Camera Placement And Pace The Intervention Of Subjective States
Numerous filmmakers have used a subjective camera placement and or shifts in pace to alert us that the narrative has shifted into a subjective or dream or unreal state as opposed to the in-the-world, real state that has preceded it. Beginning with Georges Melies, best known for his film A Trip to the Moon 1902 , subjective states have been a narrative concern and creative challenge. Luis Bunuel simply ignored the distinction between the objective and subjective from his first film, Un Chien...
conclusion Mqm
Whether the purpose of the set piece is to highlight the voice of the author, as in the case of Itami, or to subvert the genre expectation, as in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the MTV set piece is a powerful tool in the filmmaker's tool box. Its use often alters conventional narrative. Used strategically that alteration can add meaning to the narrative, as in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, or it can tilt our experience toward feeling and mood rather than narrative, as in Wong...
notesreferences Xxp
1. Paul Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946 Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1989 , 9. 3. Richard Meran Barsam, ed., Nonfiction Film A Critical History New York E. P. Dutton, 1973 , 99-100. 4. Richard Dyer MacCann, World War II Armed Forces Documentary 1943 , in Nonfiction Film Theory and Criticism, Richard Meran Barsam, ed. New York E. P. Dutton, 1976 , 139. 5. Alan Lovell and Jim Hillier, Studies in Documentary London Martin Secker and Warburg, 1972 , 105. 7. Quoted...
The Contemporary Context
Action has exploded recently in the U.S. film industry. It seems that the more action a film has, the more successful it is. Advances in technology and special effects have played a role here however, the renewed popularity of action movies has meant the development of a cadre of directors who are the Siegels and Hathaways of their day. Action sequences have become far more important and expensive than they were in the time of Siegel or Hathaway. These directors have become the most successful...
Natural Born Killers
Natural Born Killers, from a story by Quentin Tarantino, tells the story of two mass murderers, Mickey and Mallory Knox Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis . The film begins with a killing spree, moves back to their meeting and their three-week sweep through the Southwest. In those three weeks, they kill 52 people. They are captured, after being snakebitten, while looking for snakebite serum in a drugstore. Their captor, Detective Jack Scagnetti, seems as pathological as the two young killers....
BASIL WRIGHT AND night mail
Night Mail 1936 , produced by John Grierson and the General Post Office film unit and directed by Basil Wright, was certainly purposive, and it used sound particularly to create the message of the film. The film itself is a simple story of the delivery of the mail by train from London to Glasgow, but it is also about the commitment and harmony of the postal workers. If the film has a simple message, it's the importance of the job of delivering the mail. The sense of harmony among the workers is...
Dialogue 1
As mentioned earlier, dialogue can also yield results beyond the literal content of the words. In Richard Lester's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum 1966 , when Sudellus Zero Mostel speaks loudly and his master's son, Hero, whispers softly in response, the shift in tone immediately tells us something about each character. The same is true of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane 1941 . When Kane and Leland speak, the tone, pitch, and loudness variations tell us about their relationship and...
HERZOG OTHER WORLDs
Stanley Kubrick was not alone in using an editing style to create a psychological context for a place or a character. Werner Herzog created a megalomania that requires conquests in Aguirre The Wrath of God 1972 . Aguirre the Spanish conquistador is the subject of the film. Even more challenging was Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser 1974 , the nineteenth-century story about a foundling who, having been kept isolated, has no human communication skills at the onset of the story. He is taken in...
Constructing A Lucid Continuity
Seamlessness has become a popular term to describe effective editing. A seamless, or smooth, cut is the editor's first goal. A seamless cut doesn't draw attention to itself and comes at a logical point within the shot. What is that logical point It is not always obvious, but viewers always notice when an inappropriate edit point has been selected. For example, suppose that a character is crossing the room in one shot and is seated in the next. These two shots do not match because we haven't...
Matching Flow Over A Cut
What is the best way to show action without making the continuity appear to be mechanical Every action has a visual component that can be disassembled into its various parts. Having breakfast may mean removing the food from the refrigerator, preparing the meal, laying out the dishes, eating, and cleaning up. If a scene calls for a character to eat breakfast, all of these sundry elements would add up to some rather elaborate action that is probably irrelevant to the scene's dramatic intention....
