The Moving Camera - Text 14
Another device designed to produce camera movements, the dolly, was also used for daring experiments by Alfred Hitchcock within the Hollywood studio system. Trained in the 1920s in the German studios, where filmmakers had begun to experiment with the “unshackled camera,” Hitchcock set out in the second half of the 1940s to direct two films making extensive use of long takes and camera movements, The Paradine Case (1947) and Rope (1948). More specifically, the mise en scène of both films relied on a new type of dolly that did not require tracks to produce smooth camera movements. An American Cinematographer article dedicated to The Paradine Case reveals that the increased realism associated by some film critics with the long take, which was in turn frequently enabled by the use of camera movements, was not Hitchcock’s primary concern. It appears instead that Hitchcock believed that, by shooting longer takes, he could get his actors to perform in conditions closer to that of the theatre, and consequently get them to become more immersed in their roles:
The scene was shot in this manner because Hitchcock and director of photography Lee Garmes, A.S.C., felt that its particular dramatic quality would be jeopardized by a succession of cuts; also, Selznick’s head grip, Morris Rosen, had recently devised a new kind of camera dolly which would give the motion picture camera a new freedom of mobility, and this dolly offered for the first time the means of shooting a continuous take and at the same time afforded all the variety of viewpoint that ordinarily would be achieved in a succession of takes made with the camera in different setups and at different angles.
Heretofore all camera dollies have had to run on tracks, like trains, and beyond certain limits the tracks would get into the picture. Furthermore, the ordinary dolly could only move in a straight line. Rosen’s dolly rests on four fully-swivel cushion-tired wheels and is noiseless in operation. It carries the camera not only in a straight line, but around corners and at an infinite number of angles. The camera handling is such that the actors can move freely back and forth across the set, as they might on the theatre stage.[7]