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chapter 4
Editing Relating Images
The use of editing to generate idexas and emotions is on striking display in the opening sequence of City of God (2002), Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s kinetic chronicle of life in the streets of a tough Rio de Janeiro neighborhood. Flashes of a knife being sharpened against a stone in extreme close-ups are intercut to a rapid percussive beat with details of the preparation of an outdoor meal, including a chicken about to be slaughtered. The chicken stares out at the audience and we stare back, similarly overwhelmed. The tension mounts until the chicken escapes and a massive chase through the streets begins. In the quick shots of groups of boys running with guns drawn, we grasp a situation of pathos and precarious existence. The manipulation of time, space, and point of view convey the neighborhood’s powder- keg energy and the imminent threat of violence. Largely without dialogue, editor Daniel Rezende sets the scene and the emotional register of this gripping story.
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ilm editing is the process by which different images or shots are linked together. As we move through the world, we may witness images that are juxtaposed and overlapped: in store windows, on highway
billboards, on our desktops, or on television when we channel surf. But editing offers a departure from the way we normally see the world. In our everyday experience, discrete images are unified by our singular position and consciousness. There are no such limits in editing. And unless we consciously or externally interrupt our vision (such as when we blink), we do not see the world as separate images linked in selected patterns. Thus editing may emulate ordinary ways of seeing or transcend them. The power and art of film editing lie in the ways in which the hundreds or thousands of discrete images that make up a film can be shaped to make sense or to have an emotional or a visceral impact.
KEY OBJECTIVES
▪ Understand the artistic and technological evolution of editing. ▪ Examine the ways editing constructs different spatial and temporal relationships among images. ▪ Detail the dominant style of continuity editing. ▪ Identify the ways in which graphic or rhythmic patterns are created by editing. ▪ Discuss the ways editing organizes images as meaningful scenes and sequences. ▪ Summarize how editing strategies engage filmic traditions of continuity or disjuncture.
Many film theorists and professionals consider editing to be the most unique dimension of the film experience. This chapter will explore in depth how film connects separate images to create or reflect key patterns through which viewers see and think about the world.
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A Short History of Film Editing Long before the development of film technology, different images were linked sequentially to tell stories. Ancient Assyrian reliefs show the different phases of a lion hunt, while the 230-foot-long Bayeux tapestry chronicles the 1066 Norman conquest of England in invaluable historical detail. In the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, comic strips and manga have continued this tradition in graphic art: each panel presents a moment of action in the story [Figures 4.1a–4.1c]. In cinema, a storyboard sketches out each shot of a film in similar fashion.
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4.1a–4.1c Storyboard: telling stories through images. Ancient Assyrian reliefs (a), the eleventh-century Bayeux tapestry (b), and comics (c) resemble storyboards in cinema. 4.1a: Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis; 4.1b: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY; 4.1c: François PERRI/REA/Redux
Juxtaposed images have been used symbolically, sensationally, and educationally as well as to tell stories. Religious triptychs convey spiritual ideas via three connected images. The magic lantern was used by showmen to project successive images and create illusions of the supernatural. By the late nineteenth century, illustrated lectures using photographic slides became popular. Such practices have influenced film editing’s evolution into its modern form.
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1895–1918: Early Cinema and the Emergence of Editing Films quickly evolved from showing characters or objects moving within a single image to connecting different images. Magician and early filmmaker Georges Méliès at first used stop-motion photography and, later, editing to create delightful tricks, like the rocket striking the moon in Trip to the Moon (1902) [Figures 4.2a and 4.2b]. While basic editing techniques were introduced by other filmmakers, Edwin S. Porter, a prolific employee of Thomas Edison, synthesized these techniques in the service of storytelling in Life of an American Fireman (1903) and other early films. One of the most important films in the historical development of cinema, Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) tells its story in fourteen separate shots, including a famous final shot of a bandit shooting his gun directly into the camera [Figure 4.3]. By 1906, the period now known as “early cinema” gave way to cinema dominated by narrative, a transition facilitated by more codified practices of editing.
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4.2a and 4.2b Trip to the Moon (1902). In a famous shock cut in his ambitious early science fiction film, Georges Méliès linked the launch of the rocket to its impact on the face of the moon.
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4.3 The Great Train Robbery (1903). Edwin S. Porter is credited with advancing the narrative language of editing in this and other early films. The film’s last cut is used to enhance the shock effect of the final image rather than to complete the narrative.
D. W. Griffith, who began making films in 1908, is a towering figure in the development of the classical Hollywood editing style. Griffith is closely associated with the use of crosscutting, or parallel editing, alternating between two or more strands of simultaneous action, a technique that he used in the rescue sequences that conclude dozens of his films. In The Lonely Villa (1909), shots of female family members isolated in a house alternate with shots of villains trying to break in and then with shots of the father rushing to rescue his family. The infamous climax of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) uses crosscutting to portray the film’s white characters as victims of Reconstruction and the Ku Klux Klan as heroes. Griffith cuts from black soldiers breaking into a white family’s isolated cottage, to a mixed-race politician threatening a white woman with rape, to the Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue of both [Figures 4.4a–4.4c]. The controversial merging of technique and ideology exemplified in Griffith’s craft is a strong demonstration of the power of editing. After the success of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, feature filmmaking became the norm, and Hollywood developed the classical editing style that remains the basis for many films today.
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4.4a–4.4c The Birth of a Nation (1915). In this sequence of images, Griffith’s white supremacist views are supported by the use of parallel editing, which encourages the viewer to root for the Ku Klux Klan to arrive in time.
1919–1929: Soviet Montage Within a decade after The Birth of a Nation, and in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s first film, Strike (1925), influenced the craft of editing in a different, although equally dramatic fashion. Eisenstein’s films and writings center on the concept of montage, editing that maximizes the effect of the juxtaposition of disparate shots. For example, to depict the mass shooting of workers in Strike, Eisenstein interspersed, or intercut, long shots of gunfire and of the fleeing and falling crowd with gruesome close-ups of a bull being butchered in a slaughterhouse [Figures 4.5a and 4.5b]. This juxtaposition is an example of what Eisenstein called intellectual montage, through which an independent idea is formed in the mind of the viewer based on the collision of different shots.
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4.5a and 4.5b Strike (1925). The workers’ massacre is compared to the slaughter of a bull through the use of intellectual montage.
Eisenstein and filmmakers Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov advanced montage (they used the French word for editing) as the key component of modernist, politically engaged filmmaking in the Soviet Union of the 1920s. One of the most fascinating self-reflexive sequences in film history is the editing sequence in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which features the film’s own editor, Elizaveta Svilova, cutting film that the cameraman has been shown gathering. Images shown on the strips of film seem to freeze before our eyes, only to be reanimated to startling effect. Other avant-garde movements in the 1920s and thereafter continued to explore the more abstract and dynamic properties of editing employed by the Soviets.
1930–1959: Continuity Editing in the Hollywood Studio Era With the full development of the Hollywood studio system, the movies refined the storytelling style known as continuity editing, which gives the viewer the impression that the action unfolds with spatiotemporal consistency. The introduction of synchronous sound posed new challenges, but by the early 1930s editors integrated picture and sound editing into the studio style.
Beginning in the 1940s, cinematic realism achieved new emphasis as one of the primary aesthetic principles in film editing. The influence of Italian neorealism, which used fewer cuts to capture the integrity of stories of ordinary people and actual locations, was evident in other new wave cinemas and even extended to classical
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Hollywood. For example, Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950) emphasized imagistic depth and longer takes, cutting less frequently between images [Figure 4.6]. Incorporating these variations, the continuity editing style would remain dominant at least until the decline at the end of the 1950s of the studio system, whose stable personnel, business models, and genre forms lent consistency to its products and techniques. In many ways, its principles still govern storytelling in film and television.
4.6 In a Lonely Place (1950). Postwar cinema tended to explore the depth of images, cutting less frequently between them to achieve a heightened realism.
1960–1989: Modern Editing Styles Political and artistic changes starting in the 1960s affected almost every dimension of film form, and editing was no exception. Both in the United States and abroad, alternative editing styles emerged that aimed to fracture classical editing’s illusion of realism. Anticipated to some extent by Soviet montage, these new more disjunctive styles reflected the feeling of disconnection of the modern world. Editing visibly disrupted continuity by creating ruptures in the story, radically condensing or expanding time, or confusing the relationships among past, present, and future.
