editing
Individual images are obviously the building blocks of meaning in cinema. If we continue to think about cinema’s images as words, then it’s important to follow the metaphor to the next step. How do those words expand their meaning? They have to be put together into sentences, so that each word gains in meaning in relationship to the ones that surround it. In cinema, this is editing. Though there are some misconceptions about what editing actually is—it doesn’t just mean making the film shorter—it is arguably the most important function of cinema as an artistic medium, largely because it completes the journey away from still photography that individual shots still share. Through editing, meaning is multiplied.
continuity
During the dominance of Classic Hollywood, a stylistic approach to cutting was the convention: continuity editing. The idea was to tailor editing to achieve maximum clarity for the audience, minimizing the disruption that could come when a film cut to a new shot.
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson examine the classical continuity technique at length. They argue that it is an essential tool for Hollywood filmmakers to establish visual order inside their work: “Classical continuity editing, however, reinforces spatial orientation. Continuity of graphic qualities can invite us to look through the ‘plate-glass window’ of the screen. From shot to shot, tonality, movement, and the center of compositional interest shift enough to be distinguishable but not enough to be disturbing.” They are describing a delicate balancing act: on the one hand, new shots are exciting to an audience because they create an opportunity to reset the narrative and maintain interest across images, but on the other hand, they create risk that the audience may be confused. Classical continuity established norms that were designed to minimize confusion. Match cuts and eyeline matches achieved this goal.
Here’s how it works: a character performs a simple action in one shot, and then the cut to a new shot occurs during the action, disguising the edit by matching the movement of the actor. In essence, the idea is to get you not to notice the cut, but maintain focus instead on the performer. Here’s an example of a pair of shots, joined at the action, from Vincent Sherman's The Damned Don't Cry (1950). In the shot on the left, Martin (Kent Smith) moves to the left side of the frame, and in shot two, the film cuts back to a wider shot as he moves in the same direction, sitting down at the desk.
Filmmakers employ other strategies during the Classic Hollywood period that also help develop a smooth relationship between the spectators and the film itself. For example, shots that don’t have a joining action are sometimes linked through eyeline matches. In this pair of shots from Berlin Express (1948, Tourneur), Robert (Robert Ryan) stands on a train car, smoking a cigarette. He looks up, off-screen left, and the next shot is a cut to what he sees, another man entering the train car. The edit is smoothed over by a conceptual relationship between the two characters—though we have not seen them together in the same shot, we understand that they are in the same location because of the eyeline match.
One of the most dominant patterns of shot coverage is the shot/reverse shot pattern used to cover dialogue sequences. When characters sit down to have a conversation, nearly all films in the Classic Hollywood studio era will rely on this simple technique that still dominates today. Eyeline matters a lot here, shaping the ways in which we perceive where the characters are placed in the space: “If a single eyeline provides a strong spatial cue, then a second eyeline on the other side of the cut should create an even stronger spatial anchor for the spectator. This principle is commonly used to create the shot/reverse shot (SRS) schema, one of the most prevalent figures in the classical Hollywood cinema’s spatial system.” Again, today, we process shot/reverse shot patterns without thinking about them, but it is valuable to call attention to how they work, because they can be manipulated for emotional effect. Here is a typical example from The Great Sinner (1949, Dir. Robert Siodmak), between Fedja (Gregory Peck) and Pauline (Ava Gardner).
This normative style doesn’t mean, however, that editing cannot be expressive. Walter Murch, influential editor and sound designer of Apocalypse Now (1979, Dir. Francis Ford Coppola), offers a number of helpful insights about the practice of editing and its ability to shape story for an audience. He explains the thinking that goes into making a cut in a film according to a list of criteria: “An ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the following six criteria at once: 1) it is true to the emotion of the moment; 2) it advances the story; 3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and ‘right’; 4) it acknowledges what you might call ‘eye-trace’—the concern with the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame; 5) it respects ‘planarity’—the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography to two (the questions of stage-line, etc.); 6) and it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where people are in the room and in relation to one another).” Murch privileges emotion and story above continuity, in other words. His vision of editing is primarily expressive rather than obedient to continuity rules. As an editor, Murch argues, “Your job is partly to anticipate, partly to control the thought process of the audience. To give them what they want and/or what they need just before they have to ‘ask’ for it—to be surprising yet self-evident at the same time. If you are too far behind or ahead of them, you create problems, but if you are right with them, leading them ever so slightly, the flow of events feels natural and exciting at the same time.”
This is what we mean when we describe a film’s rhythm or pace. It is important to understand that an editor’s job is not simply to make a film shorter. An editor controls how the audience perceives the film’s shots not in isolation, but in relationship to one another. Think of editing like a chain: each successive image represents a link in that chain, and each link accumulates more meaning.
intensified continuity
Modern films illustrate a crucial development in contemporary filmmaking, which is the acceleration of style. In general, movies are bigger, louder, and faster today, thanks to these stylistic evolutions. They follow continuity principles in many ways, but do so at a faster pace. Theorist and historian David Bordwell calls this practice “intensified continuity.”
