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108 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
series of continuous pan shots, long shots, medium shots, close shots and close-ups, so that cut-ins and cutaways were avoided. This called for an inordinate amount of camera movement, from side to side in pan shots, up and down in tilt shots, up and back in dolly shots, and again from side to side in trucking shots. As a matter of fact, each individual shot was a long trucking shot, with the camera off the tracks.
Hitchcock's purpose in shooting his picture with this radical technique was, perhaps, to obtain a continuous fluidity of movement never before achieved by the camera. And in motion pictures, where the smooth flow of continuity is extremely desirable, such a technique may, in theory, seem promising. But in actual practice, if we are to judge from the results of The Rope, it is obvious that in trying to achieve this much desired fluidity, Hitchcock was forced to overwork his camera. He was forced to move it in order to get from one significant detail to another at times when camera movement was completely unjustified because it was unmotivated. The result was that a great deal of the extraordinary camera movement that was legitimate was negated by the camera movement that was superfluous.
In one scene, for example, the camera was forced to dolly in from a medium shot of James Stewart to an extreme close-up. With that done, the camera pulled back again to a medium shot and then panned away from Stewart to additional, continuing action.
In a normally shot picture, Hitchcock would never have dollied in for a close-up and then out at the same time, because he would have been aware of the jerkiness that such camera action creates. Instead, as always, he would have cut away from the close-up to, perhaps, a re-establishing shot, or to a cutaway for a reaction shot of another character. But because he was forced to use unmotivated camera movements, he spoiled what was, in many other respects, a vitally important picture.
Revelation pan. One of the most electrifying uses of the pan comes when it concludes with a startling revelation. The stock example, used in murder-mystery stories, is to have the camera pan slowly across an empty room and then suddenly reach and hold on a corpse. The use of contrast— as between the quiet, static room