The Economist (15/Jan/1949) - Mr Hitchcock and the Ten-minute Take
Details
- article: Mr Hitchcock and the Ten-minute Take
- newspaper: The Economist (15/Jan/1949)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Rope (1948), Under Capricorn (1949)
Article
Mr Hitchcock and the Ten-minute Take
The financial state of the film industry has stimulated interest in new techniques of production which promise to reduce costs. One, the "independent frame" method, was discussed in a recent Note in The Economist. Mr Alfred Hitchcock in his recent films has been pursuing a different line of innovation, and his description of it in a lecture to a technical audience appears in the current Cine Technician. Its main features are fuller preparation of the script, longer "takes," and the shooting of the scenes so far as possible in the sequence in which they are to be used.
The customary method by which the editor in the cutting-room assembles the scenes into a film after they have been shot, discarding what he does not want and calling for new "takes" to fill any breaches in continuity, is thus reversed, and editing and cutting are performed on the script instead of on the film. This eliminates the waste of shooting scenes which will later be perhaps totally cut. It ensures that each scene will be related to what has preceded it and to what will follow; it saves the extra and expository shots which may drag out the production time and which, Mr Hitchcock claims, an intelligent audience can identify as interpolated matter.
He therefore defends his method on its aesthetic merits as well as on its economics; he concedes that it does not entirely displace the accepted methods, but claims that a director should be ready to go back to a discarded method or adopt a new one where the subject requires it. But the method he outlined was used in Rope and in the more recent Under Capricorn. In these two films the savings in production time were considerable: Rope, a film of 7,200 feet (shorter than the average) was shot in 36 days which included 10 days of rehearsal and five reels of re-take. Under Capricorn, a longer and more elaborate film, was made in less than ten weeks. Mr Hitchcock claims that the saving of studio time is about 25 per cent. The method imposes a greater strain on the actors, who may be required to play continuously before the camera for anything up to ten minutes together.
