By Joshua Cornelius

The tracking shot has long been one of Hollywood’s most revered cinematic conventions.  Audiences can’t get enough of them, and directors seem to have a secret rivalry for who can make the longest, most logistically impossible one.  Often the emphasis, the impact the director had intended for audiences, gets lost in the discussion.  Increasingly in the modern era, tracking shots are constructed without purpose.  They’re a bit of cinematic fluff intended to add to the visual haze, meant to cloud a well worn narrative.  For Hitchcock, tracking shots were all about his audience and how he could manipulate their fear and desires to project themselves into his films.

Hitchcock’s Frenzy has one – just as the killer is about to enter his second victims apartment, the camera snakes back down the stairs, through the hallway and out the door.  Like some bashful, voyeuristic serpent that knows that what is about to transpire is a bit too shocking for necessity of display.  We know it will be, because we’ve already seen it.  The killers first murder is intensely graphic and seemingly presented in real time.  Edits highlight the intensity of the scene, but the camera lingers from start to finish, making audiences squeamish by its climax.  Hitchcock shows everything, or as much as he could without delving into pornography.  Though the killer theatrically fawns over his victim – comparing her to ripe produce throughout – the duration of the scene transforms the performance into something else.  Theatricality gives way to lunacy, and we understand entirely the dementia of the killer and simultaneously the victims inability to break free.  By the time the scene is over, we are left somewhat exhausted, and the entire film has evolved from a dramatic comedy of errors to a set of coincidences that will entrap our protagonist.

Hitchcock had decided that one murder was enough, and so that is the pat answer for his Frenzy tracking shot.  The truth is that, while an ostensibly spectacular feat, achieved with a combination of a camera jib and dolly (Steadicam wouldn’t be invented for several years), the shot really is something of a throwaway.  Nothing much is highlighted.  There is no purpose to our understanding the architecture of the apartment building or the street outside.  The shots real effect is achieved during the time it takes to happen.  We can project our own grisly images of the murder, and by the time the shot is finished, have a sense that this is all happening just a stones throw from a busy street.  As in the previous murder, help is only two doors away.  At any time of day, you might be walking on the street just two doors away from brutal rape and murder.  In a way, it’s Hitchcock’s argument for psychological horror in place of literal gore.  Subsequently, I think this might also be Hitchcock’s reply to Giallo, but I’ll save that conversation piece for another article.

As previously stated, the shot appears to have been achieved using two separate pieces of equipment – a camera jib and a dolly (both pictured).  While much of filmmaking has moved into the digital era, with impossible camera angles made possible through the use of computers, the tracking shot has remained somewhat sacrosanct.  The jib, dolly and eventually the Steadicam became the real world tools filmmakers rely on to pull it all off.  The secret of more than most tracking shots is that they are of course not one continuous, unending piece of film, but are often a seamless composite of shots created at different times using differing pieces of equipment.

Now observe the tracking shot from Frenzy.

Did you see it?  As the camera crosses the the threshold of the apartment building, a man passes in front of the camera.  In this instant, an edit is cleverly hidden.  A jib is used for the interior.  This piece of equipment is essentially a crane for a camera with wheels and mechanisms that allow the operator to level and turn the camera.  In this shot, the boom arm is moved down to a height that will allow it to fit through the hallway, and the jib is rolled backwards to the door.  If you’ll notice, there’s a slight dip from the building to the street, necessitating the need for a cut.  A man passes in front of the camera and we switch to a simple backwards dollying move – a dolly being a platform (minus jib) with wheels for rolling the camera.

What you don’t see are the scads of crew required to make these complex shots happen.  As the shot moves, a focus puller must constantly adjust to ensure that everything stays sharp and crisp.  Gaffers, who ordinarily wouldn’t need to worry about the placement of lights and wires, so long as they are out of frame, must find clever ways to light larger areas and hide evidence of their work.  Subsequently, many tracking shots are composed using lenses that allow for a greater depth of field and let more light in.  The greater the depth of field, the less focus pulling needs to be done to keep everything in focus.  The more light a lens lets in, the less a crew will need to supply lighting.

At the end of the day, tracking shots are popular because of the intense amounts of preparation and effort required to pull them off.  In a world where digital cinema has ushered in a “shoot from the hip” aesthetic, the tracking shot is rapidly becoming an endangered species.  Few modern filmmakers seem to understand how to weave one into their narrative in a way that it supplements storytelling, rather than distracting from it.  Is Frenzy one of cinemas greatest tracking shots?  Not by a long shot and not even by Hitchcock standards.  Touch of Evil and Goodfellas immediately jump out amongst cinemas most enduring examples of tracking shots done right, though more recent entries like Joss Whedon’s Serenity and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men are standouts as well.

Now that you understand the equipment and the methods, it’s easy to understand why cinema is one of our highest forms of art.  A collaborative effort of a thousand artists over a span of years, from script to screen, guided by the vision of one.  A successful tracking shot is a conquest of the form and simultaneously an emphatic declaration of its holdings as true art.