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Rope is Alfred Hitchcock’s purest exercise in stylistic experimentation. In adapting the play “Rope’s End” to the screen, Hitchcock wanted the action to seem unbroken and continuous. The problem was, of course, that film magazines could only hold eight minutes of film. That meant that every eight minutes, the director would have to find some way of masking the transition to the next reel. Usually that meant having a character momentarily block the camera with their back. The experiment was only partially successful because, quite frankly, each cut only managed to draw undue attention to itself.