Film and Video Editing

Roger Crittenden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135372699
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Televisione

This book traces the history and current practice in film and television arguing that a solid base of knowledge of the craft of the skill is essential for the proper application of the new techniques. Based on the highly acclaimed and well-used first edition published by Thames and Hudson a decade and a half ago, this second edition has been thoroughly updated, revised and extended. The aesthetics and techniques of editing are examined in depth and illustrated with numerous examples from past and present films and individual editors' work. Of relevance to the directors, camera and sound people as well as editors and aspiring editors, it will provide an invaluable reference tool to all students of film and video.

1: Historical perspective: how editing has evolved

At the turn of the century in France two paths along which film would develop were being pioneered. The Lumière brothers were demonstrating how events could be the basis of film reality, and Georges Méliès was showing how manipulation of reality could become a film event.

Everything that has subsequently been recorded on film or video fits somewhere in the formal spectrum between these two extremes. In neither case however was the potential of editing even hinted at. The Lumières were content to show an event as it occurred before the lens, and Méliès enjoyed manipulating images through multiple exposure and creative legerdemain. The cut was not part of their language.

Yet the basic form of the cinema was established within ten years of the first public presentation of moving pictures. Although it is common practice to cite the films of D.W.Griffith as the first to contain the elements which allow us to juxtapose different types of shot when cutting, most of these elements had previously been used around the turn of the century by a group of British filmmakers.

These pioneers (R.W.Paul, Cecil Hepworth, James Williamson, G.A.Smith and Alfred Collins) incorporated close-ups, sequencing of action, parallel action, variations of set-up and camera movement in their films. In British Creators of Film Technique (1948), Georges Sadoul suggested that these early film-makers were following the principles of sequence and change of view established before cinema in the telling of stories with lantern slides.

This sequencing with slides can be regarded as the direct antecedent of film editing, but in the early days film derived its impact from other traditions. Nineteenth-century popular theatre and literature were the sources of storytelling techniques which were allied to the crude methods of presentation perfected in the fairground. However one important factor made it imperative that film develop a language of its own: for thirty years it was a silent medium. Title cards were never going to be a sufficient substitute for verbal storytelling techniques developed over thousands of years of dramatic presentation.

Initially the title card provided a convenient bridge between two different shots, just as text was used to link a lantern slide performance, but mute tableaux seen from one point of view served to encourage a theatrical approach. Thus the early film-makers sensed that it was necessary to find ways of controlling rhythm and pace, establishing mood, providing emphasis and focusing attention in the scene.

D.W.GRIFFITH

The essential link between primitive film and the incorporation of most editing techniques in the films of D.W.Griffith was provided by Edwin S.Porter in his two famous films The Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery, both made in 1903. It was Porter who established that the intercutting of different shots not necessarily related to the same time and place could provide the basis for the structuring of narrative through editing.

Five years later D.W.Griffith began the process of refining his own methods of shooting which by 1914 included all the basic elements necessary for coherent visual narrative. It is of no little significance that his cameraman was Billy Bitzer who had earlier worked for Porter. Bitzer probably deserves more credit than he is given for applying the techniques in Griffith’s films. Whatever the truth one thing is certain, with each succeeding film this pair of pioneers made, they were assuming an increasing degree of importance for the editing process. Some of their significant first uses of techniques were as follows:

See Table

Iris Barry delineated Griffith’s achievements in her monograph published in 1940. Ernest Lindgren spelt them out even more clearly in The Art of Film (1948): ‘Griffith instinctively saw the coherence he could achieve on the screen even though his material was fragmentary, filmed at different times in different places with a variety of shots, but all coming together to make one scene; (Griffith) succeeded in building up in the minds of his audience an association of ideas welded with such logic and charged with such emotional momentum that its truth was not questioned.’

Consider the alternatives available to the film-maker because of this establishment of the basic language. In 1908 Griffith started out as a director in the knowledge that the conventional film would show the whole scene, from beginning to end, from in front of the characters in a shot that included the whole area of the action (usually a three-walled set). When he and Bitzer decided to move into a closer shot of one character the convention was broken. Incidentally, when the studio bosses saw the result they complained that this was unacceptable since they had paid for the whole actor! As soon as this closer shot was seen it was no great step to show a closer shot of another character. Having done this you can intercut the two.