The French New Wave produced some of the first and most dramatic examples of modern styles of editing. Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) innovated the use of jump cuts, edits that intentionally create gaps in the action [Figures 4.7a and 4.7b]. In the 1960s and 1970s, American filmmakers like Arthur Penn and Francis Ford Coppola incorporated such styles within classical genres to contribute to the New Hollywood aesthetic. In
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the 1980s, the fast-paced editing style used in commercials and music videos began to appear in mainstream films. Two popular and successful films, both made by former directors of television commercials, are indicative of this period: Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance (1983), about a Pittsburgh woman who doubles as a welder and exotic dancer, and Tony Scott’s Top Gun (1986), about fighter pilots competing in flight school. Both combine an upbeat pop soundtrack with flashy, rapid editing to suggest the seductive energy of their protagonists’ worlds [Figures 4.8a and 4.8b].
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4.7a and 4.7b Breathless (1960). Obvious jump cuts between or in the middle of shots are a visual vehicle for conveying the distractions and disjunctions in a petty criminal’s life. Michel’s voiceover continues as we see Patricia from different angles.
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4.8a and 4.8b Flashdance (1983). Continuous music and discontinuous cutting characteristic of 1980s music videos energize this film about a young working-class woman who aspires to be a dancer.
1990s–Present: Editing in the Digital Age Nonlinear digital editing ushered in perhaps the most significant changes in the history of film editing. Whereas for decades editors cut actual film footage by hand on a Moviola or flatbed editing table, or in linear sequence on tape, in the 1990s editors began to use computer-based nonlinear digital editing systems. In nonlinear editing, film footage is stored as digital information on high-capacity computer hard drives. Individual takes can be organized easily and accessed instantaneously, sound-editing options can be explored simultaneously with picture editing, and optical effects such as dissolves and fades can be immediately visualized on the computer rather than added much later in the printing process. Feature films were soon edited with nonlinear computer- based systems regardless of whether they were shot on 35mm film or digital video.
The more rapid pace of contemporary films seems to correlate with digital editing. Average shot length has declined significantly, with shots in Quantum of Solace (2008) averaging around two seconds [Figure 4.9], compared with the ten-second shots measured by scholars in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). However, digital filmmaking can also embrace the opposite aesthetic effect. On film, the length of a single take was limited by how much stock the camera could hold; on video, the duration of a shot is virtually limitless. Filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) is a virtuoso feature-length film with no cuts at all [Figure 4.10].
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4.9 Quantum of Solace (2008). This entry in the James Bond franchise utilizes extremely quick cutting, especially in its action sequences.
4.10 Russian Ark (2002). Wandering through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and seeming to pass through historical eras, the digital camera is the vehicle for this film’s meditation on art, politics, and Russian history, conveyed as a single ninety-six-minute shot.
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The Elements of Editing Film editing is the process through which different images or shots are linked together sequentially. A shot is a continuous image, regardless of the camera movement or changes in focus it may record. Editing can produce meaning by combining shots in an infinite number of ways. One shot is selected and joined to
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other shots by the editor to guide viewers’ perceptions. For example, the opening sequence of Crooklyn (1994) depicts the Brooklyn block where the film is set by editing together a high-angle moving crane shot that provides an overview of the neighborhood and its inhabitants and a variety of shots of people and their activities [Figures 4.11a–4.11c].
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4.11a–4.11c Crooklyn (1994). The credits sequence of Spike Lee’s film juxtaposes a moving crane shot of a Brooklyn block with a series of short takes of daily activities to convey a sense of a tight-knit community.
If a shot presents mise-en-scène from a single perspective, film editing conveys multiple perspectives by linking shots in various relationships. Some of these relationships mimic the way an individual looks at the world—for example, a shot of someone looking off in the distance linked to an extreme long shot of an airplane
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in the sky. But often these relationships exceed everyday perception, as in the shot of birds flying over Bodega Bay seen from above in The Birds (1963), an inhuman perspective that, juxtaposed with shots on street level, adds to the film’s uncanny effect. Edited images may leap from one location to another or one time to another and may show different perspectives on the same event. Editing is one of the most significant developments in the syntax of cinema because it allows for a departure from both the limited perspective and the continuous duration of a shot.
The Cut and Other Transitions The earliest films consisted of a single shot, which could run only as long as the reel of film in the camera lasted. In his early trick films, pioneer Georges Méliès manipulated this limitation by stopping the camera, rearranging the mise-en-scène, and resuming filming to make objects and people seem to disappear or transform. It was a short step to achieving such juxtapositions by physically cutting the film. In Méliès’s 1903 film Living Playing Cards, a magician, played by Méliès himself, seems to make his props come alive [Figures 4.12a and 4.12b].
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4.12a and 4.12b Living Playing Cards (1903). Pioneer George Méliès anticipated later editing techniques with magical transformations.
Even when they are intended to seem like magic, transitions between film shots, along with the technical labor of editing, are often obscured. Rarely can viewers describe or enumerate the edits that make a particular film sequence memorable. Learning to watch for this basic element of film language gives the viewer insight into the art of the film.
The foundation for film editing is the cut — that is, the break in the image that marks the physical connection between two shots from two different pieces of film. A single shot can depict a woman looking at a ship at sea by showing a close-up of her face and then panning to the right, following her glance to reveal the distant ship she is watching. A cut, on the other hand, renders this action in two shots, with the first showing the woman’s face and the second showing the ship. While the facts of the situation remain the same, the single-shot pan and the cut joining two shots create different experiences of the scenario. The first might emphasize the distance that separates the woman from the object of her vision. The second might create a sense of immediacy and intimacy that transcends the distance. In a key scene from The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), we first see several characters occupying different spaces of the same shot [Figure 4.13a]. After the character on the right shifts his attention to the character in the background, we are presented with a cut isolating them [Figures 4.13b and 4.13c]. As these examples illustrate, the use of a cut usually follows a particular logic, in this case emphasizing the significance of the character’s gaze. The less frequently used shock cut juxtaposes two images
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whose dramatic difference creates a jarring effect, often accompanied by a jolt on the soundtrack, as in the shower murder sequence in Psycho (1960), emulated in countless subsequent horror films. Later in this chapter we will investigate additional ways that editing may create logical or unexpected links among different images.
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VIEWING CUE Count the shots in the scene from Chinatown (1974) available online. What is the motivation behind each cut? What overall pattern do these cuts create?
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4.13a–4.13c The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Director William Wyler uses composition in depth and editing to bring out developing tensions in the friendship of three returning veterans. In the first shot, (a) our attention is drawn to the figures in the foreground. When Al turns (b) to watch Fred make a difficult phone call in the background of the shot, the film cuts to a second shot (c) that emphasizes the relationship between these two figures.
Edits can be embellished in ways that guide our experience and understanding of the transition. For example, fade-outs gradually darken and make one image disappear, while fade-ins do the opposite. Alfred Hitchcock fades to black to mark the passing of time throughout Rear Window (1954). A dissolve briefly superimposes one shot over the next, which takes its place: one image fades out as another image fades in [Figure 4.14]. In studio-era Hollywood films, these devices were used to indicate a more definite spatial or temporal break than do straight cuts, and they often mark pauses between narrative sequences or larger segments of a film. A dissolve can take us from one part of town to another, while a fade-out, a more visible break, can indicate that the action is resuming the next day. The iris, discussed in Chapter 3 (see p. 108), masks the corners of the frame with a black, usually circular form [Figure 4.15], while wipes join two images by moving a vertical, horizontal,
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or sometimes diagonal line across one image to replace it with a second image that follows the line across the frame [Figure 4.16]. Wipes and irises are most often found in silent and early sound films.
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4.14 The Scarlet Empress (1934). Extended dissolves were a favorite device in director Josef von Sternberg’s very stylized filmmaking. The layering of a conversation and the approach of a carriage appear almost as an abstract pattern.
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4.15 Broken Blossoms (1919). The iris was often used in films by D. W. Griffith to highlight objects or faces. Here it focuses our attention and emphasizes the vulnerability of Lillian Gish’s character.
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VIEWING CUE Look for examples of transitional devices besides cuts. What spatial, temporal, or conceptual relationship is being set up between scenes joined by a fade, a dissolve, an iris, or a wipe?
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4.16 Desert Hearts (1985). In a film set in the 1950s, a wipe creates a nostalgic reference to earlier editing techniques, but it may also suggest a certain kind of transience in the world of the characters.
Although editing can generate an infinite number of combinations of images, within the Hollywood storytelling tradition rules have developed to limit those possibilities, as we will see. Other film traditions, most notably those of avant-garde and experimental cinema (see Chapter 8), can be characterized by their degree of interest in exploiting the range of editing possibilities as a primary formal property of film.
