Zizek, The Hitchcockian Cut... "Looking Away"

Excerpt from above:

The Hitchcockian Cut

Montage: Montage is usually conceived as a way of producing, from fragments of the real pieces of film discontinuous individual shots, an effect of cinematic space, ie - a specific cinematic reality. That is to say, it is universally acknowledged that cinematic space is never a simple repetition or imitation of external effective reality, but an effect of Montage. What is often overlooked, however, is the way this transformation of fragments of the real into cinematic reality produces, through a kind of structural necessity, a certain leftover, a surplus that is radically heterogeneous to cinematic reality, but nonetheless, implied by it, part of it. That this surplus of the real is, in the last resort, precisely the "Gaze qua object," is best exemplified by the work of Hitchcock.

We have already pointed out that the fundamental constituent of the Hitchcockian Universe is the so-called spot, the stain upon which reality revolves, passes over into the real. The mysterious detail that sticks out, that does not fit into the symbolic network of reality, and that as such, indicates that something is amiss. The fact that this spot ultimately coincides with the threatening gaze of the other is confirmed in an almost to obvious way by the famous tennis court scene from "Strangers on a Train" in which Guy watches the crowd watching the game. The camera first gives us a long shot of the crowd, all heads turn alternately left and right following the path of the ball, all except one, which stares with a fixed gaze into the camera, ie, at Guy. The camera then quickly approaches this motionless head. It is Bruno, linked to Guy by a murderous pact. Here we have, in pure distilled form, the stiff motionless gaze, sticking out like a strange body and thus disturbing the harmony of the image by introducing a threatening dimension.

The function of the famous Hitchcockian tracking shot is precisely to produce a spot. In the tracking shot, the camera moves from an establishing shot, to a closeup of a detail that remains a blurred spot, the true form of which is accessible only to an anamorphic view from a side. The shot slowly isolates from its surroundings the element that cannot be integrated into the symbolic reality, that must remain a strange body if the depicted reality is to retain its consistency. But what interests us here is the fact that under certain conditions, Montage does intervene in the tracking shot, ie- The continuous approach of the camera is interrupted by Cuts.

What, more precisely, are these conditions? Briefly, the tracking shot must be interrupted when it is subjective, when the camera shows us the subjective view of a person approaching the object spot. That is to say, whenever, in a Hitchcock film a hero, a person around whom the scene is structured approaches an object, a thing, another person, anything that can become uncanny, unheimlich, in the Freudian sense.

Hitchcock as a rule alternates the objective shot of this person in motion, his/ her approach toward The Uncanny thing, with a subjective shot of what this person sees, ie-  with a subjective view of the thing. This is, so to speak, the elementary procedure, the zero degree of Hitchcockian Montage.