Adolescence, the much-discussed four-part series by Netflix, has been celebrated for the remarkable technical feat of dramatising hour-long stories in real time and in a single take. It has its origin in the 2023 Netflix series Boiling Point (itself adapted from the film of the same name) on which Adolescence’s director Philip Barantini and cinematographer Matthew Lewis first worked with co-creators Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne. Barantini is credited with the idea of shooting the film in one take, without what he called the “safety net” of a cut, to create the breathless momentum demanded by the script’s gripping drama.
The one-take challenge has been a cinematic perennial since the conception of the form – a directorial Everest if you will, luring brave souls to its rarified air. Rope (1948) by Alfred Hitchcock, Paths of Glory (1957) by Stanley Kubrick and Touch of Evil (1958) by Orson Welles all featured longer and longer single takes. There is tons of film lore around the technical challenges and effort required. In more recent times, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014) created the illusion of one continuous take through expertly concealed cuts. However, cinephiles everywhere agree that Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), the first whole feature film shot in a single take – one hour and 39 minutes – remains the peak of such technical and creative achievement, featuring 2,000-plus extras, 33 rooms and painstaking rehearsals. In the same way that it’s pointless to compare the achievement of athletes from different ages – as medical science, diet, and technology conspires to enable new athletic frontiers – in the case of Adolescence, an honourable mention must be given to the modular design of the revolutionary DJI Ronin 4D camera, which uses advanced LiDAR autofocus and 4-axis stabilisation to navigate tight spaces, enable handheld sequences, and seamless transfer to drones.
The one-shot film is a perfect example of the aesthetics of “too-late capitalism” according to Anna Kornbluh, whose book Immediacy provided the theme of the spring 2024 issue of TANK. Kornbluh drills down into exactly why breathlessness equates with extra realness – as Stephen Graham has observed, “You’re in it, like a play, and you can’t look away”. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. “Like Uber, but for art.”
What do we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation? One-take films mimic the live-streaming footage shot on mobile phones. Surging realness as an aesthetic programme syncs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. “Flow” is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, and all media forms – from TikTok to political debates on TV – have the style of a car crash because they demand that form of attention. They wish to appear as real as possible, in order to be as compelling as possible, by making it as hard as possible to look away.
The characters in Adolescence caught in the whirlwind of events aren’t allowed much processing time, nor is the transfixed audience. The impression may be hyper-intensified but that’s a fleeting sensation – and it's hard to extract much interpretation beyond the impact. A can of fizzy drink downed in one does not allow much time for the savouring of its contents. We learn little about what it’s like to be a teenager in the age of social media, nor make much sense of how toxic masculinity is resurrected at the site of a collapsing institution like the education system. The takeaway is superficial and unsurprising. Police are heavy-handed and stupid, the kids are messed up and teachers are clueless – oh, and that Andrew Tate might have something to do with it. As with the characters portrayed in Adolescence, the viewer is without too much material to work with in making sense of the events, far less in suggesting a course of action in dealing with them. It is very telling that the central family’s economic condition exemplifies that of the (too) late capitalist Precariat, with the father’s vandalised van spelling an end to their livelihood in one stroke. The family, having suffered an unfathomable crisis, end the series by driving out for some fast food, no doubt full of flavour but a little short on nutrition – not unlike the series itself.
Masoud Golsorkhi
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