- Essential characteristics of motion pictures
- Expressive elements of motion pictures
- Types of motion pictures
- The study and appreciation of motion pictures
The process of trimming and piecing together lengths of film in order to make an artistically concise and complete motion picture is certainly the most obvious technique of film language and the one most often discussed. The terms editing, cutting, and montage are often applied interchangeably to the process. In montage the emphasis is on the juxtaposition of ideas resulting from this process; cutting stresses the physical work with the actual strips of film; and editing encompasses both.
A single shot (i.e., the length of film exposed at one time, without interruption, by one camera) makes a visual and aural record of some segment of the physical world; by effective editing, this record can be taken apart, restructured, and shaped into an imaginative world or a discourse about the world. While all viewers presumably notice that a film is made up of a number of scenes, few realize that even relatively sedate fiction films contain on average approximately 600 cuts, one every 10 seconds. Editors strive to hide their work by cutting on action, so that the movement of a character’s arm in one location flows into another such movement elsewhere, masking the change of shot. More important is the principle by which an editor anticipates the spectator’s line of inquiry. By releasing information just as the spectator needs it, the editor constructs a natural drama whose seams are invisible.
Probably the most common convention of this sort is the “accordion” sequence, wherein, for example, a drawing room conversation between two people is introduced in an establishing shot of the setting and the actors. The editor will cut to a full shot of the actors once they begin their dialogue, because their speech gives them prominence over the setting. To help viewers understand the nuances of the dialogue, the editor will move in for a medium shot, showing both characters from the waist up. While many directors and editors stop here, Hollywood has traditionally gone in even closer, using alternating close-ups of each character (generally from over-the-shoulder shots) to convey innuendos and reactions. In the earlier days of cinema, an editor was likely to back out of the sequence in the reverse order, going from close-up to medium shot, to full shot, and finally to long shot, thus making the structure of the sequence resemble the in-and-out movement of an accordion. As audiences have increased in visual sophistication, some of these “logical” steps have fallen away.
Unforgettable moments in films are often made possible through shocking juxtapositions. When an initially smooth progression is disrupted by a quick cut to a close-up, as in the Halloween cycle of horror films, the effect can be startling and frightening. In such cases the editor insists upon a strange or important connection in a scene.
Beyond rendering scenes in unobtrusive or striking ways, editing connects scenes into sequences and larger units. It serves as a system of punctuation. In the standard Hollywood film a straight cut between two scenes suggests that the scenes are close in space or time, whereas other more visible forms of transition signal more distant relations. The picture may fade out and fade in, the screen being left dark for a moment. Or it may dissolve, or mix, to a new scene, one image showing on top of the other for a moment. The filmmakers may use other devices, such as a wipe (i.e., a line moving across the screen that wipes out the preceding image while introducing the next), irising (gradually reducing the old image from the edges to a pinpoint size and then expanding the new one in the reverse way), or a turnover (in which the entire screen seems to turn over, with the new image seeming to appear on what was the reverse side).
The director may introduce creative touches in cutting. The German-born director Max Ophüls, for example, connected the separate episodes of La Ronde (1950) by means of the musical leitmotif of a hurdy-gurdy tune. In Vivre sa vie (1962; My Life to Live), Jean-Luc Godard, one of the outstanding French New Wave directors of the late 1950s, introduced chapter headings marking the heroine’s step-by-step involvement in prostitution and, ultimately, her murder, as if it were a didactic 19th-century novel. In his British film The Thirty-nine Steps (1935), Alfred Hitchcock, probably the greatest director of suspense films, cut from a woman’s scream to the similar sound of a train whistle, an effect so dramatic that it was frequently imitated thereafter.
Editing permits highly dramatic effects that could never be staged in a single shot. In the American western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), for example, the title characters are seen cornered by lawmen on a high cliff overlooking a river, into which they make an almost suicidal leap to their escape. Actually, the shots involving the two leading actors on the cliff and those of the dives were filmed weeks apart, and they involved different crews and even different rivers, yet the audience readily accepts the illusion created by the editing. The Stunt Man (1980) takes such editing as its very theme. The main character is engaged in the rigged dangers and tricks involved in making a movie, while the audience is fooled by the greater tricks of the film that it is watching. Editing opens up a bagful of ingenious tricks of substitution, tricks that allow a marvelous or tragic experience to appear as a natural occurrence in the filmed world.
The common illusionistic experience of motion pictures depends on editing for its force and excitement, but editing can play an even more important role in films that bypass or refuse the illusion of realism. The use of graphic and ideational montage demonstrates that some filmmakers purposely flaunt the fabrication involved in motion pictures. Many films incorporate extraneous material within their fictions in order to set the illusion of the story they tell against the hard reality of other types of images. In Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), for example, interviews with “witnesses” to the events portrayed in the film open, and occasionally interrupt, the story in order to validate the fiction being re-created as history. Conversely, in films such as Zelig (1983) and Forrest Gump (1994), editing techniques are used to interject fictional characters into historical footage in order to emphasize the narrative’s sense of time and place. Editing permits the juxtaposition of very different kinds of material for a variety of rhetorical effects.
Like camera work, editing is a function that is ordinarily hidden from the audience, but it is vital to the finished picture. It is the editor’s job to judge the length of each shot, choosing the exact moment to end a segment on the basis of the amount of detail it contains, its scale, its dramatic impact, and its context in relation to the shots that precede and follow it. The impact of the finished film depends on how well edits are made.
The director generally views the day’s rushes (i.e., advance prints of the film shot that day) and, in consultation, selects what is to be used. Some directors spend a good deal of time in the cutting room; others spend none at all. Often the editor is influential in rearranging shots, discarding them, or even ordering reshooting or additional shooting. An important factor in the work of the editor is the cutting ratio—the proportion of film shot to that used in the final film. Some directors shoot as little as 3 times as much as is required, while others may shoot 10 times as much or even more. In its widest sense, editing includes mixing the sound and correlating it with the visual film.