When watching movies, we manage to make sense of a series of discontinuous, linked images, understanding them according to conventional ways of interpreting space, time, story, and image patterns. We understand the action sequences in Fast & Furious 6 (2013) despite the improbable feats performed by the characters. Likewise, we make connections among the three separate narratives from three separate periods in The Hours (2002). Editing patterns also anticipate and structure narrative organizations. The next three sections will explore the spatial and temporal relationships established by editing and introduce the rules of the Hollywood continuity editing system. Subsequent discussion will examine patterns of editing images based on graphic, movement, and rhythmic connections in order to show how different techniques provide very different experiences.
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Continuity Style In both narrative and non-narrative films, editing is a crucial strategy for ordering space and time. Two or more images can be linked to imply spatial and temporal relations to the viewer. Verisimilitude (literally, “the quality of having the appearance of truth”) allows readers or viewers to accept as plausible a constructed world, its events, its characters, and their actions. In cinematic storytelling, clear, consistent spatial and temporal patterns greatly enhance verisimilitude, and, along with conventions of dialogue, mise-en-scène, cinematography, and sound, form part of Hollywood’s overall continuity style. In the commercial U.S. film industry, spatial and temporal continuity are greatly enhanced through conventions of editing. Because its constructions of space and time are so codified and widely used, we will devote special consideration to this style.
The basic principle of continuity editing is that each shot has a continuous relationship to the next shot. Continuity editing is a system that uses cuts and other transitions to establish verisimilitude and to tell stories efficiently, requiring minimal mental effort on the part of viewers. Two particular goals constitute the heart of this style: constructing an imaginary space in which the action will develop, and approximating the experience of real time by following human actions.
In continuity editing, after the initial view of a scene, subsequent shots typically follow the logic of spatial continuity. If a character appears at the left of the screen looking toward the right in the establishing shot, it is likely that he or she will be shown looking in the same direction in the medium shot that follows. Movements that carry across cuts will also adhere to a consistent screen direction. A character exiting the right of a frame will probably enter a new space
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VIEWING CUE Estimate the number of shots in a scene from a narrative film, then watch the scene, clapping with each cut. Were more shots used than you had imagined?
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from the left. Similarly, a chase sequence covering great distances is likely to provide directional cues. Continuity editing has developed and deployed
these patterns so consistently that it has become the dominant method of treating dramatic material, with its own set of rules that narrative filmmakers learn early. Minimizing the perception of breaks between shots, it is often called invisible editing. The argument between the lovers in The Notebook (2004) uses numerous invisible cuts to shift focus from character to character and to underscore the scene’s emotional resonance as they move within the clearly delineated space between the front porch and a parked car.
Spatial patterns are frequently introduced through the use of an establishing shot, generally an initial long shot that establishes the setting and orients the viewer in space to a clear view of the action. A scene in a western, for example, might begin with an extreme long shot of wide-open space and then cut in to a shot that shows a stagecoach or saloon, followed by other, tighter shots introducing the characters and action.
A conversation is usually established with a relatively close shot of both characters, also known as a two- shot, in a recognizable spatial orientation and context. Then the camera alternates between the speaking characters, often using over-the-shoulder shots. The editing may proceed back and forth, with periodic returns to the initial view. Such reestablishing shots restore a seemingly objective view, making the action perfectly clear to the viewers. Early in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946), when detective Philip Marlowe (played by Humphrey Bogart) is hired by General Sternwood, the scene opens with an establishing shot, and their conversation follows this pattern [Figures 4.17a–4.17h]. Although many shots are edited together in the course of the conversation, the transitions remain largely invisible because the angle from which each character is filmed remains consistent and the dialogue continues over the cuts. Such editing practices are ubiquitous; we have learned to expect the coordination of conversations with medium close-ups of characters speaking and listening, just as we expect that these figures will be situated in a realistic space.
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4.17a–4.17h The Big Sleep (1946). The simple interview, which provides a great deal of plot information, is broken down by many imperceptible cuts. After an initial establishing shot, alternating shots of the two characters in conversation cut in closer and closer and eventually focus our attention on the protagonist’s face. Finally the space is reestablished at the end of the interview.
Another device that is used in continuity editing is the insert, a brief shot such as a close-up of a hand slipping something into a pocket or a subtle smile that other characters do not see. The use of inserts helps overcome viewers’ spatial separation from the action, pointing out details significant to the plot — for example, showing us a nest of dangerous tracker-jackers [Figure 4.18], or making a comparison that transcends the characters’ perpectives [Figure 4.19].
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4.18 The Hunger Games (2012). An insert shows the nest of venomous tracker-jackers that Katniss aims to set loose on her rivals.
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4.19 Fury (1936). Fritz Lang dissolves from one shot of women chatting to another of chickens clucking to illustrate the emptiness of gossip in a rare example of a nondiegetic insert in a classical film.
Continuity editing minimizes disruptive effects and maximizes the viewer’s ability to follow the action through practices that give a sense of spatial and temporal consistency. Some of these practices have become so codified they are viewed as rules.
180-Degree Rule The 180-degree rule is the primary rule of continuity editing and one that many films and television shows consider sacrosanct. The diagrams in Figure 4.20 (p. 148) illustrate the 180-degree rule in the scene from The Big Sleep discussed earlier. Marlowe and the general are filmed as if the space were bisected by an imaginary line known as the axis of action. All of the shots illustrated by the still images from The Big Sleep in Figures 4.17a–4.17h were taken from one side of the axis. In general, any shot taken from the same side of the axis of action will ensure that the relative positions of people and other elements of mise-en-scène, as well as the directions of gazes and movements, will remain consistent. If the camera were to cross into the 180-degree field on the other side of the line (represented by the shaded area in Figure 4.20, Diagram A), the characters’ onscreen positions would be reversed. During the unfolding of a scene, a new axis of action may be established by figure or camera movement. Directors may break the 180-degree rule and cross the line, either because they want to signify chaotic action or because conventional spatial continuity is not their primary aim.
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Diagram A
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Diagram B
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4.20 The Big Sleep (1946). Diagram A illustrates the 180-degree rule by depicting the imaginary axis of action, bisecting the conversation scene from The Big Sleep. All shots in Diagram B, which illustrates the editing of the conversation with reference to Figures 4.17b–4.17g on page 146, were taken from the white portion of Diagram A. Each character is depicted in tighter framings from a consistent camera angle. If the camera were to cross over to the shaded portion, the position of the characters onscreen would be reversed.
30-Degree Rule The 30-degree rule illustrates the extent to which continuity editing attempts to preserve spatial unity. This rule specifies that one shot must be followed by another shot taken from a position greater than 30 degrees from that of the first. In Winter’s Bone (2010), Ree shows her younger siblings how to skin a squirrel: an over-the- shoulder shot that emulates her point of view is followed by a medium shot in profile taken at a right angle to the action. The rule aims to emphasize the motivation for the cut by giving a substantially different view of the action. If a shot of the same subject is taken within 30 degrees of the previous shot, it will appear to jump in position onscreen.
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VIEWING CUE Does the film you watched most recently in class follow continuity patterns, such as the 180-degree rule? Locate an example and identify other ways that spatial continuity is maintained.
Shot/Reverse Shot One of the most common spatial practices within continuity editing, and a regular application of the 180-degree rule, is the shot/reverse-shot pattern, in which a shot of one character looking offscreen in one direction is followed by one of a second character looking back. The effect is that the characters seem to be looking at each other. In the example from The Big Sleep, this pattern begins with a shot of Philip Marlowe taken from an angle at one end of the axis of action and continues with a shot of the general from the “reverse” angle at the other end of the axis, and proceeds back and forth. As we can see in Figure 4.20, Diagram B, the camera distance changes from medium shot to close-up as the scene unfolds, but the angle on each character in the shot/reverse-shot pattern does not. The use of over-the-shoulder shots in shot/reverse-shot sequences increases the perception of viewer participation in a conversation. As Clarice Starling confronts the serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the 180-degree change in angle — known as cutting on the line — and symmetrical composition in the shot/reverse shot sequence shows them to be equally matched adversaries, if not mirror images of each other [Figures 4.21a and 4.21b].
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4.21a and 4.21b The Silence of the Lambs (1991). A shot of Clarice (played by Jodie Foster) followed by a reverse shot of her adversary Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins).
Eyeline Match Shot/reverse shot sequences use characters’ gazes to establish the continuous space of the conversation. When a character looks offscreen and the next shot appears to show at what or whom he or she is looking, it is called an eyeline match [Figures 4.22a and 4.22b]. If a character looks toward the left, the screen position of the character or object in the next shot will likely appear to match the gaze. Eyelines give the illusion of continuous offscreen space into which characters could move beyond the left and right edges of the frame.
