“[Let us consider] the paradox of the “immobile tracking shot”, in which the camera does not move: the shift from reality to the real is accomplished by the intrusion into the frame of a heterogeneous object. For an example we can return to The Birds, in which such a shift is achieved during one long fixed shot. A fire caused by a cigarette butt dropped into some gasoline breaks out in the small town threatened by the birds. After a series of short and “dynamic” close-ups and medium shots that draw us immediately into the action, the camera pulls back and up and we are given an overall shot of the entire town taken from high above. In the first instant we read this overall shot as an “objective”, “epic” panorama shot, separating us from the immediate drama going on down below and enabling us to disengage ourselves from the action. This distancing at first produces a certain “pacifying” effect; it allows us to view the action from what might be called a “metalinguistic” distance. Then, suddently, a bird enters the frame from the right, as if coming from behinid the camera and thus from behind our own backs, and then three birds, and finally an entire flock. The same shot takes on a totally different aspect, it undergoes a radical subjectivisation: the camera’s elevated eye ceases to be that of a neutral, “objective” onlooker gazing down upon a panoramic landscape and suddenly becomes the subjective and threatening gaze of the birds as they zero in on their prey.”

—Slavoj Zizek, The Hitchcockian Blot, from the collection Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, edited by Richard Allen and S. Ishii Gonzales, 1999.