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In 2014, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman made waves for its innovative style and approach. The film gave the impression that it was shot in one long continuous take, yet it actually wasn’t. Emmanuel Lubezki, who won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on Birdman (and the year before for Gravity), deftly stitched together shorter (but still long) takes of about ten to fifteen minutes with some cinematic sleight of hand to create the effect. The crew had to handle on-the-fly lighting changes and set movements in order to shoot the longest takes possible and minimize the seams that would need edited together. CGI and “blank spaces,” as they were called, filled in the gaps.

Playing with this type of trickery is old hat, but the scale of Birdman’s project made it something new. Hitchcock played with the single-take film with his 1948 film Rope, but it had a very limited set. Alexander Sokurov did the same with Russian Ark (2002), filmed as a single 96-minute Steadicam shot.

About Birdman, The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “The entire 119-minute movie — about a fading movie actor, played by Michael Keaton, trying to jump-start his career by appearing on the Broadway stage — looks as if it were shot in one extended take. Of course, that would have been impossible.”

One year later, German film director Sebastian Schipper did the impossible with Victoria (2015), a 138-minute film shot in a single continuous take. The film has 22 locations, a romantic story, a bank robbery, scenes of club nightlife, a cast of several people, three sound teams, six assistant directors, and was shot with one endlessly rolling take in the hours of 4:30am-7:00am in Berlin. It was a wilder, bigger, and more expansive ambition than any of its predecessors.

Schipper—perhaps best known to audiences as Mike, the guy on the bicycle in Tom Tykwer’s groundbreaking German film Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt) (1998)— wasn’t sure Victoria was possible. The logistics of choreographing a two-hour feature film in one take, spanning so many locations, timing extras, while injecting characters and interactions at just the right moments, calibrating lighting and environment, and encouraging ad-libbed dialogue throughout to keep the pace moving, is a conceptual nightmare. But they not only pulled it off—they recorded the action three times before selecting the favorite (third) take as the released final film. It is arguably one of the purest contemporary examples of Bazin’s style of mise-en-scène filmmaking, in which long takes and the choreography of camera and elements within the frame interact to create an impression of realism and a world that exists beyond the frame we see.

Film festivals initially rejected Victoria, as they discredited its filming story, failing to believe it could be done in one take. Schipper said to The Berlin Film Journal, “I 100% understand people questioning that and it really shows the extent that they know the process of filmmaking, as it’s actually absolutely moronic to do this.” But his vision was to create something “crazy,” something that exists outside audience expectations of modern cinema. He told Indiewire, “It seems like at the box office, everybody is asking ‘where’s the crazy stuff?’ Of course, when you’re writing, crazy’s not interesting by itself, there has to be a narrative and weird story. It’s not a one-size-fits-all. Cinema is like a restaurant: you have all these things to consume, and the superhero movie is like a real juicy burger. I like burgers, I have nothing against them. But I would even take it so far as to say, especially ‘if you like that,’ you should once in a while eat something else. If you get a burger and fries every day, one day you’re going to really hate that. It’s going to spoil that dish for you. And I think that’s what they’re doing. If that’s the only thing you do, to stare at the audience and ask ‘what do you guys want?’ I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

The film is more subtle and visceral than Birdman, as Schipper utilizes the one-take without making it a gimmick. Another Indiewire article articulates, “As the one-take grounds you in the real-time immediacy of Victoria’s (Laia Costa) life, Schipper is able to maneuver a genre bait and switch with natural ease, successfully pulling off an effective romance film that boldly transitions into a taut suspense picture.”

Rehearsal for Victoria was more character-based than anything, as a good deal of improvisational dialogue fills the picture’s runtime. The actors had to understand their characters to be able to pull off the film with authenticity. Schipper continues, “I always tell people that it’s not about how long we rehearsed, but what we rehearsed. We didn’t go through all the movements. I did not tell them what to do or even what to say. It was more trying to deeply understand who their characters are and what they’re doing. Once Laia had that notion about Victoria being an idealist, she was free. From there we could create stuff and throw her into situations—her buying a shot, her dancing, her wandering the street. We didn’t need a script, we could just go to these different scenes and have Laia explore them in character. When she’s dancing, she dances alone—that tells you something. She’s in the bar and she goes to hit on someone—that tells you something. It was just filling these setups with honest character moments.” Schipper believes we don’t watch films with our eyes or our hearts, but with our nervous systems. We appreciate and are drawn to authenticity and receive less of it each year from the film industry.

Ultimately, Victoria works to re-establish a sense of true realism in cinema. Schipper told Vanity Fair, “the digital tools that surround us and have changed filmmaking—not only on the C.G.I. level but on every level. Editing is digital, filming is digital. And I think what that allows is to take micro-management to a whole different level, so that you can exclude mistakes. We think we can be so smart that we exclude chance . . . something has been lost.”

Understanding Schipper’s philosophy and its value on realism, improvisation and authenticity, we grasp that the one-take filming process of Victoria is far more than a gimmicky publicity stunt or an act of technical braggadocio. Schipper’s film reinvigorates the medium for both creator and viewer, questioning what we’ve come to expect as necessary or impossible in cinematic storytelling. Victoria invites chance back into the filmmaking process.