The Nonlinear Narrative
Nonlinear storytelling has been a factor at least since Luis Bunuel's Un Chien d'Andalou 1929 . Although unusual and the exception to the rule, it is by no means unimportant, as a film such as Orson Welles's Citizen Kane 1941 attests. However, to understand the notion of nonlinearity, it is important to first define the linear narrative. One feature of the linear narrative is its reliance on plot and upon our involvement with the main character. A second equally important feature of the linear...
Questions Of Ethics Politics And Aesthetics
Documentary filmmakers go out and film events that affect the lives of particular people. They film in the place that the event occurs with the people who are involved. They then edit the film. Questions immediately arise. Would the truest representation of the facts be obtained by simply stringing all of the footage together, or is some shaping necessary As soon as the shaping process begins, ethical questions arise. Is the event honestly presented Does it accurately reflect the perceptions of...
the case of ang lees CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON
The set piece as a challenge for filmmakers is as old as Griffith's Intolerance 1916 . The set piece has ranged from sensational to more purposeful intentions. The attack on the train in Lean's Lawrence of Arabia 1962 is spectacle attuned to mythmaking. The cornfield sequence in Hitchcock's North by Northwest 1959 , on the other hand, is almost academic in its confident approach to the chase. Ranging in between we have the final shootout in Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch 1969 and the car chase in...
The General An Early Action Sequence
Buster Keaton's The General 1927 is set during the Civil War Figure 17.1 . Johnny Gray Keaton is a railroad engineer who attempts to enlist when the war begins. He is refused. His girlfriend, Annabelle Marion Beck , views the rejection as a result of his cowardice. Most of the story relates to a Union plot to steal Gray's train, which is called the General, and take it north. Johnny Gray is outraged when the train is stolen. He pursues the Union men to recapture the train. Unbeknownst to...
Leans Art
Like all directors, David Lean had particular ideas or themes that recurred in his work. How he presented those themes or integrated them into his films is the artful dimension of his work. Lean made several period films and used exotic locations as the backdrop for his stories. For him, the majesty of the human adventure lent a certain per spective that events and behavior are inscrutable and noble, the very opposite to the modern day penchant for scientific rationalism. Whether this means...
Dziga Vertov The Experiment Of Realism
If Eisenstein illustrated an editing theory devoted to reshaping reality to incite the population to support the revolution, Dziga Vertov was as vehement that only the documented truth could be honest enough to bring about true revolution. Vertov described his goals in the film The Man with a Movie Camera 1929 as follows The Man with a Movie Camera constitutes an experiment in the cinematic transmission of visual phenomena without the aid of intertitles a film with no intertitles , script a...
FRANK CAPRA AND why we fight
Frank Capra, one of Hollywood's most successful directors, was commissioned by then-Chief of Staff George C. Marshall to produce a series of films to prepare soldiers inducted into the army for going to war. The Why We Fight series 1943-1945 , seven films produced to be shown to the troops, are among the most successful propaganda films ever made. As Richard Dyer MacCann suggests about the films, They attempted 1 to destroy faith in isolation, 2 to build up a sense of the strength and at the...
The Case Of Happiness
Todd Solondz's Happiness 1998 is a portrait of a suburban family, the Jordans. The story focuses on the parents, Mona and Lenny Jordan their adult daughters, Joy, Helen, and Trish Bill Maplewood, a psychiatrist, and the husband of Trish Jordan Billy, the son of Bill and Trish Maplewood Andy, Joy's boyfriend and Allen, a patient of Bill Maplewood. The prism for the narratives is relationships love relationships, relationships of desire, parent-child relationships, and sibling relationships. The...
The Picture Edit and Pace
Once the rough assembly is satisfactory, the question of narrative clarity has, to a certain extent, been satisfied. Shots flow from one to another and suggest continuity. What is still lacking is the dramatic emphasis of one shot relative to another. This is the role of pace, which is fine-tuned in the second editing stage. The product of this stage, the fine cut, is the culmination of all of the editor's decisions. At the end of the fine cut, the choices have all been made, and the sound...
Multipurpose Dialogue
Mike Nichols was very creative about the editing of his dialogue sequences in The Graduate 1967 . In the first dialogue sequence, Benjamin Dustin Hoffman confesses to his father that he is worried about his future. The entire scene is presented in a single midshot of Benjamin. When the father joins the conversation, he enters the frame and sits out of focus in the foreground. More typical is the famous seduction scene in which Mrs. Robinson Anne Bancroft proposes an affair to Benjamin. This...