Watch the commentary at right that explores how Enemy of the State (1998) exemplifies this trend. Its director Tony Scott is a poster boy for the free-flowing, accelerated style of contemporary cinema, with its seemingly chaotic pace of editing. The sheer number of shots in the sequence at right, in which Will Smith’s character Robert Clayton Dean, an innocent man, is pursued by nefarious government spies, is staggering compared to a film from the classical period in Hollywood. However, closer analysis reveals that the approach isn’t all that different—it's just in fast forward.
|
|
Editing helps clarify spatial and temporal orientation to the audience as they watch. Because multiple images are edited together, meaning is generated across them through relationship. Continuity and match-cutting are the nuts and bolts of editing because they emphasize clarity.
montage
The most important and influential figure in the history of film editing is Russian theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. He was one of the first to theorize the practice of editing, thinking about this practice as the essential quality of cinema. Some critics place more emphasis on the value and importance of the individual shot as the defining quality of film, but Eisenstein believed it was editing because it was unique to cinema. No other art form, in Eisenstein’s formulation, can create meaning through collision of separate images. He believed that editing was a tool for argumentation and that images should clash with one another, expressing ideas that transcended any individual shot. He used the term “montage” to describe it. He believed that “montage becomes the mightiest means for a really important creative remolding of nature.” In some ways, this is an iteration of the same realist vs. expressionist dichotomy we explored earlier in the semester. Realists tended to privilege the individual shot, which recorded events. Expressionists preferred editing, which allowed them to shape perception. Now, these divisions are far too simple to be useful. We’ve seen how individual filmmakers can use the shot expressionistically, and the continuity style illustrates how studio conventions privileged realism in editing. Eisenstein was attracted to editing because it afforded him the best opportunity to interpret reality rather than capture it.
There has been some change in what the term "montage" means over time. To modern audiences, it tends to refer to "a montage," during which a longer period of narrative time is condensed to a shorter duration on screen. In these sequences, which are often set to music, the audience takes in a group of images that are united by common ideas and characters. In "montages" like this, couples fall in love, gangs of crooks gather the necessary supplies to pull off a heist, and most famously, train for big fights, as in the Rocky film series. The boxing film has long used training montages to collapse narrative time and dramatize the lengthy process of preparation that its fighters go through. At right, you'll see the montage from Creed (2015, Dir. Ryan Coogler), during which Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) trains, Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) goes through cancer treatments, and Creed's opponent Conlan (Tony Bellew) prepares his title defense. As you watch the montage, track the different elements: shots that jump forward in time, or switch to a different location; music peaks and valleys; rhythms of the montage achieved through editing, as the pace slows or quickens.
|
|
Montage didn't always refer to this kind of sequence, however. The term was first popularized by Eisenstein, who used it to describe the ways in which images, placed sequentially in a film, can produce an ideological meaning. In essence, Eisenstein believed that film mathematics worked like this: 1 + 1 = 3. Shot 1 has an individual meaning, and so does Shot 2; however, their meaning can be exponentially expanded when placed next to each other, creating a third idea that results from the collision of the two images.
In his musical All That Jazz (1979), director Bob Fosse, an obsessive editor, uses both montages and montage. Throughout the film, Fosse's montages are meant to convey the day-to-day experiences of his autobiographical stand-in, theatre and film director Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider). The "morning routine" montages, which always use the same piece of classical music against a series of images of Joe popping pills and generally preparing for the day. The montages always end with a shot of Joe in the mirror, saying "It's showtime!" At right, I offer a detailed analysis of the film's opening sequence, a montage wherein Joe selects dancers for his production.
|
|
|
Fosse also uses montage, in the Eisensteinian sense, throughout the film to create productive collision between images. Remember, Eisenstein believed that cinema's essential characteristic was its ability to join unrelated images together through juxtaposition, which then generated ideas. Fosse uses Eisensteinian montage to critique the callousness of the producers in the clip at left; after his character Joe Gideon has a heart attack, the producers debate whether they’d actually make more money if Gideon died on the operating table. The result is a sequence enriched by editing: Fosse joins two unrelated sets of images to create another idea built out of juxtaposition.
|
As you watch films, it is important to notice cuts when they occur and ask why they’ve appeared at that particular moment. Following Walter Murch’s suggestion, what new idea is introduced through that cut? Following Eisenstein’s approach, how does the relationship between the two shots challenge you or make you think? And following Fosse’s practice, how do edits work to combine emotion, ideas, and argument?
clip quiz - editing
I CONFESS (1953, Hitchcock)
One strategy of editing that many filmmakers use to cover scenes of dialogue is shot/reverse shot. In this scene from I Confess, a priest (Montgomery Clift) is questioned by a police detective (Karl Malden). How does the shot/reverse shot strategy of editing shape your perception of the conversation between them? |
|
AMBULANCE (2022, Bay)
How many shots appear in this short sequence from Ambulance? (Hint: a lot - count them). What is the impact on you as a viewer of the pace of editing? How does it make you feel, and how does the editing itself achieve that? |
|
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991, Demme)
What effect does editing have on your experience of this tense sequence from The Silence of the Lambs? |
|
THE WARRIORS (1979, Hill)
This is a montage from the opening sequence of The Warriors: what are the dominant ideas that appear in the montage? What emotion does it create and how does it do that? What is the role of editing in shaping your understanding of time and space? |
|
editing in strangers on a train
While director Alfred Hitchcock was certainly one of the most dynamic of all image-makers, his films really come alive when he puts those images in sequence with one another through editing. Working in his chosen genre of the suspense thriller, Hitchcock understood how to manipulate the audience through the slow reveal of information, which was achieved sometimes through carefully chosen camera movements, but more frequently through editing. His films set up narrative situations in which two characters work against one another; editing joins these situations and characters together, putting them in a race against the clock.
