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Chapter 6: EditingChapter OverviewObjectives: After reading this chapter, you should be able to•Understand the relationship between the shot and the cut.•Describe the film editor’s major responsibilities.•Explain the various ways that editing establishes spatial relationships between shots.•Describe some of the ways that editing manipulates temporal relationships.•Understand the significance of the rhythm of a movie and describe how editing is usedto establish that rhythm.•Distinguish between the two broad approaches to editing: editing to maintain continuity and editing to create discontinuity.•Describe the fundamental building blocks of continuity editing.•Describe the methods of maintaining consistent screen direction.•Name and define the major types of transitions between shots, and describe how they can be used either to maintain continuity or to create discontinuity.Film EditingThe first movies consisted of single shots, but filmmakers soon developed the techniqueknown as editing to coordinate a series of shots into a coherent whole. Movies generally areshot out of continuity (in other words, very much out of chronological order), often in manytakes. The resulting footage must later be organized into a form that will be comprehensibleto the audience, create meaning, and perhaps evoke specific emotional and intellectualresponses. If the shot is the basic unit of film language, editing is its grammar: for somefilmmakers, it is the most important shaper of film form. Editing derives its power from thenatural human tendency to interpret visual information in context. When two images (twoshots, for example) are placed in close proximity to each other, we interpret them differentlythan we would have if we saw only one or the other image in isolation. Understanding theeffects of editing on meaning, and having the vocabulary needed to describe the methodsemployed to achieve those effects, is the point of Chapter Six.At its most fundamental level, editing is the process of managing the transitions (called cuts)from one shot to another. Those transitions can be managed to produce a sense ofcontinuity or of discontinuity. It’s important to understand the difference between thesetwo goals, and to note that individual films can contain examples of both continuity anddiscontinuity editing.Editing that strives for continuity must carefully manage spatial and temporal relationshipsbetween shots to ensure that viewers understand the movement of figures in the frame andthe progression of narrative information. One of the most fundamental conventions of continuity editing is the use of a master (or
establishing) shot to establish for viewers the overall layout of a space in which a scenetakes place. This shot, when followed by shots that are in closer implied proximity tosubjects, makes it easy for viewers to understand relative positions of people and objectsthroughout a scene.The Kuleshov EffectRussian filmmaker and theorist Lev Kuleshov famously demonstrated the power of film editingand the viewer’s role in making sense of filmic space and cinematic time. When Kuleshovintercut an image of Russian actor Ivan Mozhukhin with shots of a dead woman, a smilingchild, and a dish of soup, his point was that a spectator would imbue an identical shot withdifferent meanings and feelings if it appeared within different contexts. In anotherdemonstration, Kuleshov took shots filmed at different times and locations and assembledthem into a logical sequence that viewers perceived as continuous in time, place, and action.This ability to create spatiotemporal continuity where none exists allows for the commonproduction practice of filming out of sequence, across multiple locations and time periods,and in and out of the studio. Scissors and GlueConsisting of single shots, the earliest films required no editing. When filmmakers beganusing multiple shots to develop longer and more complicated stories, film editors becameessential collaborators in the creative process. In the early silent era, editors were frequentlywomen, such as Dorothy Arzner and Margaret Booth, who "cut" film with scissors or razorsand took the edited scenes to a projection room for a director to view and critique. (In thelate 1920s, by the way, Arzner moved from editing to directing movies—she was one of thefew female directors in the Hollywood studio system of the ‘20s and ‘30s.) In 1924, the firstMoviola editing machine was sold to Fairbanks Studios for $125. A small device similar to aprojector, the Moviola included a small viewing lens instead of a projection lens and washandcranked. The device allowed editors to move film backward and forward at projectionspeed or any other speed they could control with their hands. From the late 1920s to the mid1960s, Moviola dominated the market for film-editing equipment, developing newer modelsthat handled sound and picture, ones that accommodated multiple picture takes, and evenminiature devices for World War II journalists and combat cinematographers to use (Moviolahistory).From Upright to FlatbedFilm-editing machines such as those first produced by Moviola and other manufacturers werecalled uprights because an editor could sit upright and edit footage. The next majorinnovation was the flatbed, a device that resembles a table and includes a television-likescreen or two for reviewing. The flatbed enabled editors to lay longer reels flat on the editingsurface; the high-speed, electrical motor enabled them to rewind and fast forward throughlong sections of film at higher speed than was possible with uprights. In addition, theflatbeds’ monitors made it possible for more than one person to review cut sequences.Filmmakers could now review and discuss scenes without going into a projection room.