Documentary
The documentary sequence has very different criteria for success than those of the dramatic sequence. Both must follow certain rules of editing to communicate with the audience, but beyond simple continuity, the differences far outweigh the similarities. As Karel Reisz suggested, A story-film and this will serve as a working distinction between documentary and story-films is concerned with the development of a plot the documentary is concerned with the exposition of a theme. It is out of this...
early experiment in soundalfred hitchcocks BLACKMAIL
Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail 1929 has many of the characteristics of the earliest sound films. It was shot in part as a silent film and in part as a sound film. The silent sequences have music and occasional sound effects. These sequences are dynamic the opening sequence, which shows the apprehension and booking of a criminal by the police, is a good example. Camera movement is fluid, images are textured, and the editing is fast-paced. The sound sequences, on the other hand, are dominated by...
the case of LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL
Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful 1997 is unusual in that its set pieces are concept-driven and their pace has almost no role in their effectiveness. They are, nevertheless, an example of the MTV style. Rather than looking to the historical examples mentioned earlier in this chapter, it's more meaningful to look at Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times 1936 and Woody Allen's Sleeper 1975 . Like those comedies, which were built up around the persona of the actor-director, Life Is Beautiful is a fable...
a dramatic punctuation the sound cut
Hitchcock found a novel way to link the concepts of trains and murders in The 39 Steps 1935 . Richard Hannay Robert Donat has taken into his home a woman who tells him she is a spy and is being followed she and the country are in danger. He is woken up by the woman, who now has a knife in her back and a map in her hand. To escape a similar fate, he pretends to be a milkman, sidesteps the murderers who are waiting for him, and takes a train to Scotland, where he will follow the map she has given...
International Advances
The year 1950 is a useful point to demarcate a number of changes in film history, among them the pervasive movement for change in film. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the growth in achievement and importance on an international level. Just as Hollywood experimented with the wide screen in this period, a group of British filmmakers challenged the orthodoxy of the documentary, a group of French writers who became filmmakers suggested that film authorship allowed personal styles to be...
suspense the extreme long shot
In Foreign Correspondent 1940 , Johnnie Jones Joel McCrea has discovered that the Germans have kidnapped a European diplomat days before the beginning of World War II. The rest of the world believes that the diplomat was assassinated in Holland, but it was actually a double who was killed. Only Jones knows the truth. Back in London, he attempts to expose the story and unwittingly confides in a British politician Herbert Marshall who secretly works for the Nazis. Now Jones's own life is...
Preserving Screen Direction
Narrative continuity requires that the sense of direction be maintained. In most chase sequences, the heroes seem to occupy one side of the screen, and the villains occupy the other. They approach one another from opposite directions. Only when they come together in battle do they appear in the same frame. Maintaining screen direction is critical if the film is to avoid confusion and keep the characters distinct. A strict left-to-right or right-to-left pattern must be maintained. When a...
Subjective Point of View
The use of subjective camera placement has already been mentioned, but subjective camera placement alone doesn't account for the power Lean's sequences can have. The burial scene in Doctor Zhivago illustrates this point. In 32 shots running just over 3 minutes, Lean re-created the 5-year-old Yuri Zhivago's range of feelings at the burial of his mother. The sequence begins in extreme long shot. The burial party proceeds. Two-thirds of the frame are filled by sky and mountains. The procession is...
the case of IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love is ostensibly a very simple love story set in 1962 Hong Kong. Overcrowding leads 2 young couples to rent rooms with other families. The man, Chow Mo Wan, works in a newspaper office. The woman, Su Li Zhen, works as a secretary for the head of a business. We never see his wife or her husband, but eventually we understand that his wife and her husband have been carrying on an affair. The marriages dissolve, and Chow Mo Wan and Su Li Zhen begin their own affair....
Luis Bunuel Visual Discontinuity
Surrealism, expressionism, and psychoanalysis were intellectual currents that affected all of the arts in the 1920s. In Germany, expressionism was the most influential, but among the artistic community in Paris, surrealism had Figure 1.29 The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929. Still provided by British Film Institute. Figure 1.29 The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929. Still provided by British Film Institute. Figure 1.30 The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929. Still provided by Moving Image and Sound...
