Hack. I will never forgive you for commandeering my favorite Orb song/video...

Great job. One of my favorite sifters. I love this sift so much and this, and this and many more...

More Soy Cuba (just an amazing film): http://www.videosift.com/video/famous-tracking-shot-from-i-am-cuba-1964-takes-us-from-a-hotel-rooftop-to-underwater-in-the-pool-below

http://www.videosift.com/video/Soy-Cuba-Loco-Amour

So lucky to have seen this recently, thanks to PM and James. I uploaded the video and James sifted it.

I am Cuba (Spanish: Soy Cuba; Russian: Я Куба, Ya Kuba) is a Cuban/Soviet film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm.The movie was not received well by either the Russian or Cuban public and was almost completely forgotten until it was re-discovered by filmmakers in the United States 30 years later. The movie's acrobatic tracking shots and idiosyncratic mise en scene prompted Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese to begin a campaign to restore the movie in the early 1990s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soy_Cuba

Marketing. Elephant was sold particularly well to European critics and it played to their misconceptions/prejudices about the youth of America (evil computers, evil video games, evil guns, evil homosexuality, evil Beethoven just to be cheeky). The Cannes victory was purely a function of a bad year at Cannes and the fact that van Sant, like Lynch and the Dardennes, is an obsessive and repetitive auteur.

I find Elephant to be more a MoMA-style video installation rather than a document of Columbine. I want to hang it on a wall and it works particularly well on that level. It is still one of the most beautiful DV movies out there. And I really love all of the quiet, long, hand-held tracking shots. No American high school has ever been so quiet and pretty and emotionally barren as the high school in this film.

But the History of Violence was bollocks.

archchef - Never ever see GERRY. Besides making ELEPHANT seem as action-packed as STAR WARS, it is like watching paint dry while you are trapped and suffocating inside the paint.

Hey, this popped into my head yesterday because of the Simpson's submission, but I think this would be called a "hand held" rather than a "tracking" or "dolly shot" as there aren't tracks used for the shot. Wiki says the old tracking shots have been replaced by the steady cam. Any film school grads want to weigh in? This is awesome, by the way. Thanks for posting.

life was different when we were only allowed 4 in the queue... you had to be strict with yourself.

originally was posted back-to-back with the goodfellas tracking shot...

That tracking shot at the beginning was very nice.

plastiquemonkey: if you're on the long tracking shot kick, I offer you the following suggestion- go find the opening shots from Altman's "The Player" and Orson Welles' "A Touch of Evil"- two of my favorites.

IIRC, Roger Ebert gave Full Metal Jacket a Thumbs Down in the same show he gave Benji the Hunted a Thumbs Up.

What's remarkable about this clip, and Kubrick films in general, is that he uses extremely long takes. The first part is a continuous tracking shot that runs well over a minute.

Another thing that gives Kubrick films a unique look is that he uses natural or existing lighting whenever possible. This scene is probably lit from the windows, which are covered on the outside with paper. If studio lights were used, they would be outside the windows.

In this clip, Private Pyle is played by Vincent D'Onofrio, who's on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and also played Orson Welles in the movie "Ed Wood" (although Welle's voice was dubbed by cartoon voice-actor Maurice LaMarche).