Long take is a continuous shot that extends well beyond the average duration, often used to create immersion or unbroken tension.
A long take is a single uninterrupted shot, typically lasting more than thirty seconds and sometimes much longer. Orson Welles opened 'Touch of Evil' (1958) with a three-minute crane shot through a Mexican border town that critics still cite as a high-water mark. Andrei Tarkovsky believed cinema should sculpt time itself and built much of his work on extended takes. Béla Tarr's 'Sátántangó' (1994) runs over seven hours with shots routinely exceeding ten minutes. Modern digital cameras and digital stitching have made the technique even more ambitious: Alfonso Cuarón's 'Children of Men' (2006) appears to contain several unbroken sequences of bewildering complexity, while Sam Mendes's '1917' (2019) is constructed to feel like a single continuous take from start to finish. The long take resists editing's manipulation of time and trusts the viewer to dwell, watch, and feel duration as the characters do.