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4.22a and 4.22b Oldboy (2003). In the suspenseful opening moments of this violent revenge film, an eyeline match directs our gaze to the protagonist, whose identity is not yet revealed in the shot that follows.
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Match on Action To match images through movement means that the direction and pace of actions, gestures, and other movements are linked with corresponding or contrasting movements in one or more other shots. Leni Riefenstahl’s extraordinary editing of athletes in motion in her documentary Olympia (1938) has become a model for sports montages [Figures 4.23a and 4.23b]. A common version of this pattern is the continuity editing device called a match on action, whereby the direction of an action is picked up when editing to a shot depicting the continuation of that action, such as matching the movement of a stone tossed in the air to the flight of that stone as it hits a window. Often a match on action obscures the cut itself, such as when the cut occurs just as a character opens a door; in the next shot, we see the next room as the character shuts the door from the other side.
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4.23a and 4.23b Olympia (1938). The seemingly superhuman mobility of Olympic divers is enhanced by Leni Riefenstahl’s editing.
Cutting on action, or editing during an onscreen movement, also quickens a scene or film’s pace. Action sequences such as fights and chases exploit these possibilities, both relying on the spatial consistency of continuity editing to convey what’s happening, and using variation to increase the surprise and excitement [Figures 4.24a and 4.24b].
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4.24a and 4.24b Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). A swordfight’s tension is increased through cutting on movement and matching on action.
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Graphic Match Formal patterns, shapes, masses, colors, lines, and lighting patterns within images can link or define a series of shots according to graphic qualities [Figures 4.25a and 4.25b]. This is most easily envisioned in abstract forms: one pattern of images may develop according to diminishing sizes, beginning with large shapes and proceeding through increasingly smaller shapes; another pattern may alternate the graphics of lighting, switching between brightly lit shots and dark, shadowy
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shots; yet another pattern might make use of lines within the frame by assembling different shots whose horizontal and vertical lines create specific visual effects. Many experimental films highlight just this level of abstraction in the editing. A sequence of Ballet mécanique (see Chapter 8) cuts rapidly between circles and triangles. Commercials capitalize on graphic qualities to convey their message visually.
While it may not be their organizing principle, narrative films edit according to graphic qualities as well. This can have an aesthetic effect — emphasizing sharp angles or soothing colors. Coherence in shape and scale often serves a specific narrative purpose, as in the continuity editing device called a graphic match, in which a dominant shape or line in one shot provides a visual transition to a similar shape or line in the next shot. One of the most famous examples of a graphic match links a bone tossed in the air to the shape of a spaceship in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) [Figures 4.26a and 4.26b].
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4.25a and 4.25b The Namesake (2006). A family drama set on two continents uses graphic elements to connect India and the United States.
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4.26a and 4.26b 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Centuries are elided in a graphic match, which functions at the same time as a match on action.
Point-of-View Shots Many of Alfred Hitchcock’s most suspenseful scenes are edited to highlight the drama of looking. Often a character is shown looking, and the next shot shows the character’s optical point of view, as if the camera (and hence the viewer) were seeing with the eyes of the character. Such point-of-view shots are often followed by a third shot in which the character is again shown looking, which reclaims the previous shot as his or her literal perspective. In a tense scene from The Birds in which the heroine, Melanie, sits on a bench outside a school as threatening crows gather on the playground behind her, Hitchcock uses both eyeline matches and point-of-view sequences. A bird flying high overhead catches her attention [Figure 4.27a]. When she turns her head to follow its flight, the shots are matched by her eyeline [Figure 4.27b]. Next comes a point-of-view sequence through which suspense is prolonged by showing Melanie’s reaction before the sinister sight of congregating birds [Figures 4.27c and 4.27d]. The editing of this scene serves both to construct a realistic space and to increase our identification with Melanie by focusing solely on the act of looking.
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4.27a–4.27d The Birds (1963). In (a) and (b) a low-angle shot of a flying bird is matched to Melanie’s eyeline. In (c) and (d) we see Melanie’s shocked face and then a point-of-view shot of the gathering birds.
Elsewhere in the film, the point of view of Melanie’s romantic interest, Mitch, is conveyed by partially masking the frame as if we were looking along with him through his binoculars. Similarly, when a character
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wakes from a knock on the head, we may see a blurry image, foregrounding the subjective effect of the point- of-view construction.
Reaction Shots These components of the continuity system — shot/reverse-shot patterns, eyeline matches, and point-of-view shots — construct space around the characters’ behavior. Thus editing highlights human agency. A reaction shot, which depicts a character’s response to something that viewers have just been shown [Figure 4.28] emphasizes human perspective in a way that can be seen as standing in for the audience’s own response. The cut back to the character “claims” the view of the previous shot as subjective. A scene from Clueless (1995) in which the protagonist, Cher, and her friends, Dionne and Tai, converse in a coffee-shop booth shows a typical conversation edited for continuity. The scene begins with a tracking establishing shot that depicts the overall environment [Figure 4.29a]. Then the scene cuts back and forth across the booth in a shot/reverse-shot pattern using eyeline matches [Figures 4.29b–d]. Cher sits alone and has the majority of the scene’s shots, indicating that she is the focal point of our identification. In this way, continuity editing constructs spatial relationships to create a plausible and human-centered world onscreen.
4.28 The Way We Were (1973). This reaction shot of Barbra Streisand’s face registers her character’s response to catching sight of her former lover.
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4.29a–4.29d Clueless (1995). After an establishing shot (a), this conversation alternates shots of the heroine Cher’s friends (b) and (d) with a reverse shot of Cher (c), maintaining spatial continuity.
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Art Cinema Editing Continuity editing strives for an overall effect of coherent space; however, many films, especially art films, use editing to construct less predictable spatial relations. For example, in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), a series of close-ups against a white background conveys the psychological intensity of Joan testifying before the inquisitors while never giving an overview of the space. The use of close-ups elevates the spiritual subject matter over the worldly space of her surroundings that establishing shots and eyeline matches would depict [Figures 4.30a–4.30c]. Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu often uses graphic elements to provide continuity across cuts. In Early Summer (1951), rather than editing to show optical point of view, he sets up his camera near the ground to balance his compositions around characters sitting on the floor. These directors provide significant challenges to the “rules” of Hollywood editing.
In postwar cinemas, directors explored characters’ restlessness through editing that defied continuity. In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film L’Avventura (1960), cuts join spaces that are not necessarily contiguous. The landscapes the characters move through express their psychological state of alienation in a way that a realistic use of space would not. Contemporary independent films may incorporate editing styles innovated in art cinema to convey a character’s state of mind or a state of being that departs from the ordinary. In Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), the editing contributes to a sense of enchantment and loss in a close-knit bayou community flooded during a storm [Figures 4.31a and 4.31.b]. We will discuss such alternatives in greater detail later in the chapter (see “Disjunctive Editing,”).
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4.30a–4.30c The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). The juxtaposition of the inquisitors’ faces with that of Renée Falconetti as Joan ignores spatial continuity but is freighted with power and significance.
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4.31a and 4.31b Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). Cutting between two views of the protagonist Hushpuppy conveys her magical, dreamlike experience.
Editing and Temporality Editing is one of the chief ways that temporality is manipulated in narrative film. A two-hour film may condense centuries in a story. Less frequently, it may expand story time, as in a prolonged rescue or a dream sequence. It is helpful to keep distinct the concepts of plot time — what is actually shown; story time, the sequence of events inferred; and screen time, the time of watching the film. Film is a time-based medium, and editing strongly affects our experience of the temporal unfolding.
Flashbacks and Flashforwards Through the power to manipulate chronology — the order according to which shots or scenes convey the temporal sequence of the story’s events — editing organizes narrative time. Sequences of shots or scenes may describe the linear movement of time forward as one event follows another in temporal order, or they may serve as pieces of a puzzle for the viewer to solve.
Editing may juxtapose events out of their temporal order in the story. Within the continuity system, such nonlinear constructions are introduced with strict cues about narrative motivation. A flashback follows an image of the present with one from the past; it may be introduced with a dissolve conveying the character’s memory or with a voiceover in which the character narrates the past. In one sense, Citizen Kane (1941) uses a linear structure, organizing itself around a series of interviews and investigations conducted by a reporter
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looking for an angle on a great man’s death. However, the story of Kane’s life is provided in a series of lengthy flashbacks that make the film’s chronology complex. Certain events are narrated more than once, a manipulation of narrative frequency. In more recent films, such temporal shifts may not be signaled by external cues. Blue Jasmine (2013) shifts fluidly between the down-on-her-luck heroine’s present existence and scenes of her extravagant lifestyle before her marriage ended [Figure 4.32]. Yet even in this case, the heroine’s mental state serves as a motivation for the temporal play; the audience is given cues to follow the narrative’s complexity.
