faithful to the crux of the story.
Some films sit us within one take, no cuts to keep us entertained and alert, just an unedited scene playing out in its languid glory. Turn the coin and it’s movies like Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike, which pioneered an extremely choppy, fast-paced style to mimic the chaos and urgency of the violent suppression of a strike in 1925. Meanwhile, the jump cut is Jean-Luc Godard‘s bedfellow, whose French New Wave films were a landmark in experimental editing, furthering its active narrative engagement to challenge perceptions.
Filmmakers have played around with editing techniques since, working with split-screen storytelling, flashbacks, quick cuts, cross-cutting and everything in between and a mix of it all to varying degrees of success. Long takes are a unique form in and of themselves, leaving less work for the editor, but by no means less impact on the viewer.
The recent Netflix sensation Adolescence allowed audiences to follow the arrest and interrogation of a teenage boy in real time, with one shot per episode capturing the confusion, anger, pain, and violence of the story. By using hour-long uncut shots, the show delivered raw performances, accompanied by a sense of realism only made possible by a lack of cinematic artificiality, like we’re following the characters as a background figure rather than a passive viewer at home.
The longest one-take movie in film history
While various movies have utilised this technique for long scenes, like Gaspar Noé’s Climax, only a relative handful of films have actually been shot entirely in one take from start to finish. Russian Ark by Alexander Sokurov is a 96-minute-long take, while Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria clocks in at 140 minutes of one-take madness. These are nothing compared to the reigning champion of this title, however, which even has a Guinness World Record for the accomplishment.
At three hours, 28 minutes, and four seconds, One Shot Fear Without Cut holds the record for the longest uncut movie. The Indian thriller seems hard to find (at the time of writing, only three people have logged the movie as ‘watched’ on Letterboxd), so if you want to get your hands on the record-holding feature, you might be out of luck.
Made in 2010 and eventually released in 2014, the elusive movie seems like more of a gimmick than a genuinely accomplished film, which makes it rather unsurprising that director Haroon Rashid has never made anything else. Maybe directing a three-and-a-half-hour uncut horror movie was enough for him to retreat to his armchair.
When record-breaking becomes part of your modus operandi while you’re making a film, there’s a strong chance you’re going to taint it. Rashid might have earned a Guinness World Record, but at what cost? Because it seems like hardly anyone has seen his film.
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