SUMMARY
Acting links cinema with theater as a medium of performance, but the film actor is not always the center of the show. A filmmaker typically combines an actor’s performance with other elements of design furnished by the camera, sets, lights, and props, and in the final combination of elements, the actor may or may not be central.
Compared with theater, film acting is more challenging because its condi-
tions are more artificial. The film actor must make do with little rehearsal, must know how much the camera will magnify what he or she does, must play to a
nonexistent audience, must know how a camera reads a scene, and must share
the scene with nonexistent props, characters, or effects that will be added in postproduction.
Film acting has emphasized a naturalistic playing style, and historically, actors have been divided into stars and supporting players. Among stars, the personality star has been the most common type. Since the beginning of cinema, viewers have been attracted to personality stars, and their appeal continues undiminished.
Film actors today may combine method and technical approaches, although the
method approach did not itself appear in cinema until the 1950s.
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Acting
KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
coverage
master shot
stars
expressionist
method acting
supporting players
extras
Stanislavsky
technical acting
homage
star persona
typage
SUGGESTED READINGS
Charles and Mirella Jona Affron, Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
Michael Caine, Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making (New York: Applause, 1997).
Steve Carlson, Hitting Your Mark: What Every Actor Really Needs to Know on a Hollywood Set (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Production, 1999).
James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).
Roberta Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).
Carole Zucker, Figures of Light: Actors and Directors Illuminate the Art of Film Acting (New York: Plenum, 1995).
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Editing: Making the Cut
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
■ define the role of editing in the production
■ describe the basic rules of continuity editing
process
and the ways in which they establish
continuity of action from shot to shot
■ describe the difference between linear and
nonlinear editing systems
■ explain how continuity editing establishes a
coherent and orderly physical world on screen
■ explain the basic methods of joining shots
■ explain how editing approaches that
■ explain how editing helps create continuity,
emphasize jump cuts, spatial fragmentation,
dramatic focus, tempo, and narration and
and thematic montage work as alternatives to
point of view
continuity editing
■ explain how editing establishes parallel action
From Chapter 5 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Editing: Making the Cut
■ describe how editing cues viewers to draw
■ explain how editing establishes perceptual
connections and interpretations across shots
constancies across shot and scene transitions
Many filmmakers regard editing as the single most important creative step in determining the look and shape of the finished film. A good editor can save a film that has been directed in a mediocre fashion, and poor editing can damage the work of even the finest director. This chapter looks closely at the role of editing in the production process, continuity editing codes (these are the rules of editing that are found in most commercial feature films), and alternatives to continuity editing.
WHAT IS EDITING?
Editing is the work of joining shots to assemble the finished film. The editor selects the best shots from the large amount of footage the director and cinematographer have provided, assembles these in order, and connects them using a variety of optical transitions.
In theory, the process of editing begins with the completion of filming or cinematography. In practice, however, the editor may begin consultations with the producer and director and may even begin cutting the film while principal filming is being completed.
Most editors, however, will not watch the process of filming or view the locations where the film is shot. This allows them to view the footage unhampered by knowledge about the actual conditions that existed in front of the camera and to visualize with greater freedom various ways of combining the shots.
The amount of authority that the editor has may vary from production to pro-
duction and, consequently, so may the editor’s relationship with the director and producer. These factors determine when the editor may begin work and in what capacity on any given production.
Despite these variations, the basics of editing have remained relatively constant.
The first task is to assemble a rough cut , which is done by eliminating all the unusable footage containing technical or performance errors. These may include out-of-focus shots or shots containing unstable camera movement, flubbed lines by an actor, inaudible sound recording, or lighting problems. Once all this footage has been removed, the editor then assembles the remaining footage in scene and sequence order. This rough assembly will be pruned, refined, and polished to yield the final cut . The final cut is the completed product of an editor’s work. It includes the complete assembly and timings of all shots in the film’s finished form. It is in going from the rough cut to the final cut that the real art and magic in editing lies.
LINEAR AND NONLINEAR SYSTEMS
Editors today use a nonlinear editing system to accomplish their work. A nonlinear system, such as the Avid, is computer-based and works with digital video (footage shot on film must be converted to digital video), giving an editor instantaneous access to any frame, shot, or edited sequence distributed anywhere in the existing footage.
