FILM STUDIES

THE RELATION OF SHOT TO SHOT: EDITING

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1
 YOU • What is Editing?
• Editing: Relating Images
• Organization through Editing

WILL • Construction of Spatial and temporal relationship

• Graphic and Rhythmic Relations

LEARN
• Continuity & Disjunctive Editing
• Elements of Film Editing
• The Process of Digital Editing

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what is editing? (film technique)

Since the 1920s, when film theorists began to realise what

EDITING can achieve, it has been the most widely
discussed film technique.

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 “For a writer, it’s a word. For a
composer or a musician, it’s a note. For
an editor and a filmmaker, it’s the
frames. The one frame off, or two frames
added, or two frames less… it’s the
difference between a sour note and a
sweet note. It’s the difference between a
clunky clumsy crap and orgasmic
rhythm.”
Quentin Tarantino on film editing

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 History
• At the end of the 19th century,
during cinema’s infancy, films
had no cuts or editing
Eleven seconds of footage of the Lumière's
comedic scenario called 'L’Arroseur arrosé' (The
whatsoever.
Waterer Watered).
• The camera ran for as long as
the film reel was. During
screening, the 1-minute footage
was shown in its entirety to a
paying audience.
• Soon, viewers got bored. The
static image was tedious.
Three seconds of the short film 'Rough Sea At Indrani Kopal. 2019
Dover'in 1895 by Birt Acres (England)
• Editing was the solution.
• Edgar S. Porter, an early film pioneer, experimented
heavily on the two main principles of editing: ellipsis
and cross cutting.

• Ellipsis is a procedure where movement & action

unnecessary to the telling of a story will often be
removed by editing.

• Both techniques contributed for his achievements with

the movies Life of an American Fireman (1903), The Great
Train Robbery (1903) and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend
(1906).

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 Each frame counts
• The addition or removal of one
frame may break or make a
scene, by supporting or
shattering the illusion intended.

• Therefore, editors work

diligently to maintain the
viewers’ suspension of
disbelief.

• Film editing determines pace

and structure; it is a vital
component to tell stories
efficiently.
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 Film Editor, a role women dominated
in the silent and early sound era
(when film editing was seen as 1)
tedious and 2) like sewing; (film
patchers and negative cutters) only
to have men take over when the job
became more visible and lucrative.

Still, there’s a slew of famous and

should-be-famous female editors, or
rather, famous film edits that were
usually made by a woman who’s
better known in the industry than
outside it.

e.i. Thelma Schoonmaker, Anne V.

Coates, and Dede Allen.

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The History of Women Editors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzuYgcBZsQ8
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Cuts & Transitions 101
 Cuts & Transitions 101
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAH0MoAv2CI
Cuts and Transitions 101

Since the 1920s, when film theorists began to realise what

EDITING can achieve, it has been the most widely
discussed film technique.

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 cUTTING ON ACTION
1. Cutting on Action - Cutting from one shot to another
while the subject is still on motion. On a punch, or a kick,
turning, going through a door, or throwing something.
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SHOT SIZES
CutAways
2. Cut Aways (inserts) - cutting to an insert (of something)
or use the cut aways to get inside the head of a character.

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Cross Cut
3. Cross Cut - This is where the editor intercuts back and forth between locations.
For example, most phone conversations are usually cross cuts and when used
effectively, cross cutting can certainly amp up the tension and suspense in a sequence.
This technique is also used to show what's going on inside a character's head.
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Jump Cut
4. Jump Cut - Jumps cuts are when the editors cut in between the same shot.
And they often used to deliberately show the passing of time. So, you
naturally find these in the montages. Jump cuts are also used to add a level of
urgency to the scene.
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 The Shower Murder Scene in Psycho
78 Shots and 52 Cuts that changed cinema forever!
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match Cut
5. Match Cut - Create the world around your characters.
A match cut is one method that editors/directors use in editing to suggest a relationship
between two different objects and to create a visual metaphor. It is a cut within a scene that
makes sense spatially. This can be between two different objects, two different spaces, or two
different compositions in which an object in two shots graphically match. Match cuts are any
cuts that emphasizes spatio-temporal continuity and it is the basis for continuity editing.
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 CONTINUITY EDITING
When we refer to continuity editing, we are referring to
editing techniques that are used to help establish a logical
flow between disparate shots so as to present a smoother
narrative transition that does not end up jarring or confusing
the viewer.

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"Shot, reverse shot"
This is when the reverse of a shot is shown right after
the original shot. It is used often in conversation scenes.

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"180 degree rule"
In this shot only
one side of a
room is shown;
an invisible line
is drawn.

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"Shot, reverse shot"
This is when the reverse of a shot is shown right after
the original shot. It is used often in conversation scenes.

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 "Eyeline match"
A transition where the audience go from looking at a
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character's gaze to what the character is actually seeing.
 "Whip pan"
This is when a shot cuts from one to the next by means
of rapidly moving the camera and creating a blur.

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TRANSITIONS

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Fade in/Fade out
Dissolving to or from black.

