The first lecture highlighted the importance of being specific when talking about the editing of film. To articulate your points on a film or analyse it properly you must be able to have the right language and or terms with regard to editing and to be specific when discussing them. In the book ‘A Short Guide To Writing About Film’, Timothy J. Corrigan describes editing as “the linking of two different pieces of film” and that “the break between… two images is a cut”.
Is the editing fast or slow? An average take is between 3 and 5 seconds, be specific in the speed. How long is each cut? How many cuts are used in one sequence. You should practice counting cuts within a sequence to give yourself a good base for estimating further down the line.
What types of cuts are used? There are many different types of cut and most are used conventionally to represent certain things like the passing of time or change in location. Is it a straight cut? – literally one frame placed after the other. Is it a fade in/out? – where the two frames blend into one another which is also a kind of dissolve. Cuts can be used to show a movement in space and time and often the conventions surrounding each cut can be reinvented to create certain feels. For example in John Ford’s ‘The Searchers’ (1956) we have a series of dissolves (conventionally used to show a change of scene) that last over 30 seconds creating an overlap/montage of images depicting John Wayne riding through different scenery as the seasons seem to change. this sequence shows us a long passing of time.
It is also important to consider the audio and how the cut of a visual very rarely means the audio is cut at the same time in the same way. More often than not we hear the sound of a visual before we see the visual. Audio plays a big part in films and so should be considered as importantly as the visual cut.
We were shown three sequences, Man Ray’s ‘Emak-Bakia’ (1926), Matthias Müller’s ‘Home Stories’ (1990) and Ang Lee’s ‘Hulk’ (2003). All had very different styles of editing and the point was to try and articulate what we saw with regard to how the sequences were edited. The problem we found when relaying our discussions )which we did in smaller groups) to the class as a whole, was that when trying to describe a film we lean towards the theme and move away form the specific editing tools and processes. The Hollywood film is meant to do this. The first films used certain cuts that became convention. (An early experiment in editing involved a long shot of a man siting on the opposite side of a room on a chair looking at his hand. The camera in this case becomes us and us the camera, we are viewing this scene as if we were the camera. What happened next was a straight cut to a close up of the mans hand. All of a sudden we are the man looking down at his hand, people had great trouble getting used to this kind of editing because it was so different to reality. The cut threw us through time and space and body.) So these conventions became the norm we have today and cinema began to try and adopt a invisible style of editing where the audience is unaware of the cuts and the film flows in a way that lets the audience focus on the story. Of course, like any other media, people began questioning the done thing and trying new ways of attacking or engaging the senses. All of sudden cuts are meant to be notable seen and to create a specific felling as a result.
We also watched an example of a film that had an absence of cuts, Claude Lelouche’s ‘Renevous’ (1976) a continuous shot from a camera attached to the front of a sports car racing through the streets of Paris. What does this lack of cuts do/mean when we think about editing and its effects? I have enbeded the clips below.
I could not find the specific clip from ‘Hulk’ but for those that have seen the film it is an early scene where an experiment is being done on a toad. The editing is reminiscent of comic books as frames are split and composite together breaking the ‘frames’ in different ways. (Part of the conclusion to the whole lecture is that are analytical skills within editing will improve so please forgive this brief description of the hulk sequence.)
