Film Editing: A History and Elements PDF

CHAPTER FIVE Editing: Relating Images 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 r...

CHAPTER FIVE Editing: Relating Images 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. A Short History of Film Editing (1 of 5) 1895‒1918: Early Cinema and the Emergence of Editing – Edwin S. Porter, employee of Thomas Edison, used basic editing techniques in the service of storytelling in early films such as Life of an American Fireman (1903) and The Great Train Robbery (1903). – D. W. Griffith became closely associated with the use of crosscutting or parallel editing (the alternating between two or more strands of action) with his work in The Lonely Villa (1909) and The Birth of a Nation (1915). A Short History of Film Editing (2 of 5) 1919‒1929: Soviet Montage – Sergei Eisenstein’s iconic works center on the concept of montage, editing that maximizes the effect of juxtaposed disparate shots. Along with Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov, Eisenstein advanced montage to a key component modernist, political filmmaking in the 1920s Soviet Union. – Importance and prominence of women in editing A Short History of Film Editing (3 of 5) 1930‒1959: Continuity Editing in the Hollywood Studio Era – With the development of the Hollywood studio system, movies refined the storytelling style known as continuity editing, which gives the viewer the impression that the action unfolds with spatiotemporal consistency. – 1940s cinema, particularly Italian neorealism, emphasized realism as a primary aesthetic principle of editing, favoring fewer cuts to capture the integrity of stories of ordinary people and actual locations. A Short History of Film Editing (4 of 5) 1960‒1989: Modern Editing Styles – The French New Wave produced some of the earliest and most dramatic examples of disjunctive editing, such as the jump cuts in films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). – In the 1960s and 1970s, disjunctive styles in classical genres contributed to the New Hollywood aesthetic. – By the 1980s, fast-paced editing in commercials and music videos began appearing in mainstream films. A Short History of Film Editing (5 of 5) 1990s‒Present: Editing in the Digital Age – Nonlinear digital editing brought about the most significant changes in film editing of the 1990s. Feature films today are edited with nonlinear computer-based systems regardless of whether they are shot on 35mm film or digital video. – The rapid pace of contemporary films seems to correlate with digital editing.  A contemporary film like Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) utilizes extremely quick cutting for action sequences. The Elements of Editing (1 of 15) The Cut and Other Transitions – Film editing is the process through which different images or shots are linked together sequentially in various relationships. 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 foundation for film editing is the cut, or a break in the image that marks the physical connection between two shots from two different pieces of film. The Elements of Editing (2 of 15) The Cut and Other Transitions – A shock cut juxtaposes two images whose dramatic difference creates a jarring effect. – Edits can be embellished by features such as fade-ins or fade-outs which guide our understanding of a transition by gradually darkening an image to make it appear or disappear. The Elements of Editing (3 of 15) The Cut and Other Transitions – Similarly, a dissolve superimposes one shot over the next as one image fades out while the other image fades in. – The iris masks the corners of the frame with a black, usually circular, form. – A wipe joins two images by moving a vertical, horizontal, or sometimes diagonal line across one image to replace it with a second. The Elements of Editing (4 of 15) Continuity Style – In both narrative and non-narrative films, editing is crucial for ordering space and time, with verisimilitude (“the appearance of being true”) allowing viewers to accept a constructed world as plausible. – Consistent spatial and temporal patterns enhance verisimilitude and form part of Hollywood’s overall continuity style. – Continuity editing focuses on the basic principle that each shot has a continuous relationship with the next shot. The Elements of Editing (5 of 15) Continuity Style – – – Spatial patterns are introduced through an establishing shot, or an initial long shot that establishes setting and orients the viewer. Conversations are usually established with a close shot of both characters, known as a two-shot. Over-the-shoulder shots alternate between the speaking characters. Additionally, reestablishing shots are used to restore a seemingly objective view and make the action clear to viewers. Inserts, or brief shots such as close-ups, help to overcome viewer’s spatial separation from the action, pointing out significant details. The Elements of Editing (6 of 15) Continuity Style – The 180-degree rule, the primary rule of continuity editing, maintains the relative positions of people and other elements of the mise-en-scène in a particular scene by dividing space with an imaginary axis of action line and filming only on one side of that axis. – The 30-degree rule specifies that one shot must be followed by another taken from a position greater than 30 degrees from that of the first. The Elements of Editing (7 of 15) Continuity Style – One 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, creating the effect of characters looking at each other. – An eyeline match is created when a character looks offscreen and the next shot appears to show what they are looking at. The Elements of Editing (8 of 15) Continuity Style – A match on action, similar to the eyeline match, is a continuity editing device whereby the direction of an action is picked up in a shot depicting the continuation of that action, such as the movement of a stone tossed into the air matched to the flight of that stone as it hits a window. – A graphic match takes advantage of one dominant shape or line in a shot that provides a visual transition to a similar shape or line in the next shot. The Elements of Editing (9 of 15) Continuity Style – Point-of-view shots, used to great effect in many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, first show a character looking, then a shot that shows the character’s optical point of view (as if the viewer were seeing through the character’s eyes), and then a third shot of the character that reclaims his or her literal perspective. – A reaction shot, which depicts a character’s response to something that viewers have just been shown, emphasizes human perspective in a way that can be a seen as standing in for the audience’s own response. The Elements of Editing (10 of 15) Continuity Style – Continuity editing strives for an overall effect of coherent space, but not all films adhere to the “rules” of continuity. Art films in particular use editing to construct less predictable spatial relations. The Elements of Editing (11 of 15) Editing and Temporality – Editing can manipulate the temporality of a narrative film. As a result, it is important to keep distinct the concepts of  story time: the sequence of events inferred in chronological order and the dead time in between  plot time: the length of time a movie depicts when telling its story  screen time: the actual length of time a movie takes to tell its story The Elements of Editing (12 of 15) Editing and Temporality – Editing organizes narrative time by manipulating a story’s chronology, or the order according to which shots or scenes convey the sequence of a story’s events. – An image from the present may be followed by one from the past, as in a flashback, an event from the present may be followed with one from the future in a flashforward, or an event may be narrated more than once in a manipulation of narrative frequency. The Elements of Editing (13 of 15) Editing and Temporality – Some edited sequences, often descriptive ones such as a series of shots identifying a setting, cannot be located precisely in time. – Narrative duration, the length of time used to present an event or action, does not necessarily conform to the length of time that passes in the story. – Devices like the cutaway allow for time to be condensed in the narrative, while the less frequent overlapping editing allows for the same action to be depicted over several cuts. The Elements of Editing (14 of 15) Editing and Temporality – The relative length of shots determines the pace of a film. Where fast-paced spy movies may use rapid cutting and have a shorter average shot length (ASL), more relaxed films may control pace with the use of long takes. – André Bazin in particular championed the sequence shot, in which an entire scene plays in one take, and the lasting effect of this style of editing has led researchers to coin the term slow cinema. The Elements of Editing (15 of 15) Editing and Temporality – Rhythm, or the organization of the pace of editing according to different paces or tempos, is determined by how quickly cuts are made. – The coordinated editing of temporal and spatial patterns can be organized into sequences or scenes, which comprise one or more shots that together describe a continuous space, time, and action. – Narrative segmentation refers to the division of scenes and sequences into larger narrative units. Thinking about Film Editing (1 of 4) Editing styles applied in different contexts—Hollywood, art cinema, documentary, or avant-garde—convey different perspectives. Editing can generate emotions and ideas through constructing patterns of seeing and moving beyond normal temporal and spatial limitations. Editing as a Subjective Experience or as an Objective Perspective – Responses are never guaranteed. – Differences in editing styles across cultures and historical periods Thinking about Film Editing (2 of 4) Primary Traditions in Editing Practices: Continuity, Disjunctions, and Convergences – The alternative practices that have paralleled and sometimes directly challenged continuity rules are called disjunctive editing. Disjunctive editing is visible editing that makes a break from cutting in the service of verisimilitude. – These practices have two main purposes:  To call attention to the editing for aesthetic, conceptual, ideological, or psychological purposes  To disorient, disturb, or viscerally affect viewers Thinking about Film Editing (3 of 4) Primary Traditions in Editing Practices: Continuity, Disjunctions, and Convergences – Disjunctive editing techniques include:  Jump cuts: cuts that interrupt a particular action to create discontinuities. One purpose behind these cuts is distanciation, or the distancing of viewers from the work of art.  Montages: an attention-grabbing collision between shots developed by Sergei Eisenstein, who argued that two contrasting or conflicting shots (a dialectical montage) will be synthesized into a visual concept when juxtaposed. Thinking about Film Editing (4 of 4) Primary Traditions in Editing Practices: Continuity, Disjunctions, and Convergences – Editing in the mainstream has been influenced by other traditions and styles and no longer strives for invisibility. – Digital technology has revolutionized editing. – Editing is perhaps the most distinctive feature of film form, and the one that effectively leads viewers to experience images viscerally and emotionally.