Sergei Eisenstein The Theory Of Montage
Eisenstein was the second of the key Russian filmmakers. As a director, he was perhaps the greatest. He also wrote extensively about film ideas and eventually taught a generation of Russian directors. In the early 1920s, however, he was a young, committed filmmaker. Figure 1.12 Mother, 1926. Still provided by Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives. Figure 1.12 Mother, 1926. Still provided by Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives. Figure 1.13 Mother, 1926. Still provided by Museum of...
the case of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is a traditional war film framed by a modern prologue. The former Private Ryan, with his wife, children, and grandchildren, visit the American cemetery where so many who died on D-Day and in its immediate aftermath are buried. He is there to visit the grave of Captain John Miller who died on the rescue mission that saved his life. The body of the narrative focuses on D-Day and the mission to save Ryan, after the War Department receives word that his three...
Matching Action
To provide cut points within shots, directors often ask performers to introduce body language or vocalization within shots. The straightening of a tie and the clearing of a throat are natural points to cut from long shot to close-up when there is no physical movement within the frame to provide the cut point. Where movement is involved, here-to-there is a trick directors use to avoid filming an entire action. When an actor approaches a door, he puts his hand on the doorknob when he greets...
ROBERT FLAHERTY AND man of aran
Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran 1934 closely resembles a commercial film. In this fictionalized story of the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland, Flaherty used actual islanders in the film, but he created the plot according to his goals rather than basing it on the lives of the islanders. Man of Aran tells the story of a family that lives in a setting where they are dwarfed by nature and challenged by the land and sea. Flaherty used two shark hunts to suggest the bravery of the islanders, and...
The Case Of Magnolia
Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia 1999 functions as a nonlinear drama but, as in the case of Anderson's other films, it also functions as a movie about moviemaking a constructed reality , or more broadly the media. In the case of Magnolia, the prologue consists of narration. A skeptical nar rator describes in detail 3 remarkable coincidences from the past. Each is framed as a past how-done-it as opposed to a who-done-it. Each incident ends in a death the first a murder, the second an accident,...
a simple introduction parallel action
Strangers on a Train 1951 is the story of two strangers who meet on a train one is a famous tennis player Farley Granger , the other is a psychopath Robert Walker . Bruno, the psychopath, suggests to Guy that if they murdered the person who most hampers the progress of the other's life, no one would know. There would be no motive. So begins this story of murder, but before the offer is made, Hitchcock introduced us to the two strangers in a rather novel way. Using parallel editing, Hitchcock...
Imaginative Documentary
As discussed in Chapters 7 and 25, realism is the basis of the documentary. When a documentary is edited, the footage of an event is made to conform 10 an interpretation of the event that, within the parameters of sponsorship, is truthful. The greatest expression of this characteristic of the documentary is found in cinema verite works. What if the filmmaker's goal is to reveal an insight or an interpretation that wouldn't be available from a straightforward editing of the footage What if the...
D W Griffith Dramatic Construction
D. W. Griffith is the acknowledged father of film editing in its modern sense. His influence on the Hollywood mainstream film and on the Russian revolutionary film was immediate. His contributions cover the full range of dramatic construction the variation of shots for impact, including the extreme long shot, the close-up, the cutaway, and the tracking shot parallel editing and variations in pace. All of these are ascribed to Griffith. Porter might have clarified film narrative in his work, but...
levels of meaning the cutaway
In The 39 Steps, Hannay is on the run from the law. He has sought refuge for the night at the home of a Scottish farmer. The old farmer has a young wife that Hannay mistakes for his daughter. When the three of them sit down for dinner, the farmer prays. Hannay, who has been reading the paper, notices an article about his escape and his portrayal as a dangerous murderer. As he puts down the paper at the table, the farmer begins the prayer. The farmer, suspecting a sexual attraction developing...
Providing Adequate Coverage
Directors who do their work properly provide their editors with a variety of shots from which to choose. For example, if one shot features a character in repose, a close shot of the character as well as a long shot will be filmed. If need be, the props in the shot will be moved to ensure that the close shot looks like the long one. The background and the lighting must support the continuity. Similarly, if an action occurs in a shot, a long shot will be taken of the entire action, and later a...
