The Moving Camera - Text 15
Hitchcock’s next feature, Rope, was made up of only ten dolly shots of an average length of eight minutes. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Hitchcock argued that the smooth movements produced by the dolly and the crane kept the viewer immersed in the narrative, unlike those produced with a hand-held camera (to which Bogdanovich jokingly replied that the reason Hitchcock had not directed any westerns was that he refused to put his camera on a horse).[8]
Other filmmakers had more ambivalent relations with the heavy machinery of hegemonic cinema. In a pioneering film announcing neo-realism, Ossessione (1943), Luchino Visconti put the long takes and camera movements enabled by the crane in the service of a novel approach to mise en scène which aimed to convey the ambiguous nature of reality.