The Best of British Cinema: Boiling Point (2021)
Returning to the incredible 2021 film which inspired the series
A large part of my Film Studies undergraduate dissertation was written because of Boiling Point. The film re-assured my interest in the relatively new trend of what I called ‘single-shot’ films — that is, films that either genuinely capture their entire story in one single shot or which aim for that look through the use of hidden cuts (think Birdman, for instance). Of course, this film goes further back than 2014 when the aforementioned Birdman popularised the technique. Cinema began with single-shot films, if you want to be technical, as it took a few years for directors to begin cutting their films at all.
Alfred Hitchcock is the real pioneer of the technique, however. With Rope, released in 1948, he effectively created the rule book for the faux-single-shot. That film has hidden cuts, masked by pushing the camera into the back of an object for example, and it also has a detachment between ‘real time’ and the time which its narrative takes place over. The film is 80 minutes long, but its action takes place across an entire evening despite the fact that we are given the illusion of one continuous, flowing action. The film is very easy to watch, but it is quietly a work of complete genius. One could write a book on it and…
