I enjoyed this snippet from Peter Brunette’s (very useful) Roberto Rossellini (Univ. Calif. Press, 1996):
“As Renzo Rossellini insisted quite strongly to me, the zoom and the long take were used in the earlier historical films because they were infinitely faster and therefore infinitely cheaper […] Of course, this does not mean that the zoom does not have any aesthetic effects, only that it use was often dictated by the most banal considerations” (346).
Banal considerations, indeed.
