Week 25/2026

This week’s selection brings together three films that make similar use of the tracking shot, placing long hallway takes at the center of their aesthetic.

In L’année dernière à Marienbad, Resnais’s Nouvelle Vague classic, tracking shots are used to follow a woman and a man as they walk through the hallways of a luxurious hotel. He tries to convince her that they met last year, and she struggles to remember. As the camera traces their every step, we slowly descend into their labyrinthine minds, where every corridor leads to a different memory, dream or image. Through the tracking shots, Resnais turns the hotel into a maze of forgetting, remembering and doubt.

In Hôtel Monterey, Akerman also lets her camera roam through a run-down hotel in New York. Starting with static, long takes of the lobby, rooms and deserted corridors, the camera suddenly begins to move, leading us through the claustrophobic hallways all the way to the top floor, where it lets us escape through a window. Here, too, the wandering camera movements endow the space with a certain subjectivity, unveiling the hotel’s inner duration. As Akerman explains: ‘I want people to lose themselves in the frame and at the same time to be truly confronting the space.’

Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, a film about a high school shooting, features one of the most disturbing uses of the tracking shot. Showing the shooters on their killing spree, Van Sant frames them from behind with a “follow shot” that mimics the aesthetics of first-person shooter video games. Refusing emotionally charged editing, he uses long gliding tracking shots to generate a sense of detachment from the violent actions, forcing their banality into view.