If those interested in neorealism and/or the long take are interested in the
two separately, I have an essay coming out in the _CineAction_ issue on
Hitchcock and Cukor that deals with long takes.  The topic of neorealism is
tangential, though.

The title and first five paragraphs are below--so you can knew if it might
interest you.  It should be available within the next few months.

Sincerely,
Edward R. O'Neill

"Notes on the Long Take in George Cukor's _A Life of Her Own_"
By Edward R. O'Neill, Bryn Mawr College

"In my case, style must be largely the absence of style."-  George Cukor

    "In this essay I should like to attack two misconceptions about George
Cukor.  One misconception is rather large, and the other quite small, but
since they are equally wrong and wrong for related reasons, it will be
possible to attack the small one in order to get at the larger  one.
    The larger misconception is just this:  Cukor didn't care or know much
about the camera or how to move it.  He left the planning of the camera's
movements to others.  He gave equally little consideration to montage and
similarly relegated its concern to other professionals.
    On this view, what is good and important in Cukor's films can be
narrowed down to the category of mise en scene:  Cukor's control of his
performers and his elegant visual taste was restricted entirely to this
domain.  If Cukor occasionally resorted to sustained takes or even sequence
shots-a single scene being captured in an uninterrupted shot-these generally
involve no camera movement, as in the justly famous prison interview in
_Adam's Rib_.
    The smaller misconception has the distinction of having been shared by
Cukor himself:  that his 1950 film _A Life of Her Own_ (starring Lana Turner
and Ray Milland) was among the director's worst if not the very worst of his
films.  A brief but precise examination of _A Life of Her Own_, though, will
demonstrate that the movement of the camera is extensive, that the camera is
often carefully positioned and moved to create takes lasting between one and
several minutes, that these long takes are sometimes disguised with insert
shots, and that while these long takes are indeed directly related to Cukor'
s forte in directing performers, there is no need to conceive of performance
itself as antithetical to cinema.
    Thus a very small issue-the length of the shots in one film-can help
lead us to larger issues in thinking about Cukor and about how theoretical
issues about what was once called the "nature of cinema" are framed in film
studies."







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