The editor decides which footage to work on by using notes that describe the characteristics, strengths, and flaws of particular shots. Prior to the 1990s, when the film industry adopted digital editing systems, editors worked directly on celluloid film and had to search manually through all the footage to find a desired shot or segment. This 150
Editing: Making the Cut
older approach was a linear system because the editor could only search for one shot at a time and had to do so by viewing footage sequentially, from beginning to end.
Digital systems have made editing a much faster process, and the complex and instantaneous control they give an editor over the digitized footage helps to explain why so many films— Mission Impossible 2 (2000), An Enemy of the State (1999), Armageddon (1998)—have such fast and aggressive editing.
Films today have many, many more cuts and shot transitions than in earlier decades.
Many shots are only a few frames long, less than a second of screen time. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) features a dizzying array of speedy shot changes that often disorient the viewer because the camera perspective is shaky and unsteady. Nonlinear systems facilitate this more intensive editing style. To create the hyperfast shot transitions of Moulin Rouge (2001), editor Jill Bilcock worked with a massive amount of digitized foot
age. Scenes in the film were covered with a huge number of camera angles and setups. She then created files of shots labeled “men in top hats and tails” or “glamour shots of Nicole [Kidman]” and had instant electronic access to this material to use in building the film’s montage sequences. (A montage is a scene composed of a rapid series of shots.) Nonlinear systems enable editors to organize and manipulate such vast amounts of footage. A film such as Moulin Rouge could not exist without computerized editing.
While digital systems have given editors greater control over their footage and increased their abilities to manipulate it in ever more elaborate ways, these systems have disadvantages. Unlike linear systems, the editor does not view a film image but rather an electronic image on a small monitor, which is degraded in quality, with poor resolution.
This can bias editors toward close-ups because they will look better on the monitor than long shots. Furthermore, because the monitor’s image is a poor guide to the visual qualities of the actual film images, it forces an editor to rely more heavily on his or her notes about the footage. It is arguable that editors using linear systems get to know their footage MAN ON FIRE (PARAMOUNT, 2004)
Like many films today, Man on Fire has an especially fast cutting rate, with shot transitions occurring at a rate of more than one per second. This quick shot of Denzel Washington in a gun battle is only a few frames long, a fraction of a second in duration. The viewer barely sees it as a single shot. Nonlinear editing systems have accelerated the editing rate of contemporary films, giving editors new levels of control over huge amounts of footage and enabling them to create the complex montages that have become typical of modern film. Frame enlargement.
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Editing: Making the Cut
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM (UNIVERSAL, 2007)
Director Paul Greengrass has developed a style that many have called “shaky-cam.” It marries jerky, unstable camerawork to super-fast editing, creating an explosive style for action filmmaking. Shot lengths are extremely brief, and the film as a whole becomes an aggressive montage. Frame enlargement.
better because they must search manually through all of it to find what they need. The editor working on a digital system will not access footage that the notes have excluded.
Types of Visual Transitions
In joining the shots together into a rough and then a final cut, the film editor typically employs three basic types of visual transition. The most commonly used transition is the straight cut , which is visible on screen as a complete and instantaneous change of one image or shot to another. The cut is typically used to join shots where there is no change of narrative time or place involved. A cut from a shot of Julia Roberts looking off-frame right to a shot of Denzel Washington looking off-frame left tells the viewer that Roberts and Washington are looking at each other and that no changes in time or place have occurred in the story between the shots.
When changes of time or place do need to be specified, the editor has several techniques available. One is the dissolve . One shot begins to fade out to black, but before it is gone completely, the next shot begins to appear on top of it so that there is a moment of superimposition in which the two shots are visible together. If an editor dissolved from a shot of Julia Roberts to a shot of Denzel Washington, the viewer would know that some change in time or place in the story had occurred. The shot after the dissolve might be taking place several hours after the shot preceding the dissolve, or it may be occurring in a new location.
