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The Best of British Cinema: ‘Adolescence’ (2025)
Philip Barantini works his magic again in this gruelling, intense miniseries
When choosing my dissertation topic for my Film Studies course in late 2022, I am now willing to admit that I bit off more than I could then chew. In choosing to focus on what I called the ‘single-shot film’ — considering both films which are genuinely only comprised of one continuous take (such as Philip Barantini’s 2021 film Boiling Point) and those which are carefully edited to emulate that effect (such as Alejandro Inarritu’s 2014 Best Picture Winner Birdman: or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) — I stepped into an academic space which had not yet been explored much at all. Save for a handful of articles readily available online (and which I was not really supposed to be using, seeing as most of them had not been published in academic journals or similar places), I found myself relying mostly on academic text about editing, ironically, and then using those texts to argue about what happens when we intentionally remove editing from cinema — what remains of cinema when cutting is removed?
It is for good reason that Alfred Hitchcock quite famously called the process cutting of a film that film’s ‘assembly’. Editing is, perhaps obviously, crucial to 99.9% of films which exist whether they’d like to admit that…