Digital Reality
From the earliest days, film has struggled with two opposite impulses to make its narratives as realistic as possible and to create the fantastic, the reimagined reality. These two impulses were represented in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Louis Lumi re and his brother, and by George M li s. Now, over 100 years later, digitization of the image, including special effects and post-production, has fused the two opposite worlds. Now images can look real and yet can originate out of an imagined...
Contents
Acknowledgments for the Fourth Edition xi Introduction to the Fourth Edition xv I HISTORY OF FILM EDITING 1 3 The Influence of the Documentary 53 4 The Influence of the Popular Arts 71 5 Editors Who Became Directors 81 6 Experiments in Editing Alfred Hitchcock 97 8 International Advances 128 9 The Influence of Television and Theatre 148 10 New Challenges to Filmic Narrative Conventions 159 II The MTV Influence on Editing I 184 12 The MTV Influence on Editing II 196 14 The Appropriation of Style...
Alfred Hitchcock
Few directors have contributed as much to the mythology of the power of editing as has Alfred Hitchcock. Eisenstein and Pudovkin used their films to work out and illustrate their ideas about editing, but Hitchcock used his films to synthesize the theoretical ideas of others and to deepen the repertoire by showcasing the possibilities of editing. His work embraces the full gamut of editing conceits, from pace to subjective states to ideas about dramatic and real time. This chapter highlights a...
objective anarchy jeanluc godard
Perhaps no figure among the New Wave filmmakers raised more controversy or was more innovative than Jean-Luc Godard.6 Although attracted to genre films, he introduced his own personal priorities to them. As time passed, these priorities were increasingly political. In terms of style, Godard was always uncomfortable with the manipulative character of narrative storytelling and the camera and editing devices that best carried out those storytelling goals. Over his career, Godard increasingly...
sound time and place fritz langs M
Fritz Lang's M 1931 , although made only two years after Hitchcock's Blackmail, seems much more advanced in its use of sound, even though Lang faced many of the same technological limitations that Hitchcock did. Like Blackmail, Lang's film contains both dialogue sequences and silent sequences with music or sound effects. How did Lang proceed In brief, he edited the sound as if he were editing the visuals. M is the story of a child murderer, of how he paralyzes a German city, and of how the...
the dynamics of relativity
When Akira Kurosawa directed Rashomon 1951 , he presented a narrative story without a single point of view. Indeed, the film presents four different points of view. Rashomon was a direct challenge to the conventions that the narrative clarity that the editor and director aim to achieve must come from telling the story from the point of view of the main character and that the selection, organization, and pacing of shots must dramatically articulate that point of view Figure 8.1 . Rashomon is a...
conclusion Cad
Perhaps more than any other genre, the documentary has been successful in communicating ideas. The interplay of image and sound by filmmakers such as Riefenstahl, Capra, and Jennings has been remarkably effective and has greatly enhanced the filmmaker's repertoire of editing choices. These devices have found their way back into the fictional film, as evidenced in the work of neorealist filmmakers and the early American television directors whose feature film work has been marked by a pronounced...
VON TROTTA FEMINIsM AND POLITICs
In the 1970s, Margarethe von Trotta distinguished herself as a screenwriter on a series of films directed by her husband, Volker Schlondorff. They Figure 10.9 Clockers, 1995. Courtesy Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks Spike Lee. Figure 10.9 Clockers, 1995. Courtesy Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks Spike Lee. codirected the film adaptation of the Henrich Boll novel, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum 1975 . In 1977, von Trotta began her career as a writer-director with The Second Awakening of...
the jump cut and discontinuity
The New Wave began in 1959 with the consecutive releases of Fran ois Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, but in fact its seeds had developed ten years earlier in the writing of Alexandre Astruc and Andr Bazin and the film programming of Henri Langlois at the Cin math que in Paris. The writing about film was cultural as well as theoretical, but the viewing of film was global, embracing film as part of popular culture as well as an artistic achievement. What developed in...
A Contemporary Action Sequence
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas directed and produced Raiders of the Lost Ark 1981 together. The film exemplifies many remarkable action sequences. The focus here is on the sequence in which Indiana Jones chases and captures the trunk containing the Lost Ark of Canaan. The film tells the story of adventurous archeologist Indiana Jones and his pursuit of the Ark. He is competing with a French archeologist and his financiers, the pre-war Nazis, who believe that the Ark has supernatural power....