Editing I
The process we call EDITING mostly refers to the relation of shot to shot.
We learned through the film syntax that the shot is the basic unit of meaning in the cinematic language.
The discovery of editing was a radical turning point in the development of cinema. Above all in Russia, pioneering filmmakers discovered that the skillful juxtaposition of shots could create meaning.
Particularly famous became the experiment carried out by Russian director Lev Kuleshov (known as the Kuleshov Experiment, or the Kuleshov Effect).
The director juxtaposed a close up of the impassive face of an actor with 3 different images: a bowl of soup, a corpse in a coffin and a beautiful woman. The spectators were convinced that the actor was showing hunger, grief and lust respectively. With this experiment, Kuleshov wanted to demonstrate the expressive power of editing. Acting becomes practically irrelevant since it is possible to create meaning just playing with different shots.
Originally, the word “cut” was taken in literal sense of the word. In the editing rooms filmmakers had to physically cut the film and joint it to the next one.
Through editing techniques, they constructed scenes and sequences and separated them from each other.
Conventional movie makers use following techniques to this end:
- Fade-out (the end of the last shot gradually darkens to black)
- Fade-in (the shot lightens from black)
- Dissolve (briefly superimposition of the last shot of one scene and the first one of the next)
- Wipe (The first shot of the next scene replaces the last one of the previous by means of a boundary line moving across the screen)
Editing Categories
Editing, the relationship of shot to shot, is normally divided into four categories:
- Graphic relations
- Rhythmic relations
- Spatial relations
- Temporal relations
In this learning unit we will focus on the first two areas: Graphic and Rhythmic relations.
Graphic Relations
In the editing jargon, graphic relations describe the homogeneity (or lack of homogeneity) of the visual style along the different shots throughout the movie.
In the traditional Hollywood industry it was essential to create this homogeneity in order to keep the audience deeply involved into the story.
The parameters used by filmmakers to create that homogeneity were:
- lighting,
- color tones,
- depth of focus,
- camera angles.
Traditional films keep those factors constant during the whole movie.
In the Searchers (1956), John Ford defines for us in the very first shot the visual identity of the entire movie. The deep colors of skies and earth, the open landscapes of Monument Valley, create an atmosphere that is instrumental to convey the essence of the story.
Ford opens the film with a door that reveals the audience the scenario of the tragedies of his characters.
The movies closed in the same scenario with the same door closing, and returning the audience to the real, spatial-time coordinates of their real existence.
In some cases, the directors intentionally try to produce a contrast between the different sections of the movie to create a particular narrative effect.
In Citizen Kane (at this point of the course you should already know this movie), Orson Welles starts the narration with an exaggeratedly conventional news reel: News on the March.
The news reel ends abruptly. And at this moment, Welles opens a never-seen-before scene in the newsroom of The Inquire with strong backlighting effects that do not allow the audience to see the faces of the characters.The shock is powerful. We know that we are going to experience a experience that has nothing to do with the conventional cinema that had been done up to that moment.
Rhythmic Relations
Time is an essential aspect of film editing. The photographic reproduction of images, a technique developed in the second half of the 19th century, was only able to grasp static scenes, to reproduce isolated moments. When the film pioneers tried to use those original photographic devices to catch motion, they were introducing the factor of time. Motions happens in time. First film camera was actually a photographic device that was able to take 24 pictures per second. The cinema projector inverts the process and show those images at the same rate, 24 images per second. When the human eye is exposed to 24 static images per second, it will perceive those images as a continuum.
In addition to thus, time is a strategic part of filmic story telling. A movie cannot last forever. Filmmakers must decide the duration of shots, scenes, and sequences.
The temporal relationship between these three basic units of meaning is what determines the rhythm of the film.
Every shot will take a certain physical length, a section of the photographic reel, it is normally measured in frames (we already learned that 1 second corresponds to 24 images per second – in contemporary digital cameras, it can be 25 or even 29 frames per second). But the original photographic reels, it could also be measured in feet or meters.
In any case, the shot’s physical length corresponds to the time it appears on the screen.
The length of the shots obviously determines the rhythm of the scene.
In The Battleship Potemkin (1925), the director Sergei M. Eisenstein revolutionized editing with a frantic editing. The film is 86 minutes long and contains 1346 shots. The average number of shots in feature films at that time was around 400.
Particularly dynamic is the famous Odesa Steps Sequence. The average shot length in this segment of the film is less than 2 seconds. Eisenstein intercut moments of personal tragedy into scenes of documentary realism.
The effect is powerful.
Normally, the rhythm of the film is determined by length of shots. The shorter the length, the faster the rhythm. Still, there are other ways to increase the pace of the movie without reducing the length of the shot.
Orson Welles offers us excellent examples of how to create a very dynamic filmic narration with bold camera movements.
The classic example in Touch of Evil (1958):
Editing is not the only factor to manage the rhythm of the filmic narration.
Other elements that contribute to this end are:
- performance,
- camera angles,
- dialogues,
- music
Billy Wilder almost made James Cagney sick in One, Two, Three because of the fast pace of dialogues in the film. Without spectacular camera movements or editing techniques, the filmmaker bases the frantic rhythm of the film on the performance of his main character.
Camera angles can also add dynamism to the act of filmic storytelling. In The Third Man (1949), Carol Reed systematically uses tilt or “Dutch” camera angles in practically each scene of the movie. The outcome is a very unconventional narrative with an uncanny dynamism.
Film Noir is another genre rhythm plays an important part. In this case, the fast pace is created not through the action or the editing, but through the sharp and fast dialogues. Howard Hawks worked with Humphrey Bogart in several Noir. The most relevant is The Big Sleep, based on a novel by Raymond Chandler. This film is also the best example of how to control the rhythm of the movie with dialogues.
We tend to believe that a faster rhythm is synonym of higher filmic quality. This is a mistake. Every story demands a particular rhythm that fits its nature. Music can play an important role to both accelerate and pause the narrative rhythm. Johann Strauss’ The Blue Danube waltz helps Stanley Kubrick in the opening of 2001, A Space Odysse, complement the slow elegance of its editing.
Psycho’s famous shower scene offers us a brutal contrast to this combination of music and visuals. Bernard Hermann’s musical score reinforces the violence of the editing. The sequences ends with a slow camera movement to show the dead character.