What is the ultimate goal of continuity editing

Editing 7

The essence of cinema is editing. It’s the combination of what can be

extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general

sense, put together in a kind of alchemy. —Francis Ford Coppola

Still from 127 Hours (2010). ©Fox Searchlight Pictures. All rights reserved./courtesy Everett Collection

What Is Editing? Chapter 7

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following: • Describe how editing can affect a film’s pacing, plot structure, and perception of its mise en

scène. • Explain how editing can juggle plot threads and rearrange the order of story content for

dramatic effect. • Identify the basic building blocks editing uses to tell a story, including how a variety of

transitions can affect perception of time. • Define systems of editing, such as continuity editing, discontinuity editing, and the mon-

tage theory, and describe how editing guides what a viewer is seeing and hearing in order to refocus attention and to enhance or even completely change what was in the script.

7.1 What Is Editing? In narrative movies, the story idea usually comes first, and the screenwriter puts his or her vision into words, describing what will be seen on the screen. With most movies, the director chooses and arranges what will actually be in the scene (the mise en scène) and how it plays out. The cin- ematographer composes various images in the camera that force the audience to view only part of what is in the scene, and to view it in a specific way with each shot. The editor then decides which of those shots to use, in what order they appear, and how long they are on the screen. This can have a critical effect on how well an audience can pick up on what the director has put into the scene. Directors typically work closely with both the cinematographer and editor to make sure their visions coincide. There are cases, however, when a director who wants to maintain personal control may shoot a scene in such a way that it can be edited in only one way, or is in one continuous take with no alternate angles to cut to. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope is a rather extreme example, an 80-minute film with only 10 individual shots running 5 to 10 minutes each and five of the cuts disguised to make it appear like only five individual shots. Sometimes viewers of Rope have the impression that the entire film was shot in one long take because the few cuts it employs seem so natural that they’re not perceived as cuts. Effective editing is sometimes called “invisible”

editing. This is because viewers often do not even realize when a shot changes from, say, a two-shot to a close-up of one actor, or even from one location to another, if the editor appropriately anticipates what view- ers want to see and when they want to see it, and remembers to maintain a plausible continuity between shots.

Some films take the opposite approach and use certain scenes to show off their abil- ity to edit numerous shots together, as in the battle scenes of 300, action sequences in XXX and Star Trek Into Darkness, and

party scenes in Baz Luhrman’s remake of The Great Gatsby. A film such as Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt) looks from beginning to end almost like an exercise in all the possible techniques of edit- ing. The montage theory of editing, which will be discussed later, is a rebellion against the idea of invisible editing, and instead considers that not only is editing the most important aspect

©Warner Bros. Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ In Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby, a flurry of short shots edited together adds to the quick-paced, almost frenzied nature of the party scenes.

What Is Editing? Chapter 7

of filmmaking but that the joining of shots should intentionally juxtapose disparate images to create new meaning. Most standard character dramas and comedies, however, tend to use func- tional continuity editing that serves the story and does not call attention to itself. Editing can shorten scenes that were shot, tighten them to pick up the pace and increase dramatic tension, and lengthen scenes, stretching out reactions longer than they were originally delivered by the actors on the set and so slowing the pace for dramatic emphasis. Typically, using fewer and lon- ger takes in a scene slows the pacing, while using more shots of briefer screen time quickens the pacing. (Compare, for example, the divergent editing styles in the 1974 and 2013 versions of The Great Gatsby.) Editing can even rearrange or eliminate words, actions, or entire sequences— segments made up of closely related scenes. For example, the last scene in the script might be split in half, with the first half placed at the beginning of the film so that the middle of the picture becomes an extended flashback. The entire plot structure can be changed through the editing. Quentin Tarantino has stated that the edited movie is really the final draft of the script. And of course editing can change the film yet again through various stages from “roughcut” to “preview print,” undergoing revisions for the “premiere” version and often a shortened “theatrical cut” (sometimes slightly different for different countries), then a revised “director’s cut” for home video, and sometimes even a later “definitive director’s cut.” Changes in different editions may be due to ratings or censorship concerns. They may be made to make story clarity more obvious for certain target audiences. Or scenes may be deleted simply to shorten the running time so theaters can schedule more showings per day.

To understand what goes into editing, it can be a useful exercise to read original screenplays in various drafts, and then to compare them with the finished film, if possible, in its various cuts. A select few DVDs and Blu-ray discs include the film’s screenplay, sometimes as a DVD-ROM file (as with Nurse Betty, The Stunt Man, and Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong) and occasionally as a file designed to appear on screen while you watch the film (as with Pirates of the Caribbean, Taxi Driver, Pleasantville, and American Beauty). Articles and entire books have examined particular films from script to screen in their many different incarnations along the way. A few films are available on DVD or Blu-ray in multiple versions that can allow you to trace the modifications in two or more different cuts for yourself, including Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional, and Oliver Stone’s Alexander, among others. Many foreign-language films are drastically recut for American release, primarily to shorten them and speed up pacing, but also to eliminate char- acter development and subplots deemed unnecessary for the basic storyline or too confusing for American audiences. It can be instructive to compare the very different versions of films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and Senso, or Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla (a.k.a. Gojira), to name just a few. Do the changes improve the films for an audience with a differ- ent cultural background, do they destroy the director’s original intent, or do they merely present the same basic story differently?

Another useful exercise is to watch your favorite films over again, picking out an especially impres- sive scene to view repeatedly, sometimes in slow motion, so you can observe all the different shots that make up the scene. Try to understand how the editor’s choices affect how you perceive the scene’s pacing, and how you notice specific props or actions more clearly at key moments than if different shots were used or a different number of shots were cut together over the same screen time. Additionally, if a DVD or Blu-ray edition of a film offers the opportunity in its supple- mentary features, it can be very instructive to watch unedited takes of a scene and then see the complete edited scene (and possibly alternate edited versions) immediately following. Certain DVDs include bonus features that break down selected scenes shot by shot, explaining how a sequence is constructed, sometimes comparing it with the shooting script and “storyboards” or

Rearranging the Story Into a Plot Chapter 7

“animatics” that directors use to pre-visu- alize the scenes. Others give you the option of viewing alternate camera angles during a scene. Sometimes (as with the Men in Black Deluxe Edition) they even let you rearrange shots or remix the audio to see the effect that has.

In this chapter, we will examine some of the basic tools of editing, which is one of the elements of filmmaking that occurs in post-production, or after principal pho- tography is completed. However, some aspects of editing may begin before film- ing ends, as the director will look at dai- lies, or the footage shot during a given day. Every editor, like every director, has his or her own style. And, as with the director’s relationship with the cinematographer, his

or her relationship and level of cooperation and supervision with the editor vary from film to film. But most editors operate with these tools at their disposal, so a working knowledge of them should help us to understand how the film is put together.

7.2 Rearranging the Story Into a Plot Before we get into the technical details of what goes into editing, you must understand the pur- pose of editing; briefly, it is to arrange the screenwriter’s story and cinematographer’s shots into the film’s final plot. The writer puts story elements into a plot in a certain order, the director