The Hitchcock film famous for being made from apparently continuous takes is “Rope.” The 1948 thriller follows two young men who murder a former classmate, hide his body in a chest, and host a dinner party around it.
Hitchcock designed the production to create the illusion that the entire film unfolds in one uninterrupted shot. In practice, the camera could hold only about ten minutes of film, so the movie was assembled from long takes that usually ended with the camera passing behind a person or piece of furniture. Those movements concealed many of the cuts.
The technique required extraordinary choreography. The set’s walls were mounted on rollers so crew members could move them aside for the camera and replace them moments later. “Rope” was shot largely on a single interior set and is often discussed alongside later one-shot-style films, although it is not literally one continuous take.