Unity of Time
Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Cinematic Theatre > The Dramaturgy of the Cinematic View > Unity of Time
Comparing the temporal experience of theatre, film, and television, that the shared unfolding of time between the audience and the performer is a hallmark of in-person work: ‘this temporal linearity distinguishes theatre from other media such as film or video’. , noting that ‘in making theatre and performance, you are engaging in the passage of time as it happens, as opposed to the editing, reordering and compiling of moments of time that is the domain of the film-maker’. Basically, the theatre audience watches the performers for a specific duration during the scheduled performance, which is the amount of time it takes for the actors to enact the play onstage. Unity of time, in this instance, does not account for any amount of time passing within the narrative onstage, and in fact most modern plays demonstrate temporal transitions between scenes or acts just like film and television - through set, light, costume, and music changes. The collective audience/performer experience of temporal duration requires not only a unity of gaze/space, but temporal synchronicity, which has traditionally relied on being in the same physical space together. To communicate this sensation, Cinematic Theatre makers lean into longer takes and fewer cuts and edits than traditional movies. As Morgan Green explained to me:
One thing I tried to maintain and honour of the feeling of the play was to make it as many long takes as possible, so as few cuts as possible. Because in movies and cinema, the cut is the language, basically; in theatre, it's durational … you don't get to cut, you just keep going. I was trying to capture that feeling of the story going into the evening uninterrupted; it ended up being eleven long takes.
Grant Dodwell similarly told me of filming Platée with Pinchgut Opera: ‘it is 90 minutes, one shot’ – cinematographers they worked with stated that this was an unusual approach to filmmaking. Longer shots allow the film audience to take in lots of detail within the scene in the same way as they would take in the full stage not only as a unified physical whole, but as a unified span of time.
Cinema has used several techniques to communicate the unity of narrative time, in which the characters exist together; this is typically rapid cuts between actors as they speak to each other, but now may further include using virtual production tools to 'splice' actors into the same scene (a method used by several companies during the pandemic's peak Zoom integration, too, including Streamed Shakespeare and Creation Theatre, which I discuss further in Televisual Theatre, particularly the Choreographing Zoom section). For Cinematic Theatre, in which cameras are placed around performers typically on a stage, longer takes in which more than one performer is in the shot can demonstrate that performers had shared the same time and space, working with each other to communicate the narrative. In film, this is called 'the sustained two shot' and YouTube content creator Every Frame a Painting has a short video on the history and techniques of this very theatrical kino-eye:
Last updated