Interesting comment, you seem to have changed your mind a bit; in your thread opener you concede:
'The film-makers could have lied and said it was one shot and I don't think they could have been proven wrong.'
I think that was their intention - to keep everyone believing it was one take in real time. From what I understand it was Olsen who revealed they shot smaller chunks:
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/03/08/elizabeth-olsen-on-silent-house-and-why-shell-never-co-star-with-mary-kate-and-ashley/
Personally I was very impressed with the way they shot it, and thats not due to any bias or invested urge to champion the film; I was dragged to see it and went into the cinema thinking it would be crap. Based on the trailer I thought it was going to have many cuts, inept editing barely hiding them, subpar camerawork throughout and no scares making it generally pointless with a laughable 'hook' insulting the audiences intelligence. Instead I found the first half interesting and tense and engaging. It turned out to be a bonus that from a filmmaking perspecitive the 12 minute takes are impressive. As to your point that they could theoretically have done it in one take, I think that would be an irresponsible production decision.
Heres some examples of the logistics on a film with this type of crew which would make it untenable to even try to run through an hour and a half of narrative each time they turn on the camera:
1: Olsen or one of the other actors fluffs a line, they start again. We can assume that mistakes in performance, big or small, happened more than once along with mise en scene malfunctions happening around the actor, thats why blooper reels exist.
2: An actor forgets the blocking of part of the script and moves down the wrong corridor because they have too much to remember. Since its a mistake the camera operator needs to stop because they don't know where they should walk that won't clash with the actor if they correct their blocking and try to carry on per the correct blocking.
3: A hair or speck of dust rests on the lens which will be distracting if it stays there the rest of the film. Or the battery dies, of some of the crew believe something either is showing up in the background that shouldn't or isn't illuminated enough and they need to check rushes.
4: The door jams one of the times Olsen has to open it, or the plywood breaks or splinters when she tries to get out of the windows, or a flashlight stops working at a moment when darkness isn't in the script.
5: The boom operator lowers the boom accidentally into shot, or the sound team can't do their work because its untenable to prepare each room and choreograph where the boom operator[s] will come in and leave to always pick up the sound without picking up their own movements, lagging behind the room changes or being in shot. Equally in some takes the distant noises are not correctly choreographed and the recording equipment don't pick them up, meaning the actors can't react to those noises.
6: A special effect goes wrong in such a way that the visual evidence in shot is unconvincing, or disproves some part of the story.
7: An object in the general set dressing of a scene moves on its own in a way that ruins the scene.
8: An object central to the story has to be moved for the narrative and even though its offscreen for a period, crew can't make the changes because it would be picked up by the sound recordists dealing with a scene continuing nearby.
9: As the camera operator is moving around furniture to stalk Olsen, sometimes close, sometimes from a distance, they slip or trip on something in the set.
10: Make up effects can't be completed properly because of lack of breaks to alter the look of the actors despite bloodwork needing to look dramatically different over the course of the story.
Those of course are all things that can happen on any film but they would be more frequent on a project where everyone in every department has to do their jobs all at once, in order and with no mistakes even if the set ups of their jobs would normally take hours of preparation. People might put off communicating problems on set they might discover during a take in their own departments because their voices will get picked up by the ever running sound machines and because the director has no spare moment to listen to the problem that is about to ruin the shoot in the effects department, or continuity department. It would be inevitable that filming one take of something like this would stretch people until they were making thousands of mistakes, they could end up with hundreds of almost identical takes each with one mistake, leading to hundreds of hours of partially complete one take attempts that they would eventually edit together taking the best moments of all those takes anyway, making the attempt moot. Which in turn would mean they wasted a lot of time and money trying to shoot like they are working on SNL and not like they are working on a horror film with special time requirements, extending the shoot, exhausting everyone and still not achieving what they hoped for. The filmmakers would know this and if they were being honest to their financiers they'd have to admit it might take months of trying to get one perfect take, which would inevitably make any sane financier suggest they should the film the normal way in order to not waste money getting hundreds of practically identical footage.
As long take films go, theres no point comparing it to even Rope; the camera operator on Silent House is darting closer to Olsen, veering around corners, around furniture in darkened rooms, looking at the characters through furniture, getting on the ground, getting back up, changing focus in scene, adjusting to extreme changes in light exposure, getting into tight areas, running behind and ahead of Olsen and all the time choreographed well enough that they don't crash into each other, trip each other up or themselves. I'd love to know if they came up with a less intensive system for the sound recordists because to have 3 or more people running and darting close to each other would have been a nightmare for long takes. Getting 12 minutes would require a pretty good cameraperson to not show signs of fatigue in the shots. The lack of success of the film I think is firmly rooted in what the story ends up being, which is too cliche and underwhelming for twist savvy audiences. They should have tried to fix the narrative inadaquacies and forget about promoting the one take fantasy.
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