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4.32 Blue Jasmine (2013). Woody Allen’s film cuts between the lead character’s present and past without explicit cues, but after a few flashbacks the time periods become easy to locate based on settings and other characters.
The less common flashforward connects an image of the present with one or more future images. Because it involves “seeing” the future, the technique is thus usually reserved for works that intentionally challenge our perceptions: movies focused on psychology or science fiction. In Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), for example, a couple is tormented by the recent death of their daughter; haunting images of a small figure in a red rain slicker prove to be flashforwards to a revelatory encounter [Figure 4.33]. In Memento (2000), the chronology of scenes is completely reversed, but the maintenance of continuity within each scene allows us to follow the film.
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4.33 Don’t Look Now (1973). Images of a small figure in red prove to be flashforwards to a horrifying encounter with the past.
Descriptive and Temporally Ambiguous Sequences Certain edited sequences cannot be located precisely in time. The purpose of such a sequence is often descriptive, such as a series of shots identifying the setting of a film. In An American in Paris (1951), as one character describes the heroine to another, we see a series of shots depicting her different qualities (with different outfits to match). These little vignettes are descriptive; they do not follow a linear or other temporal sequence. Music videos also defy chronology in favor of associative editing patterns.
In art films and increasingly in commercial narrative films, the cinema’s ambiguous temporality may be of primary concern. Thus editing may defy realism in favor of psychological constructions of time. Writer Marguerite Duras and director Alain Resnais make time the subject of their film Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), which constantly relates the present-day story, set in Japan, to a character’s past. An image of her lover’s hand sparks the female protagonist’s memory of being a teenager in France during World War II, and the flashback begins with a matching image of another hand. But temporality is such an important dimension of film narration that even more traditional narratives explore the relationship between the order of events onscreen and those of the story. Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999) ingeniously inserts shots of the activities of the protagonist, played by Terence Stamp, into the narrative but out of sequence, keeping us guessing about temporal relations [Figures 4.34a and 4.34b]. Inception (2010) complicates our
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sense of time by making us question whether entire sequences are dreams or events in the lives of the characters.
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4.34a and 4.34b The Limey (1999). Different shots of the protagonist (Terence Stamp) appear in the film without a clear sense of when they occurred.
Duration Narrative duration refers to the length of time used to present an event or action in a plot. This may not conform to the length of time that passes in the story. Editing is one of the most useful techniques for manipulating narrative duration; it can contract or expand story time. Although actions may seem to flow in a continuous fashion, editing allows for significant temporal abridgement, or ellipsis. Cutting strategies both within scenes and from scene to scene attempt to cover such ellipses. Grabbing a coat, exiting the front door, and turning the key in the ignition might serve to indicate a journey from one locale to the next. As we have seen, transitional devices such as dissolves and fades also manipulate the duration of narration. Without the acceptance of such conventions, time would be experienced in a disorienting fashion.
A specific continuity editing device used to condense time is the cutaway: the film interrupts an action to “cut away” to another image or action — for example, a man trapped inside a burning building — before returning to the first shot or scene at a point further along in time. We are so accustomed to such handling of the duration of depicted events that a scene in real time, such as the single shot of the central character’s taking a bath in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), seems unnaturally long [Figure 4.35].
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4.35 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). This long take records the protagonist’s bath in real time; the film’s pacing emulates the everyday routine of the housewife.
Less frequent than the condensation of time, the extension of time through overlapping editing occurs when the same action is depicted across several cuts. In Battleship Potemkin (1925), a sailor, frustrated with the conditions aboard ship, is shown repeatedly smashing a plate he is washing. Plot time in this scene is longer than that of the action. The effect is to emphasize this small moment’s decisive importance in a heroic narrative of the sailors’ mutiny.
Overlapping editing is a violation in a continuity system, and while it can be used for emphasis or for foreshadowing, it often appears strange or gimmicky. In a masterfully choreographed fight scene in John Woo’s Hard Boiled (1992), shots of the hero’s balletic leap are overlapped [Figures 4.36a and 4.36b]. Such instances of prolonging narrative duration emphasize editing’s rhythm, pulse, and pattern over story event.
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(a)
(b)
4.36a and 4.36b Hard Boiled (1992). The hero shoots up a restaurant without himself taking a hit. The fact that his leaps are prolonged through overlapping editing makes the scene even more spectacular.
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Pace. The relative length of individual shots determines the pace of a film’s editing. The fast pace of a spy movie like The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) contrasts with the more relaxed pace of a comedy like School of Rock (2003). Chase scenes are likely to be cut more quickly than conversations. Pace may vary historically, culturally, and stylistically. There are no strict rules of pacing, although some editors may be very exact in measuring shot length to achieve a desired rhythm.
Observers have noted that the average shot length (ASL) of narrative films has decreased over the past decades and correlate these measures to industry and narrative patterns as well as to processes of human perception. Rapid cutting of films whose average shot length may be less than two seconds has been enabled by digital technologies and driven by the prevalence of blockbuster action films.
A different way of controlling pace through editing is the use of long takes, or shots of relatively long duration. Classical film theorist André Bazin is famous for his advocacy of the long take in such post–World War II films as William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives. Bazin especially championed the sequence shot, in which an entire scene plays out in one take, arguing that this type of filmmaking more closely approximates human perception and is thus more realistic than editing. Films cut with a preponderance of long takes use mise-en-scène — including blocking and acting — and camera movement instead of editing to focus viewers’ attention.
Two different tests of Bazin’s theories can be seen in contemporary uses of the long take. Shots that are sustained for what can seem an inordinate amount of time are prevalent in the styles of directors of contemporary international art films, prompting researchers to coin the term slow cinema for these works. Flowers of Shanghai (1998), by Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, unfolds with only forty shots. The long takes evoke the city’s past and vanished way of life. Minimal narrative incident, a contemplative or neutral camera, and a patient spectator are required of such films, in which editing’s deliberate pace is one of the most defining aesthetic criteria.
Long takes, and especially sequence shots, are used by Quentin Tarantino and other contemporary directors not to promote Bazin’s realism but to craft virtuoso displays of the kinetic possibilities of cinema. The spectacular unbroken shots in films like Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) keep pace with the film’s otherwise rapid editing by the impressive choreography of characters, sets, and camera movement.
Most films use shot length to create a rhythm that relates to the particular aims of the film. One of the most influential examples of fast cutting, the infamous shower murder sequence from Hitchcock’s Psycho, uses seventy camera setups for forty-five seconds of footage, with the many cuts launching a parallel attack on viewers’ senses. In contrast, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) produces its uncanny mood in part through lengthy tracking shots. In these examples, pace is specific to the film and also a distinctive element of the director’s style.
Rhythm. The early French avant-garde filmmaker Germaine Dulac defined film as “a visual symphony made of rhythmic images.” Rhythm describes the organization of the pace of editing according to different tempos determined by how quickly cuts
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are made. Like the tempos that describe the rhythmic organization of music, editing in this fashion may link a rapid succession of quick shots, a series of slowly paced long takes, or shots of varying length to modulate the time between cuts. Sofia Coppola often includes a set piece cut to a popular song in her films [Figures 4.37a and 4.37b]; the rhythm of the editing follows the music. Since rhythm is a fundamental property of editing, it is often combined with continuity aims or graphic patterns.
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4.37a and 4.37b The Bling Ring (2013). A teenage gang’s raid of a celebrity’s closet is propelled by a fast-paced song that continues as the police close in.
Without editing, a film’s screen time would equal its plot time. Incorporating cuts shows the complexity of temporality in narrative film by organizing the order, frequency, and duration of events and descriptive information. Documentary and experimental films manipulate temporality through editing as well. Finally, editing is also integral to the viewer’s physical experience of watching movies as they unfold in time — its rhythms can make us tense and fearful, calm and contemplative, or energized and euphoric.
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VIEWING CUE bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience
Time the shots of the sequence from The General (1927) available online. How does the rhythm of the editing in the sequence contribute to the film’s mood or meaning?
VIEWING CUE What is the temporal organization of the film you’ve just viewed for class? Does the film follow a strict chronology? How does the editing abridge or expand time?
