The Moving Camera - Text 13B
Studio cranes were expensive and could only be operated by crews made up of several skilled hands and technicians. The complex but fluid camera movements they produced nonetheless promptly became a central feature of the production values on which the hegemony of Hollywood cinema largely rested. They also provided an extraordinary tool to some of the more inventive filmmakers working within this system, including Orson Welles, who once described the apparatus of Hollywood filmmaking as “the biggest electric train any boy ever had.”[6] Like Paul Fejos before him, Welles pushed the narrative potential of crane shots to their furthest reaches. The three-and-a-half-minute opening shot of Touch of Evil (1958), for instance, uses the crane to combine inserts, establishing shots and everything in between while depicting a whole neighbourhood and jumping over buildings when needed. In the process, Welles and his crew managed to create in a single shot a coherent narrative weaving the actions of several characters moving about on the U.S.-Mexico border.