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cant detail — does nothing to reinforce the tension. The delay in the reaction is brought about by showing the audience something that has nothing to do with the story : the dramatic conflict is momentarily side-tracked.
If the director had not been bound to this particular formula of presentation, he could have delayed the reaction equally well by cutting. He could have left the shot of Rupert on the screen for as long as he felt necessary : the cut to the boys' reaction could then have been made at the point when the director felt that the suspense had been held long enough. The advantage of this method of editing the scene is that the spectator would all the time be watching something on the screen that is part of the conflict. Holding the shot of Rupert would not have decreased the suspense to be derived from delaying the reaction : on the contrary it would have increased it, because the spectator would all the time have been watching images relevant to the cat-and-mouse game being enacted on the screen.
In making a comparison between the continuity of Rope and that of a normally edited film, several points emerge. It must be obvious that, had the two scenes been edited, the dramatic effects would have been achieved more incisively. The exact moment at which the image of the two boys' reaction should be seen could have been selected— after some experiment on the cutting bench, if necessary —and then carried into practice ; the precise moment at which it becomes important that the spectator should see the initials inside the hat could have been chosen and then used. The editor could have timed the effects to best advantage without being hampered by any of the physical complications of long camera movements. If the scene had been shot from the requisite number of camera angles, he would have been able to do this with complete freedom. Where a general lack of dramatic precision is the overall impression created by Rope, a precise, dramatically taut continuity could have been achieved.
The effect on the total impact of a film made in this way can be imagined. The five feet of camera movement which the camera takes to burrow into the hat is a complete waste of screen time. If this loss of time is multiplied by the number of times it must occur in the course of a complete film, one gets a picture of the overall loss of pace which must result.
Apart from the problem of timing individual cuts, the question of correctly timing an entire event in relation to the rest of the sequence can become extremely important. In the chapter on editing 236