Hitchcock was fond of this kind of attention-grabbing trifle, later enforcing a “no late admission” policy for Psycho in order to dramatically stress the importance of every moment of that film.
So, what was the purpose of this experiment? On one level, it’s certainly just a gimmick. Despite the sometimes awkward effect of getting so close to characters and objects, the cuts themselves are entirely invisible. The crew would then switch spools and begin the next take in the darkness, before pulling away from the nearby subject to continue the scene, hardly losing a beat. It is during this complete darkness that the camera would cut. Oftentimes the camera will approach a subject so closely that the frame is momentarily engulfed in shadow. The hidden cuts in Hitchcock’s film aren’t quite as skillfully hidden as they are in those later works, and a viewer can easily identify them if they know what to look for. In order to create the illusion of a single unbroken shot between them, Hitchcock employed a method of hidden cuts that has since been used on recent faux-one-shot movies Birdman and 1917. It is composed of 10 long takes (11 if the opening credits sequence is included) that each run about the length of a film spool. Rope is often considered Hitchcock’s most experimental film.
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