Scenes and Sequences The coordination of temporal and spatial editing patterns beyond the relationship between two shots results in a higher level of cinematic organization that is found in both narrative and non-narrative films. Scenes and sequences are two terms for larger units of edited shots that, while not always strictly distinguished, are helpful to conceive of separately. In a narrative film, a scene is comprised of one or more shots that together describe a continuous space, time, and action — such as a conversation filmed following the 180-degree rule. A sequence is any number of shots that are unified as a coherent action (such as a walk to school) or as an identifiable motif (such as the expression of anger), regardless of changes in time and space. If the conversation ends with one character rising from the breakfast table, and subsequent shots show the character driving, grabbing a coffee, and taking the elevator to work, the unit is a sequence. The editing bridges any changes of setting and covers ellipses of time, but the character continues one primary action, and no significant time passes. In a nonfiction film, a sequence could be defined by a topic or an aesthetic pattern. Editing combines and organizes a film’s many scenes and sequences into patterns according to the logic of a particular story or mode of filmmaking.
One way to relate editing on the micro, shot-to- shot level to editing on a macro level is to divide a film into large narrative units, a process referred to as narrative segmentation. A classical film may have forty scenes and sequences but only ten large segments corresponding to the significant moves of the plot. In such films, locating editing transitions such as fades and dissolves can help point to these divisions, which occur at significant changes in narrative space, time, characters, or
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action. Tracing the logic of a particular film’s editing on this level gives insight into how film narratives are organized. For example, the setting of a film’s first scene may be identical to that of the last scene, or two segments showing the same characters may represent a significant change in their relationship. While these structural units and relations may be dictated in the script, it is editing that realizes them onscreen.
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FORM IN ACTION bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience
To watch a video about editing in Moulin Rouge!, see the Film Experience LaunchPad.
Editing and Rhythm in Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Editing gives a film its rhythm, and musical sequences often emphasize this dimension of editing over its ability to convey narrative information and spatiotemporal continuity. In the 1980s, commercials and music videos began to influence feature-film style strongly, and in the 1990s the ease of digital editing facilitated a trend toward faster pacing. Today shot lengths average less than half those of studio-era Hollywood films. The frenetic editing of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) contrasts markedly with the even pace of the classical An American in Paris, for example. In contrast to the long takes of the Gene Kelly ballet sequence inspired by a Toulouse-Lautrec poster in the former film, the frantic editing of Moulin Rouge! sucks Toulouse-Lautrec, among many other pleasure- seekers, into a whirling world of mashed-up pop songs and dance moves.
Split-second shots of can-can dancers lip-syncing the disco song “Lady Marmalade” [Figure 4.38a] bewilder viewers as much as they do the naive hero Christian on his first visit to the notorious nightclub, the Moulin Rouge [Figure 4.38b].
4.38a
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4.38b
Incongruously, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is introduced to the medley as the film cuts to the exterior of the club [Figure 4.38c] before a special effects shot rapidly returns us to a montage of a tumult of bodies [Figure 4.38d] dancing to the “Can Can Rap” of Zidler, the master of ceremonies.
4.38c
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4.38d
Cutting to the exterior again to highlight Zidler’s direct solicitation of the audience [Figure 4.38e], the film follows his superhuman dive back into the fray with jump cuts showing him commanding different stages.
4.38e
Abruptly, Zidler signals for silence, and after a brief pause, the music and dance (and editing) resume at an even more accelerated pace [Figure 4.38f]. The rhythmic nature of the nineteenth-century music hall dance form and a postmodern pastiche of musical styles are echoed in and whipped into a frenzy by editor Jill Bilcock’s cutting of a three-minute musical sequence with close to two hundred individual shots.
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4.38f
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Making Sense of Film Editing The editing styles we have discussed so far are not simply neutral ways of telling stories or conveying information. Applied in different contexts — Hollywood, art cinema, documentary, or the avant-garde — editing styles convey different perspectives. Cutting to a close-up in a silent film such as The Cheat (1912) was an innovative way of smoothly taking the viewer inside the film’s world; it served the psychological realism of Hollywood storytelling. Documentary films have developed editing patterns whose logic is made clear by a continuous voiceover narration. Experimental films like The Flicker (1965) employ various patterns of alternation or accumulation to generate aesthetic experiences and reveal structural principles like those found in paintings or poetry.
Film editing serves two general aims. It can generate emotions and ideas through the construction of patterns of seeing; it can also move beyond normal temporal and spatial limitations. In John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), for instance, we experience the approach of pursuing Indians and the subsequent battle and escape from the perspective of the stagecoach’s white passengers [Figures 4.39a and 4.39b]. Audience members almost involuntarily hope for the vanquishing of the pursuers, who are shown in long shots. We feel palpable relief, along with the surviving passengers, when their pursuers give up the chase. The editing breaks with the 180- degree rule, and the confusion builds feelings of tension. Since the point of view is not confined to the interior of the stagecoach, we see the initial threat and the close calls that the characters cannot see. Through logic and pacing, the editing does more than just link images in space and time; it also generates emotions and thoughts.
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4.39a and 4.39b Stagecoach (1939). The editing of John Ford’s classic Stagecoach uses humanizing close-ups of the passengers, medium long shots of the coach under siege, and long shots of the attackers to keep the viewers’ sympathy with the stagecoach passengers.
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FILM IN FOCUS bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience
To watch a video showcasing the editing of Bonnie and Clyde, see the Film Experience LaunchPad.
Patterns of Editing in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
See also: Midnight Cowboy (1969); Fight Club (1999)
Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) represented a new kind of American filmmaking in the late 1960s, in part because its complex spatial and temporal patterns of editing departed from the established norms. Based on the story of the famous outlaws from the 1930s, the film describes the meeting of the title characters and their violent but clownish crime wave through the South. As their escapades continue, they are naively surprised by their notoriety. Soon the gaiety of their adventures gives way to bloodier and darker encounters: Clyde’s accomplice/brother is killed, and eventually the couple is betrayed and slaughtered.
Frequently, Dede Allen’s editing of specific scenes emphasizes temporal and spatial realism. The scene depicting the outlaw couple’s first small-town bank robbery begins with a long shot of a car outside the bank. The next shot, from inside the bank, shows the car parked outside the window. Spatially, this constructs the geography of the scene; temporally, it conveys the action that takes place within these linked shots. The scene creates verisimilitude.
At other points in Bonnie and Clyde, the logic of the editing emphasizes psychological or emotional effects over realism. When Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) is introduced, for example, the first image we see of her is an extreme close-up of her lips; the camera pulls back as she turns right to look in a mirror. This is followed by a cut on action as she stands and looks back over her shoulder to the left in a medium shot and then by another cut on action as she drops to her bed, her face visible in a close-up through the bedframe, which she petulantly punches. Here Bonnie’s restless movements are depicted by a series of jerky shots, and we sense her boredom and frustration with small-town life through the editing [Figures 4.40a and 4.40b].
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4.40a and 4.40b Bonnie and Clyde (1967). The lack of an establishing shot combines with the multiple framings to emphasize the claustrophobic mise-en-scène, taking us right into the character’s psychologically rendered space.
Next Bonnie goes to her window and, in a point-of-view construction, spots a strange man near her mother’s car. She comes downstairs to find out what he is doing, and her conversation with Clyde (Warren Beatty) is handled in a series of shot/reverse shots, starting with long shots as she comes outside and proceeding to closer pairs of shots. The two-shot of the characters together is delayed. The way this introduction is handled emphasizes the inevitability of their pairing.
The final scene of the sequence is the film’s most famous and influential, and the strategies used serve as an instructive summary of the patterns and logic of editing. Accompanied by the staccato of machine-gun bullets, Bonnie’s and Clyde’s deaths are filmed in slow motion, their bodies reacting with almost balletic grace to the impact of the gunshots and to the rhythm of the film’s shots, which are almost as numerous. In nearly thirty cuts in approximately forty seconds, the film alternates between the two victims’ spasms and reestablishing shots of the death scene. Clyde’s fall to the ground is split into three shots, overlapping the action [Figures 4.41a–4.41c]. The hail of bullets finally stops, and the film’s final minute is comprised of a series of seven shots of the police and other onlookers gathering around, without a single reverse shot of what they are seeing. One of the more creative and troubling dimensions of the Bonnie and Clyde film is the striking combination of slow, romantic scenes and fast-paced action sequences, which culminate in this memorable finale.
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VIEWING CUE
(c)
4.41a–4.41c Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Clyde’s famous death sequence uses slow-motion cinematography, cutting on movement, and overlapping editing.
