Random Sample: Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days”
The online film journal Reverseshot.com held a symposium entitled “Take One”, in which writers were invited to write about a single shot from any film. In the editors’ words:
“We asked our staff writers and contributors to choose a single shot, whether that be a long take or an insert, a momentary flash or a monumental camera movement, and devote their words to it, putting it into whatever emotional, theoretical, or historical context they desired. What’s revealed? The meaning of the shot, both to the writer and to the films from which they came. Something seemingly simple, but which proved thoroughly expansive.”
I wrote about a long sequence/shot in Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days” in which a tracking shot of a lonely music man becomes a grand metaphor for some kind of grand metaphor.