The Long Take

"The Long Take demonstrates a thorough and masterful command of film, media, and visual theory. With vivid descriptions of the works under consideration, Lutz Koepnick helps illuminate and elucidate the use of the long take in film and art with a prose that is at once accessible and intelligent. An ambitious and magisterial work."—Nora M. Alter, Temple University

"Analysing permutations in the long take across a notably diverse array of institutional contexts, with close readings of moving images drawn from feature films, gallery installations, site-specific artworks and video games, Lutz Koepnick develops an expansive and nuanced account of wondrous looking. Although Koepnick is fully attuned to the demands of the attention economy, The Long Take nonetheless strikes a hopeful and appropriately curious tone, highlighting the multiple settings and situations in which, for a time at least, spectatorship can be both embodied and unguarded."—Maeve Connolly, author of TV Museum and The Place of Artists’ Cinema

"The Long Take offers important, timely, and provocative insights on the transformation of our relationship to projected images as sites of exhibition morph and multiply and as viewing practices become mobile and contingent. Koepnick’s mode of analysis serves as a lesson in how criticism must adapt to the dynamic visual ecologies of the present moment."—Critical Inquiry