For linking sex with violence, glamorizing its protagonists through beauty and fashion, and addressing itself to the anti-authoritarian feelings of young audiences, Bonnie and Clyde is among the most important U.S. films of the 1960s. Together with other countercultural milestones such as The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), it heralded the end of studio-style production and the beginning of a new youth-oriented film market, one that revisited film genres of the past with a modern sensibility. However, as we have seen, it was not only the film’s content that was innovative; Bonnie and Clyde’s editing and the climactic linkage of gunshots with camera shots also influenced viewers — ranging from French New Wave filmmakers to the American public.
These potential effects of editing are well illustrated in the legendary editing experiments conducted by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. A shot of the Russian actor Ivan Mozzhukhin’s face followed by a bowl of soup signified “hunger” to viewers, while the identical footage of the face linked to a child’s coffin connoted “grief.” In the absence of an establishing shot, viewers assumed these pairs of images to be linked in space and time and motivation — the so-called “Kuleshov effect.”
A magisterial example of how editing overcomes the physical limitations of human perception can be found in 2001: A Space Odyssey. No individual
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In the film you’ve just viewed for class, what different emotional and intellectual responses are evoked by the editing choices? Be sure to jot down specific examples from the film to support your response.
character’s consciousness anchors the film’s journey through space and time. Instead, our experience of the film is largely governed by the film’s editing: long-shot images that show crew members floating outside the spaceship, accompanied by Johann Strauss’s The Blue Danube waltz, and a montage of psychedelic patterns that erases all temporal borders [Figure 4.42]. Our almost visceral response to these sequences is a result of the cinema’s ability to defy our perceptual limits.
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4.42 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969). From beginning to end, the editing of this film defies the limits of human perception.
Of course, these two aims of film editing often overlap. The abstract images in 2001: A Space Odyssey make us think about the boundaries of humanity and the vastness of the universe — and, perhaps, about cinema as a manipulation of images in space and time. Many of Alfred Hitchcock’s climactic sequences generate emotions of suspense — achieved in Saboteur (1942) by literally suspending the character from the Statue of Liberty [Figures 4.43a and 4.43b]. The scene also transcends the confines of perception by showing us details that would be impossible to see without the aid of the movie camera.
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4.43a and 4.43b Saboteur (1942). Suspense is made literal—and visceral—as a man’s fate hangs by a thread.
Our responses to such editing patterns are, of course, never guaranteed. We may feel emotionally manipulated by a cut to a close-up or cheated by a cutaway. Additionally, across historical periods and in different cultures, editing styles can seem vastly different, and audience expectations vary accordingly. In a song-and-dance sequence from the Hindi film hit Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Big Hearted Will Take the Bride) (1995), the editing uses flashbacks and costume changes on match cuts to highlight the central couple’s predestined romance [Figure 4.44a and 4.44b]. Audiences familiar with the conventions accept these ruptures in time and space; those less so may be surprised with the return to verisimilitude after the number.
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(a)
(b)
4.44a and 4.44b Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Big Hearted Will Take the Bride) (1995). Editing transcends time and space within the song-and-dance sequences and resumes continuity as the narrative moves forward.
Disjunctive Editing As we have noted, continuity editing is so pervasive in narrative film and television it presents its basic tenets as “rules” [Figures 4.45a and 4.45b]. But since the first uses of editing in the beginning of the twentieth century, continuity rules have been paralleled and sometimes directly challenged by various alternative practices. Here we will refer to these practices collectively as disjunctive editing to distinguish these styles from continuity
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editing and to illuminate historical, cultural, and philosophical differences in editing styles. However, these traditions are
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not unified; moreover, in modern filmmaking it is quite possible to find multiple editing methods converging in the editing style of a single film.
(a)
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4.45a and 4.45b Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). The principles of continuity editing are illustrated by their failed execution in a film by notorious B-filmmaker Edward D. Wood Jr. When actor Bela Lugosi died before filming was complete on this low-budget sci-fi horror film, the director replaced him with another actor in a cape. Clearly props alone do not create continuity.
Disjunctive editing is visible editing; it makes a definitive break from cutting in the service of verisimilitude. Alternative editing practices based on oppositional relationships or other formal constructions can be traced back to very early developments in film syntax in various countries and schools excited about the possibilities of film art. These practices confront viewers with juxtapositions and linkages that seem unnatural or unexpected with two main purposes: to call attention to the editing for aesthetic, conceptual, ideological, or psychological purposes; and to disorient, disturb, or viscerally affect viewers.
When the viewer is forced to notice a particular cut or cutting pattern because it is so jarring, she or he may be led to reflect on its meaning or effect. Disjunctive editing is prominent in avant-garde and political film traditions, and some theorists argue that it leads the viewer to develop a critical perspective on the medium, the film’s subject matter, or the process of representation itself. Other effects of disjunctive editing patterns may be more physical than rational. Editing may be organized around any number of different aspects, such as spatial tension, temporal experimentation, or rhythmic and graphic patterns.
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Jump Cuts One technique that is used many different ways in disjunctive editing is the jump cut, a cut that interrupts a particular action and, intentionally or unintentionally, creates discontinuities in the spatial or temporal development of shots. Used loosely, the term “jump cut” can identify several different disjunctive practices. Cutting a section out of the middle of a shot causes a jump ahead to a later point in the action. Sometimes the background of a shot may remain constant, while figures shift position inexplicably. Two shots from the same angle but from different distances will also create a jump when juxtaposed. While such jumps are considered grave errors in continuity editing, as noted previously, they were reintroduced into the editing vocabulary of narrative films by the French New Wave, notably Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). Jump cuts gave Godard’s gangster narrative an outlaw energy. Contemporary films such as Michael Clayton (2007) have appropriated this technique to increase viewers’ disorientation as the plot twists [Figures 4.46a and 4.46b].
(a)
(b)
4.46a and 4.46b Michael Clayton (2007). Hollywood films have increasingly appropriated jump cuts. Here, shots of a corrupt attorney rehearsing her boardroom speech are intercut with her convincing performance.
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Jump cuts illustrate the two primary aims of disjunctive editing. In Wong Karwai’s Happy Together (1997), they contribute to the film’s overall stylization. Jumps in distance and time are combined with changes in film stock within a supposedly continuous scene [Figures 4.47a and 4.47b]. The viewer notices how the action is depicted, rather than simply taking in the action. The viewer may reflect on how the disjointed shots convey the characters’ restless yet stagnant moods, recognize in them the film’s theme of displacement, or appreciate the aesthetic effect for its own sake.
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(a)
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4.47a and 4.47b Happy Together (1997). Here jump cuts draw attention to the restlessness and displacement of two men who have moved from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires.
The jump cuts in Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) are a central device through which the film’s play with space and especially time is achieved. The major conceit of this classic art film is the characters’ different versions of the past. The protagonist, known only as X, insists he met the heroine A at the same hotel one year before, and she denies it. This difference in point of view relates to the viewer’s disorientation through editing. Numerous images show the female protagonist striking poses around the hotel and gardens [Figures 4.48a and 4.48b]. The temporal relationship among such shots is unclear — are they happening now, are they flashbacks, or are they X’s version of events? — as differences in costume and setting are countered by similarities in posture and styling. Finally, the editing strategy becomes a reflection on the process of viewing a film. How can we assume that the action we are viewing is happening now, when recording, editing, and projection/viewing are all distinct temporal operations?
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(a)
(b)
4.48a and 4.48b Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Delphine Seyrig strikes poses against various backgrounds, challenging our perception of time and place in the narrative and in cinematic viewing more generally. The technique was later adopted in music videos.
One principle behind the use of disjunctive edits like jump cuts for some filmmakers is the concept of distanciation introduced by German playwright Bertolt Brecht in his plays and critical writings of the 1920s.
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The viewer is “distanced” from the work of art when he or she is made aware of how the work is put together; that is, he or she is encouraged to think as well as to feel. In Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), Jean-Luc Godard uses nondiegetic inserts like numbered chapter headings, printed text, and advertising images as distanciation devices.
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Montage As noted previously, the most important tradition in disjunctive editing is the Soviet theory of montage, which aims to grab viewers’ attention through the collision between shots. Sergei Eisenstein developed his ideas in extensive writings, undertaken from the early 1920s to his death in 1945, which have secured him a place as one of the foremost theorists of cinema. At the same time, he illustrated these ideas in his films, starting with Strike in 1925. Eisenstein advocated dialectical montage, arguing that two contrasting or otherwise conflicting shots will be synthesized into a visual concept when juxtaposed. In Battleship Potemkin (1925), the shots of several stone lions juxtaposed in sequence suggest that one stone lion is leaping to life [Figures 4.49a–4.49c]. According to Eisenstein, the concept of awakening, connected to revolutionary consciousness, is thus formed in viewers’ minds even as they react viscerally to the lion’s leap. Such an association of aesthetic fragmentation with a political program of analysis and action has persisted in many uses of disjunctive editing.