Though many of Hitchcock’s films follow this basic logic, few exemplify it better than Strangers On A Train (1951), his thriller adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel of the same name; in it, two men randomly meet one another on a short train trip. The first, Guy Haines (Farley Granger), is a burgeoning tennis pro caught in a bad marriage to Miriam (Kasey Rogers), who is also in love with Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), the daughter of a senator. The second, Bruno Antony (Robert Walker), is a spoiled rich kid who hates both of his parents, but especially his stern and contemptuous father (Jonathan Hale). Guy is credulous and ordinary, but Bruno is diabolical; he hatches a scheme that the two men, strangers to one another, should each do the other a favor and murder the person who stands in the way of their dreams—Bruno would bump off Miriam, and in exchange, Guy would snuff out his father. The police could never trace the killings back to either of them. Guy thinks Bruno is joking, but Bruno is most decidedly not.
The film uses editing right away to create parallels between Guy and Bruno, combining with carefully selected shots on their shoes. It’s how they’ll bump into one another, but the focus on their feet also emphasizes the film’s key ideas—these two men are strangers, and the opening shots of their shoes illustrate their anonymity.
Not all editing is flashy or creates these kinds of thematic parallels; some of it is simply functional. One of the most common strategies is the use of shot/reverse shot to capture scenes of dialogue. In the images below, Guy and Bruno sit on board the train in one of the cars, getting to know each other, with Bruno winding up to reveal his murderous plot. As they talk, Hitchcock cuts back and forth between them, showing Guy on some of his lines of dialogue, and Bruno when he speaks most of his. On occasion, he provides reaction shots of each of them as they listen to what the other is saying. This is a basic use of editing to communicate narrative information and reveal character.
Some pieces of editing are more thematically resonant, joining ideas across time and space through particular uses of juxtaposition, in which two images are placed next to one another in sequence to invite us to consider the relationship between them. At a moment of particular frustration with Miriam, Guy screams out, “I could just strangle her!”, and Hitchcock subsequently dissolves to a shot of Bruno’s hands, which he will soon use to do just that, holding up his end of the bargain he has drawn Guy into.
When Bruno eventually follows Miriam and her dates to the fairgrounds where he will separate her from the others and commit the murder, Hitchcock uses editing to create suspense, as he often does in his work. Miriam doesn’t know Bruno and has no idea why he is following her, though she knows he is—she just mistakes it for a kind of flirtation. The audience, though, knows what he’s up to, which creates a disconnect between the amount of information that Miriam has and the amount of information that we have. That’s suspense. Hitchcock playfully uses editing to create a relationship between Miriam and Bruno through cuts that is fundamentally about misinterpretation; she thinks he’s after one thing, but he’s really after something quite different.
Sometimes, editing can provide new information with a particularly chosen cut. As Guy is walking with his police escort through the streets and monuments of Washington D.C., Hitchcock keeps the two of them in two-shot, while they get to know each other. Despite the presence of the police officer, all seems relatively normal. But then, a cut reveals something sinister; a long shot of Bruno standing atop one of the nearby monuments’ staircases, looking down ominously at Guy from a distance. The cut has the ability to change our perception of the scene. What seems normal at one moment is actually suddenly threatening.
One of the major motifs of Strangers On A Train comes up in dialogue between Bruno and Guy in the early scenes, as Bruno outlines the murder plot: criss cross. The idea of the criss cross is present in the film’s consistent reliance on cross-cutting between two places at the same time. Editing can join these two distance places by intercutting between them; the suggestion is that the two events are happening at the same time, and the intercutting encourages us to see them in relationship to one another.
Watch the clip at right from Strangers On A Train, which contains one of its most famous sequences of cross-cutting. Bruno is heading for the fairgrounds where he plans to plant Guy’s lighter so the police will have physical evidence to confirm their suspicions that he killed Miriam; Guy, meanwhile, is stuck playing a tennis match that he can’t get out of without raising the police’s alarms and seeming guilty, but he knows he needs to beat Bruno to the island where Miriam was murdered, so he plays the match as quickly as he can. Hitchcock cuts between the two places, adding in some important complications along the way that ratchet up the suspense.
|
|
Strangers on a Train demonstrates the importance of editing, from the practical considerations of match cutting and continuity to the time and space possibilities of montage. It also expressively juxtaposes seemingly unrelated images together to create a third meaning in the style of Eisenstein. Editing is undoubtedly essential to the cinematic art form—images can function in isolation, but their meaning grows exponentially when linked together in a chain.