Perhaps the greatest step in this exploration of filmic space is the moment when the director realizes he is inside the area established in the wide shot. It is as if a member of the audience at a theatre performance has stepped on to the stage. The camera has to all intents and purposes become a character in the scene. So the dynamics of film language come to depend upon the sense that each member of the audience has of being present in the action through the agency of the camera.

Most cinema still proceeds as if Griffith were leaning over the shoulder of the director. Each director prepares the shooting script of a film with a very basic assumption in mind: that for each scene there exists an ideal point of view which establishes the position of the camera for the master shot. This ideal position is related to the best way of staging the action to allow the focus of the scene to be properly encompassed.

Once this position is established every subsequent shot that is incorporated must refer to the axis of this establishing shot. This is because we are working in a two-dimensional medium that represents three-dimensional space. The only ways of changing this axis are by character movement or camera movement.

As we have seen, Griffith was the first to make disparate elements cohere into convincing sequences. The culmination of his efforts came in two epic films: Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Iris Barry says: The film Intolerance is extremely important in the history of cinema. It is the end and justification of that whole school of American cinematography based on the terse cutting and disjunctive assembly of lengths of film.’

Figure 1.1 D.W.Griffith on the set with Lillian Gish.

THE SOVIET CINEMA

Griffith had an enormous influence on the post-revolution generation of film-makers in the Soviet Union. Iris Barry states that it was: ‘from his example that they derived their characteristic staccato shots, their measured and accurate rhythms and their skill in joining pictorial images together with a view to the emotional overtones of each so that two images in conjunction convey more than the sum of their visual content’.

In 1919, when the Moscow Film School was established, Griffith’s films were being shown in Russia for the first time. Lenin himself, aware of the immense potential value of film to the new Bolshevik state, personally arranged the wide distribution of Intolerance. However, Lindgren points out that there was a deeper consciousness developing there:

It was the directors of the Soviet Union who were the first to understand the full significance of this fact (of film truth) and to exploit it; for editing, as the Russians saw, is nothing less than the deliberate guidance of the thoughts and convictions of the spectator.

Lindgren goes on:

They clearly perceived…that editing derived its power…from the fact that a succession of shots involved a complex set of relationships between them, relationships of idea, of duration, of physical movement and of form.

Among this generation of directors, all of whom came under the influence of Griffith, were V.I.Pudovkin, Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. The writings and films of these four are worth careful study by all aspiring editors.

Kuleshov felt that editing was the heart of film-making. By cutting together the same shot of the face of a well-known Russian actor (Ivan Mosjoukine) with, for instance, a plate of soup on a table, a shot of a coffin containing a dead woman and a little girl playing with a toy, he was able to demonstrate that you could control the audience response by the nature of the juxtaposition, yielding in the above cases the feeling that the actor was expressing alternately hunger, sadness and joy.

Pudovkin worked with Kuleshov on the above experiment and it was he who carried the results forward into his filmic construction. He wrote at one point that he ‘…tried to affect the spectators, not by the psychological performance of the actor, but by plastic synthesis through editing’. He was scornful of Griffith’s direct narrative techniques, preferring to create emotional effects through the careful montage of associative elements. His film Mother is the best demonstration of this approach.

EISENSTEIN

Sergei Eisenstein was just as interested as Pudovkin in the value of montage, but in his hands editing acquired intellectual force. His use of juxtaposition was meant to convey a synthesis of ideas much in the way that the Marxist theory of the dialectic proposed a dynamic progression in society. He was not content to tell stories even when they were related to the momentous events of the revolution. To Eisenstein it was of paramount importance that his montage gave the meaning behind the events.

The classic example is the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin (1925) where he uses more than 150 shots in less than seven minutes to portray an event through complex juxtapositions, whereas the surface drama could have been conveyed in no more than two dozen cuts. However, Eisenstein saw every cut as an opportunity to convey ideas about the events, rather than just as a means of pacing and focusing the scene. This point, incidentally, seems to be lost on Brian de Palma when he plagiarizes the Odessa Steps in the climactic scene of his film The Untouchables.

Although much of Eisenstein’s approach seems contrived and obscure, it would be wrong to consign his work to the attic of film technique. The coming of sound put unbearable pressure on the effectiveness of pure visual metaphor, but he was as brilliant a thinker on the nature of the medium as we have so far seen, and his aesthetics regarding composition, colour and much else are still stimulating to contemporary minds if we can dust the cobwebs off our own resistance to earlier forms.