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4.49a–4.49c Battleship Potemkin (1925). Sergei Eisenstein rouses stone lions through montage.
Recall that, strictly speaking, the term “montage” simply means editing. As some of the techniques used by the Soviets were adapted elsewhere, the term montage sequence came to denote a series of thematically linked shots, or shots meant to show the passage of time, joined by quick cuts or other devices, such as dissolves, wipes, and superimpositions. In studio-era Hollywood, the Soviet émigré Slavko Vorkapich specialized in creating memorable montage sequences such as the earthquake in San Francisco (1936) [Figures 4.50a–4.50c].
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VIEWING CUE Does the editing of the film you’ve just viewed for class call attention to itself in a disjunctive fashion, setting up conflicts or posing oppositional values? If so, how and to what end?
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4.50a–4.50c San Francisco (1936). Although continuity editing was the norm in studio-era Hollywood, montage sequences were created for special purposes, such as this spectacular earthquake scene.
The term “montage” has come to emphasize the creative power of editing — especially the potential to build up a sequence and augment meaning, rather than simply to remove the extraneous, as the term “cutting” implies. This principle of construction is behind abstract and animated films and video art that convey visual patterns through their editing, examples of which will be explored in Chapter 8. It also informs films made from found footage, which date back at least to montage experiments like The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), cut from existing footage
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by Soviet filmmaker Esfir Shub when film stock was in short supply. One of the first explorations of the overabundance of images that saturated postwar consumer culture, Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958) is a rapid montage that creates humorous, sinister, and thought-provoking relationships among images culled from newsreels, pinups, war movies, and Hollywood epics. The introduction of consumer video in the 1980s made the editing of found footage and the use of video effects accessible to artists as well as amateurs. Cecilia Barriga’s low-budget analog video art piece Meeting of Two Queens (1991) is ingeniously constructed by re- cutting brief clips from the films of Hollywood icons Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. The resulting video suggests a romance between the two by making use of viewers’ expectations of continuity editing and altering mise-en-scène through superimposition.
Converging Editing Styles Given the influence of other traditions and styles, editing in mainstream films arguably no longer strives for invisibility. Certainly it is no longer possible — if indeed it ever was — to assign specific responses, such as passive acceptance or political awareness, to specific editing techniques.
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FILM IN FOCUS bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience
To watch a video on the editing of Battleship Potemkin, see the Film Experience LaunchPad.
Montage in Battleship Potemkin (1925) See also: Man with a Movie Camera (1929); The Untouchables (1987)
Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is one of the most renowned examples of daring and innovative editing in film history. A 1925 silent classic based on a 1905 historical event, Battleship Potemkin describes the revolt of maltreated sailors aboard their ship, the sympathetic response of townspeople on shore, and the violent repression of those people by the czar’s soldiers. Although the story itself is quite simple, Eisenstein uses complex montage to charge specific incidents with powerful energy and meaning, emphasizing the breaks and contrasts between images joined by a cut. As Eisenstein developed his ideas about montage, he put them into practice, editing the film himself with his assistant Grigori Aleksandrov.
In a film with no single protagonist, numerous cuts join small groups to show the participation of the masses in anti-czarist sentiment, moving our perspective beyond the confines of individual perception and its temporal and spatial limitations. To give heightened drama or dynamic tension to an action, Eisenstein uses more shots than a typical Hollywood film, sometimes overlapping the same action from one shot to the next in showing several points of view. When the ship’s doctor is thrown overboard by sailors, the gesture is repeated from overhead and side angles, engaging viewers’ emotions and leading them to a particular idea: the desperation of the sailors resulting in a mutinous act. After the doctor hits the water, Eisenstein employs an insert of the maggot-infested meat that the doctor had approved for the sailors’ consumption. Appearing out of temporal sequence, this shot acts as narrative justification for the doctor’s treatment.
The centerpiece of Battleship Potemkin is the famous Odessa steps sequence in which innocent citizens who have come to look at the ship are shot and trampled by the czar’s soldiers. The sequence is justly celebrated for its dynamic cutting, which makes dramatic use of movement and graphic patterns within shots to bring about Eisenstein’s favored interaction between shots: collision. The sequence begins with the intertitle “Suddenly”; townspeople then begin to run from the imperial soldiers down the vast steps toward the camera. This action moves generally from left to right. Several figures are isolated in closer shots that are intercut throughout the sequence: a boy without legs propelling himself forward with his arms, a group of women, a mother running with her child. When the orderly rows of troops are shown entering from top left, the shot provides a dramatic graphic contrast to the chaos of the mass of people. In the first major crosscutting episode within the sequence, the mother becomes separated from her son in the crowd. Shots of
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her turning back to retrieve him are vigorously contrasted with shots of him falling, the oncoming crowds, and the soldiers’ inexorable progression behind them. Finally, the mother climbs high enough and enters a shot from the bottom left, which positions the soldiers across the top. The film cuts to peasants looking on, and in the next shot the mother is fired on and falls as the troops continue marching down. The use of movement in opposing directions is one of the key elements that organize this complicated editing sequence [Figures 4.51a–4.51c].
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4.51a–4.51c Battleship Potemkin (1925). The conflict between the organized troops and the frightened masses is heightened by graphic collisions among shots showing different screen directions, different planes of action, and patterns of light and shadow and figure movement in the first part of the Odessa steps sequence.
As if this dramatic episode has not raised enough tension and pathos, after an intertitle announces the arrival of the Cossacks, Eisenstein embarks on one of the most famous editing sequences in film history. A young mother is shot and falls in several overlapping cuts. The baby carriage she had been clutching begins to roll down the stairs [Figure 4.52]. Intercut with its descent (which is shown from changing screen directions) are repeated shots of onlookers who seem to be mimicking our own powerless, horrified gaze. No establishing shot puts these figures in spatial context.
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4.52 Battleship Potemkin (1925). Repeated details of the baby carriage’s descent convey a sense of helplessness.
Just as the carriage reaches the bottom and begins to overturn, Eisenstein cuts to quick shots of a Cossack striking directly at us [Figure 4.53a] and then to the briefest of shots of the face of a woman wearing pince-nez.
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In a famous shock cut, her glasses are instantly shattered and bloodied [Figure 4.53b]. The sequence fades out. As our vision is assaulted by the shock cut, the image of shattered glasses mirrors our own “injury,” even as it stands in for an even more horrific, offscreen image of the baby’s fate.
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4.53a and 4.53b Battleship Potemkin (1925). The impact of the Cossack’s blow registers in the shock cut.
Battleship Potemkin made a strong impact in the West when it was released in 1926. In the long term, Eisenstein’s stylistic legacy has survived, even as the revolutionary purpose he associated with his aesthetic innovations has been questioned or abandoned. His work has inspired more than one homage, including American director Brian De Palma’s mimicking of the Odessa steps sequence in his gangster film The Untouchables (1987). Some see this tribute as a tour de force of suspenseful editing; others think the sequence is a distracting self-indulgence. Thus the mainstream film incorporates montage style but not necessarily its meaning.
Digital technology has revolutionized the craft and language of editing. Using footage from one hundred small digital video cameras, Lars von Trier in Dancer in the Dark (2000) breaks down actions much more minutely than through standard editing, and the arbitrariness of the cutting becomes apparent rather than remaining hidden [Figures 4.54a and 4.54b]. As the two formal traditions of continuity and disjunctive editing converge, the values associated with each tradition become less distinct. For Eisenstein, calling attention to the editing was important because it could change the viewers’ consciousness. For contemporary filmmakers, omitting establishing shots, breaking the 180-degree rule, and using rapid montage may serve primarily to establish a distinctive “look.”
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4.54a and 4.54b Dancer in the Dark (2000). The use of many digital cameras makes it possible to intercut close shots from multiple perspectives.
Editing is perhaps the most distinctive feature of film form. Editing leads viewers to experience images viscerally and emotionally, and it remains one of the most effective ways to create meanings from shots. These interpretations can vary from the almost automatic inferences about space, time, and narrative that we draw from the more familiar continuity editing patterns, to the intellectual puzzles posed by the unfamiliar spatial and temporal juxtapositions of disjunctive editing practices.
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