I attended a cinematographer’s seminar at the Newport Beach Film Festival a year or two ago, and asked a question of Vilmos Zsigmond, whose camerawork on Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye was entirely composed of slowly arc-ing tracking shots, always gently floating from right to left (or vice versa) and never sitting still. I told Zsigmond I loved this because it seemed like an apt metaphor for the fluid, always-moving impermanence of life in Los Angeles. And he said, “What you’ve just said is an intelligent interpretation, but when Altman and I talked about it there was no rationale of that kind. All he said was, ‘Let’s keep the camera slowly moving the whole time.’ I asked why and he said, ‘I don’t know but let’s just do that.’ I didn’t like it at all, but I do now.”