With this Strange Days post, 10 years on and to the minute, we begin closing the curtains on our Single Take Titles series. If one of your favorites wasn’t featured, please let us know what we missed.

In the comments readers have mentioned Goodfellas and Russian Ark. For the purposes of this series the latter film qualifies as its opening is uncut, though its actual titles fall on black before the shot begins. However, this beginning is quickly overshadowed by the incredible achievement of the entire film being shot as a single 96-minute Steadicam take.

There is something about the power of single take shots, Steadicam or otherwise, wherever they fall in a movie’s timeline. In fact, we do intend to feature the single take scene that inspired this feature and it is not an opening sequence (but it is connected with one Martin Scorsese).

STRANGE DAYS

Contextually, from a November 1995 issue of American Cinematographer, “…richly textured and technologically groundbreaking…Strange Days [is] a noirish thriller that unfurls almost exclusively in the post-meridian hours…set on the eve of the millennium…tracks the dubious activities of a gang of fringe operators who dabble in a new kind of narcotic: ’sensory recordings’ (SR).” Executive producer/screenwriter James Cameron says he imagines SR as a futuristic offshoot of law enforcement technology, a “next-generation wire-tap.”

“‘This is society’s underbelly, the bottom feeders,’ director Kathryn Bigelow sums up. ‘It’s a world of hustlers, of night crawlers…this is about people who have dark needs that have to be satisfied. They’re living at an intensity that the world of the day does not promise or hold.’ To portray [that] world, Bigelow decided early on that “the photography had to be the looking-glass through which you want to enter…there’s an excitement that the darkness holds.’”

“‘A variety of camera systems of camera systems where used to achieve the look,’ says James Muro, who in addition to operating the Steadicam did a lot of hand-held work using an Aaton and a tiny Robings SL, a 35mm camera that weighs about six pounds with film. Reserving the Steadicam for the more conventional shots…Muro relied on the Robings for the more fluid POVs. Coupling it with the Helmet Integrated Display unit developed by Lightstorm Technologies…Muro was able to hold the camera anywhere while maintaining a viewfinder image in his helmet device. This enabled him ‘to literally put the camera where the actor’s head would be.’”