I love how the tracking shot of the chase in @WilliamFriedkin's TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. subtly manipulates our expectations: the use of pillars to hide/reveal the car translates its attempt at disappearing, but also creates frames within the frame that ensnare it, a dual...

…effect that very few filmmakers can create, especially without cutting. Everything that's in the frame is important: the blurry foreground to focus attention on the car, the first three pillars that condition the viewer to expect something, and then the 4th which surprises...

…us by completely hiding the car. I think: OK, the shot's gonna end here, but no, the camera moves upwards, away (seemingly) from the chase. For a second, I breathe, thinking the tension will fade away. And then enters the red car! Again, unexpected. The speed of the camera...

…has also changed without us necessarily noticing, because Friedkin uses the camera's rotation to the left to hide the fact that it's slowing down. The tracking shot, which was going at the same speed as the cars 10 seconds ago, is now coming to a stop. And it's seamless. When..

…the white car resurfaces, the red one continues to the right of the screen because of its momentum, which prolongs the illusion of speed even though the camera is stopping. Dramatic effects abound as the focus…

…also changes several times very quickly, from following the white car in distress, to the menacing red car manifesting in the shot, to switching back to the white car reappearing at the top of the screen, again in an unexpected manner. And both cars eventually end up on the...

…same axis, highlighting once again the fact that the red car is going aggressively after the white one. Even at the potentially problematic moment when the red car is still, just after it moved back to realign itself with the white one, the kinetic energy is maintained by...

…having other vehicles entering the frame, feeding this illusion of perpetual movement. No down time, no space for resting. There's more ideas and cinema in this 20-second shot that in a lot of car chasing/racing films' entire runtime.

In the director's own words:

“The chase” is the purest form of cinema, something that can’t be done in any other medium, not in literature nor on a stage nor on a painter’s canvas.