A substantial change of time or place is often indicated by the use of a fade . In this case, the first shot fades completely to black. The darkness lasts on screen for a few moments, and then the next shot begins to fade in. In a fade, there is no moment of superimposition. If the editor faded from a shot of Roberts to Washington, the shot after the fade could be taking place several days or even weeks after the first.
By using these basic transitions, editors can establish important relations of time and place in the story. These visual codes developed early in the history of film to enable filmmakers to organize their story material and construct complex narratives by, for example, using a fade to establish that one set of events is occurring at a later time than a 152
Editing: Making the Cut
A VERY LONG
ENGAGEMENT
(WARNER BROS.,
2004)
Because the dissolve
overlaps images,
editors often use this
transition for poetic
effects. Matilde (Audrey
Tautou) is searching
for her fiancé, who
was lost on the battle-
field during World
War I. She telephones
a woman who has
information and is
told about a group
of soldiers who found
a body hidden in an
underground bunker—
perhaps this was her
fiancé. As the call ends,
she reflects on this
information. The scene
plays in a single frame
containing a series of
shots that dissolve in
and out as split-screen
effects. This design
presents the story infor-
mation in a very fluid
and poetic manner.
Frame enlargements.
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Editing: Making the Cut
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
(COLUMBIA PICTURES,
1962)
Editors pay very close atten-
tion to the visual proper-
ties of the shots they join
together. They carefully
choose the edit points,
where they place cuts and
other optical transitions.
This famous cut in Lawrence
of Arabia —from a close-up
of Lawrence (Peter O’Toole)
blowing out a match to a
long shot of the Arabian
desert with the sun just
below the horizon—startles
the viewer with its radical
change of scale and with
the poetic association that
motivates the cut, one that
links the burning match
with the fiery desert. Frame
enlargements.
previous scene. But filmmakers also use these optical transitions for their poetic and expressive visual effects. Editors examine the footage closely, and when they join shots together, they often do so because of the suggestive effects and ideas these combinations can create.
An editor may use a cut to join shots with similar graphic properties. The instantaneous change of images produced by the cut calls attention to the graphic similarities or differences, as the frame enlargements from Lawrence of Arabia (1962) demonstrate. In Apollo 13 (1995), the cut was used poetically to show astronaut Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), stranded in a crippled spacecraft thousands of miles from Earth, and his anxious wife
“looking” at one another (across the cut and the thousands of miles that separate them).
Because it overlaps images, a dissolve can create many poetic effects. For a scene in Blow (2001), when drug kingpin George Jung (Johnny Depp), in prison for the remainder of his life, writes a tender letter to his father (Ray Liotta), whom he will never see again, the editor joined shots of the characters, seen in separate locations, with dissolves. One series of shots shows George taping a letter in prison, and the other shows his father listening to the letter at a later date. The edited scene goes back and forth between shots in each series. Each pair of shots is linked with a dissolve, which connects the images of each character and suggests that the emotional bond between them persists despite their physical separation.
In The English Patient (1996), editor Walter Murch used a dissolve as the transition out of a flashback to show the youthful Count Almashy (Ralph Fiennes) touch
ing the face of his older self (by overlapping these images at the midpoint of the dissolve) as he lay dying at a point many years later in the story.
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Editing: Making the Cut
APOLLO 13 (UNIVERSAL,
1995)
Separated by thousands of miles,
Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) and his
wife (Kathleen Quinlan) “see”
each other across the cut. Their
matching eyelines and the cam-
era angles imply that they are
looking at one another, despite
the literal impossibility at this
point in the story for them to do
so. The film’s editor has created a
moment of visual poetry. Frame
enlargements.
OTHER OPTICAL TRANSITIONS Editors can use other optical transitions to sequence story information and create visual effects. In this regard, however, contemporary film is relatively impoverished. A viewer who looks at films from the silent period, for example, may notice devices such as the iris . Irises were used much like fades to signal the end of an important chapter in the story or to conclude a scene or film. In an iris-out, a circular THE CIRCUS (UNITED
ARTISTS, 1928)
Contemporary films seldom
use the iris, which is a shame
because it offers filmmakers a
uniquely expressive visual effect.
It directs the viewer’s attention to
a selected portion of the frame,
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