's skyline light fades more quickly than in real life, but viewers attribute real time to the coming of night. They therefore experience time as passing more slowly than it does in the film.
The elasticity of time is perhaps best appreciated when we are the spectators of a performance, be it a film, a play, a concert or a lecture. The actual duration of the performance and its mental duration are different things. To illustrate the factors that contribute to this varied experience of time, we can turn to the example of Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film . This technically remarkable work was shot in continuous, unedited 10-minute takes. Few features have been produced in their entirety using this approach. Orson Welles in , Robert Altman in and Martin Scorsese in employed long, continuous shots but not as consistently as in . (In spite of the many plaudits the innovation earned the director, filming proved a nightmare for all concerned, and Hitchcock used the method again only in part of his next film, .)
Hitchcock invented this technique for a sensible reason. He was attempting to depict a story that had been told in a play occurring in continuous time. But he was limited to the amount of film that could be loaded into the camera, which was roughly enough for 10 minutes of action.
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