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It was during the '40s that German-French emigre Max Ophuls imported his sweeping camera style to Hollywood, in movies such as Letter from an Unknown Woman. When he returned to Europe, Ophuls directed four films - La Ronde, Le Plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de... and Lola Montes, all photographed by Christian Matras - that raised the bar for camera movement. Bailey calls our attention to the opening shot in La Ronde, "about eight or nine minutes long, a studio shot that sets up the whole film." In this extended dolly move choreographed to the musical score, master of ceremonies Anton Walbrook guides the viewer through the set, finally alighting on a carousel, which serves as metaphor for film's narrative structure: a roundelay of love. In his 1968 book The American Cinema, film critic Andrew Sarris writes that the meaning of "Ophulsian" movement is, "Time has no stop. Montage tends to suspend time in the limbo of abstract images, but the moving camera records inexorably the passage of time, moment by moment."

Stanley Kubrick was a fan of Ophuls' camera moves, and in his 1957 World War I epic Paths of Glory, he and cinematographer George Krause paid tribute with one sweeping ballroom sequence. Still, Paths of Glory is even more notable for its lengthy dolly moves in the trenches, which were made two feet wider than the real thing to accommodate the shots. The camera tracks back as a general inspects the bedraggled, demoralized troops, who appear and recede on the sides of the frame like insignificant onlookers. Later, that same general sends those troops over the trenches and onto the battlefield to execute a suicidal mission, and the camera moves with them - halting as they fall, and then moving on. Andy Romanoff, president of Panavision Remote Systems and a former camera operator, says of these moves, "They are enormously powerful at making you feel the inevitability of what's going on, and of pushing you toward it."

This is movement that creates emotion in the spectator, says Romanoff. On the other hand, he says, the opening of Touch of Evil - which remains at the top of most people's lists of great camera moves - is not about emotion, but is "an amazing storytelling movement. It's a tour de force of exposition." Says Fraker, "It's the most fabulous shot, but it's about telling the story."

Is it, though? In his 1985 introduction to the film's published shooting script, Terry Comito wrote: "[The] camera seems less concerned with monitoring the events on the screen than in disorienting the spectator." Guided by cinematographer Russell Metty, ASC and camera operator John Russell, a 22-foot Chapman crane moves up and down, back and forth, laterally and diagonally, picking up a range of activity, introducing Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh, but repeatedly losing the car on which a bomb has been planted. What the shot conveys is the world of Touch of Evil, a "whirling labyrinth," wrote Comito. It also conveys the personality of the filmmaker, and the independence of the camera from the characters.

Brown might be describing that shot when he writes, "Out-of-sync camerawork, moving too soon or carrying on after the actors stop, draws attention to the camera's eye and we feel like an entity, a presence, if not quite an onlooker." As Wexler puts it, "When there's a quiet room and a person's sitting alone and the camera moves around him, there's a subjective response that someone else is there. You're saying to an audience, 'This is a movie,' which is a legitimate thing to say. After all, we're making movies, not capturing reality."

Wexler operated an early helicopter shot for the finale of the Picnic (1955), which was shot by James Wong Howe, ASC. The shot starts on a bus Kim Novak has just boarded, and pulls up to reveal an overhead view of Kansas farmlands. It then moves across to catch up with the train carrying William Holden, whom Novak is traveling to meet. This move serves two purposes: it connects point A to a relatively distant point B, and it carries an emotional charge. Obtaining the shot was, so to speak, no picnic. "I sat on a 2-by-4 in a navy helicopter with a rope around my waist, holding my Cinemascope camera," recalls Wexler. The effort was rewarded, though, and the grand aerial move became a hallmark of big-screen entertainments in the 1950s and '60s. Those opening bird's-eye views of Manhattan in West Side Story (1961) and of Julie Andrews in the Alps in The Sound of Music (1965) were not something audiences could experience the same way on TV.

The freeing up of camera and sound equipment coincided with the ascendancy of personal style in film, and that meant an increase in different styles of camera movement. A case in point is the sudden rise of the handheld camera shot, most prominently among filmmakers of the French New Wave. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who shot many of those pictures, explains on the DVD of Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Band of Outsiders, "The idea was that we were filming live reporting. Live reporting means handheld cameras and no artificial lighting." In a documentary on that disc, Godard says, "This movie was made as a reaction against anything that wasn't done.... A handheld camera isn't used for tracking shots? Then let's do it. It went along with my desire to show that nothing was off-limits." Liberation was the point, particularly in Jules and Jim (1962, directed by Francois Truffaut and shot by Coutard), with its famous handheld scene of Oskar Werner, Henri Serre and Jeanne Moreau racing each other on a Parisian bridge. The freedom of the camera and the freedom of the characters are one.

Late in the same decade, filmmakers once again began to explore the kinetic possibilities created by mounting cameras on moving vehicles. To capture the trend-setting car chase for Bullitt (1968), Fraker recalls, "We mounted cameras inside, we mounted cameras outside and we used a special camera car alongside. It was the first extensive use of pipe rail to mount cameras on cars, so on the bumps and uneven streets it's solid, because the camera moves with the car." Fraker is even more interested in talking about his use of camera movement in another 1968 film, Rosemary's Baby. "There's a particular scene involving a confrontation between Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes," he says. "It's a static shot all the way through, about two and a half or three minutes long. Then you push in to Mia, and she says, 'Oh, my God. It's alive, the baby's alive.' At that point, [director] Roman Polanski's got the audience. It's all about reserving the movement for the moment when you want to make a story point."