Timecode (2000)
Directed by Mike Figgis
A production company begins casting for its next feature, and an up-and-coming actress named Rose tries to manipulate her filmmaker boyfriend, Alex, into giving her a screen test. Alex's wife, Emma, knows about the affair and is considering divorce, while Rose's girlfriend secretly spies on her and attempts to sabotage the relationship. The four storylines in the film were each shot in one take and are shown simultaneously, each taking up a quarter of the screen.
6 connections found
View:
6 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Timecode to
Many films have been centered around the wasteland of Los Angeles ("Short Cuts", "Magnolia", "Playing By Heart"), but at least they contained characters that the audience could more or less relate to.
It's like an Altman movie that viewers are invited to assemble in their own heads -- ''Short Cuts'' without the cuts.
Where the film really fails is its plotting, which recalls Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" but with all of the stories running concurrently.
Improvised films are not new ("The Blair Witch Project"), nor are films that consist of one continuous shot with no cutting ("Rope").
Alfred Hitchcock orchestrated " Rope " (1948) so that it appeared to be all one shot, and Jean-Luc Godard famously said that the truth came at 24 frames per second, and every cut was a lie.
The elements have appeared before: takes the length technology allows (Hitchcock's 1948 Rope), split screen (suspenseful scenes in Hitchcock admirer and imitator Brian De Palma's films, such as Sisters and Carrie), and handheld digital cameras with improvised acting (for instance, films which adhere, more or less, to the restrictive tenets of the Dogma manifesto Mifune and others).
If you’ve ever seen a Mike Figgis movie (Leaving Las Vegas, One Night Stand, Timecode), you might understand the self-consciously conceptual, stressed masculinity that’s afoot here as mid-tier Figgis.
As far as I know, Mike Figgis’ “Timecode,” made in 2000, was the first true example, and as its title suggests it was essentially a novelty item.
Advertisement
In 2000, Mike Figgis released the experimental drama Timecode ; two years later Alexander Sokurov made Russian Ark , a lyrical one-take journey through Russian history composed of a single Steadicam sequence shot in almost constant motion that deserves substantial credit as 1917 ’s technical predecessor.
Back in 2000, director Mike Figgis took that notion to the extreme in "Timecode."