Indeed, when he was working with students at the Moscow Film School in the 1930s there was ample evidence that his approach to direction was anything but dry. We are indebted to a student, Vladimir Nizhny, for recording Eisenstein’s pedagogical methods in his book Lessons ivith Eisenstein (1962). In it he describes intense work on the staging of a particular scene which Eisenstein used as a workshop example. It is the killing of the old moneylender by Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. After exploring many ways of breaking down the scene, Eisenstein convinced his students of the feasibility of handling it in one long developing shot. By choreographing the two characters he was able to suggest a way of sustaining the drama through pacing and visual emphasis without resorting to editing.

Eisenstein summarized the work he had done with the class thus: ‘It seems to me that the worry that was affecting many of you at the start, that for us to stage everything in one shot would be boring and uninteresting, has proved unjustified…In our work we have managed to fix all the striking and critical moments in a corresponding close view without changing the camera set-up… you have been convinced that mise-en-scène contains in itself all the elements concerned with editing break-up into shots.’ He then coined the term ‘mise-en-shot’ to describe the way staging the action carefully can provide all the dramatic emphasis that would conventionally be conveyed by cutting.

His object was not to convince his students that shooting a scene in one shot is necessarily the best solution, but that proper staging will reveal the details of dramatic development that allow the director to decide how to photograph the scene. This analysis is still the essential task of each director and directly determines the nature of the editor’s material.

In contrast and in opposition to Eisenstein’s dramatic artifice, and inspired by Lenin’s call to record the new Soviet reality, Dziga Vertov and his colleagues in ‘Kino-eye’ set out to use the medium in a way that was entirely reliant on what occurs in front of the camera, without being provoked by a script or performed by actors. The resulting energy and inventiveness is visible in The Man with a Movie Camera, where montage is only one element of the self-consciously manipulative style. Despite seeing himself as a significant recorder of post-revolutionary Russia, Vertov brought a refreshing playfulness to the form both in shooting and in the cutting room.

Figure 1.2 Sergei Eisenstein behind the camera.

Not all early Soviet film-makers were concerned with either dramatic narrative or the representation of Soviet reality. Alexander Dcvzhenko created the cinematic equivalent of poetic form by pioneering the montage of visual association not dependent on narrative progression. His film Earth (1930) presents a series of images which, whilst being thematically linked, do not add up to the coherent narrative which is inherent in conventional dramatic films. Dovzhenko has remained an inspiration for all film-makers who are attracted to the metaphorical use of visual language.

ROBERT FLAHERTY

Ironically it is the non-fiction film which has often provided more imaginative explorations of visual language. Pre-eminent amongst the progenitors was Robert Flaherty who has indeed been called The Father of Documentary’. As is often true of those who have a major influence on the development of a medium, Flaherty had few collaborators, especially in the early years, preferring to follow his own idiosyncratic path.

It might all have been so different if he had given up after the original material for his first film was burnt in a fire. Perhaps his determination to continue had something to do with the fact that the film had been shot under the punishing conditions of the arctic cold whilst observing a family of Eskimos. After a second period of shooting he eventually released Nanook of the North in 1922. No doubt the impact of this film at the time had something to do with its ‘exotic’ subject, but nothing can take away the fact that Flaherty’s instinctive respect for his material conveyed a freshness which is still visible when the film is viewed today.

Figure 1.3 Robert Flaherty on location during the shooting of Louisiana Story with cameraman Richard Leacock, editor Helen van Dongen, the boy from the film and Mrs Flaherty.

Flaherty’s work from Nanook to Louisiana Story in 1948 demonstrates a continuity of development over three decades spanning silent and sound cinema. His techniques were refined from film to film without any radical change of approach. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements and thanks
• Introduction
• 1: Historical perspective: how editing has evolved
• 2: Shooting with cutting in mind
• 3: From cutting room to edit suite: the development of the technology
• 4: Editing procedure
• 5: The language of editing: giving your material form and refining its meaning
• 6: Sound in editing
• 7: Completing the screen picture: from mix to
• 8: The elusive art: some editors and their work
• Glossary
• Suggested further reading