Fade in: When darkness

slowly turns into a image
then that's called Fade in.
This is normally used when
film begins.
Fade out: When an image
slowly turns into darkness
then that's called Fade out.
This is normally used when
film ends.

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Dissolve (Blend Shots)
Blend one shot into another. Commonly used in montages and can also
represent the passing of time. Indrani Kopal. 2019
Dissolving from the same shot
Makes characters appear or disappear (example: Yoda, Nosferatu), or go
through physical changes (classic transformation of the wolf man).
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Smash Cut Abrupt transitions. (Waking up from a bad dream)
Intense to quiet or quiet to intense

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Iris

An in camera effect back in the day when you can manually open and close
your iris from black. Nowadays it is used as a stylistic choice (ei: A
Christmas Story).
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The Wipe (screen wipes from one side to the other)
A new image wipes off the previous image. A wipe is more fluid than a cut
and quicker than a dissolve. Many types of wipes: Star Wars, Christmas
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Story, Rocky Horror Picture Show.
L-cut (audio transition)

The audio from the current shot carries over into the next shot. Used all the
time when characters are just talking to each other. (ex: Jaws, Full Metal
Jacket "john Wayne" line)

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J-cut (audio of the next scene starts before you get to it)

Blend one shot into another. Commonly used in montages and can also
represent the passing of time.

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 "Sound bridge”

This is where audio from a previous clip runs onto the next or audio
from the next clip starts playing before the video is shown.
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 J-cut and L-cuts purpose

Very subtle editing techniques that people might not even

notice. Both designed to create a seamless flow, a seamless
transition from one scene to another with audio guiding the
way.

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Creative Combinations
Once you know all of the different types of cuts, you
can begin to mix and match them.

Example: Match cut into a J-cut, Verbal match J-

cut, Cross-cutting cut away, Cut away Jump
Cut...Etc.

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montage
By definition, a montage is "a
single pictorial composition
made by juxtaposing or
superimposing many pictures or
designs.”
In filmmaking, a montage is an
editing technique in which
shots are juxtaposed in an
often fast-paced fashion that
compresses time and conveys
a lot of information in a
relatively short period.

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 The Russian Montage
Movies to Analyze:
• Battleship Potempkin: 1925 - Dir. Sergei Eisenstein
• Man with a Movie Camera: 1929 - Dir. Dziga Vertov
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: 2009 - Dir. David
Yates
• Psycho: 1960 - Dir. Alfred Hitchcock
• The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: 1966 - Dir. Sergio Leone
• Youth of Maxim: 1935 - Dir. Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid
Trauberg

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 Montage
By definition, a montage is "a single pictorial composition
made by juxtaposing or superimposing many pictures or
designs.”

In filmmaking, a montage is an editing technique in which

shots are juxtaposed in an often fast-paced fashion that
compresses time and conveys a lot of information in a
relatively short period.

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 Slow Paced Montage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXJKIuxpfkA

They used:
• Still pictures
• Sepia tone
• Slow-paced
editing
• Orchestral music
• No dialogue

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Fast-Paced Montage in "The
Rules of Attraction"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqNWHm_CWfA

They used:

Video footage (digital)

Fast-paced editing
(quick shots, many
cuts)
House music
Narration

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The two clips epitomize what a montage consists of.

These particular examples because they are from major

motion pictures, and both illustrate the same topic – a trip –
but in two extremely contrasting ways.

The montage from 1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance

Kid shows a trip from New York City to Bolivia that occurred
in the beginning of the century. The second montage is from
the 2002 The Rules of Attraction, which narrates a journey
across many countries in Europe.

The 33-year time gap between both movies is evidence of how

styles change over time, especially as they tell stories that took
place a hundred years apart (Butch Cassidy traveled to South
American in 1901.)

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 What to Avoid
Montages cannot create strong emotions. Ergo, they are not used
to make the audience feel, rather they make the audience know.
Montages inform.

This is so true that the message inherent to some montages could be

replaced by simple text cards. However, this alternative is far less
exciting and stimulating… far less cinematic.

Think of Rocky (1976) and the now famous training montage. That
whole sequence could be replaced by a title card reading "After
weeks of training, Rocky improved his stamina and perfected his
boxing skills." This short sentence essentially summarizes that 3-
minute montage… but which one do you think is more cinematic?
Which one would make you have goose bumps?

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 For this reason, it is often said
that characters cannot fall in
love during montages. The
courtship and romance would
be too bland or dull. Love
deserves a better treatment.

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 Soviet Montage

Russia went and had a revolution in 1917 and

cinema was a big part of its aftermath. Even
though film stock was hard to come by, we saw
the first film school started, and the study of
film became hugely important.
Russian filmmakers started trying to
understand the power of the cut itself, thus
developing a theory of filmmaking based
solely around the juxtaposition of images:
Soviet Montage.

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The roots of Soviet montage
The innovative use of montage in film by the Soviet film-
makers has its roots in art forms such as painting, literature,
and music from pre-revolutionary Russia.
By 1910, a group of Russian painters had already
experimented extensively with 'montage': the Russian futurists
declared that conventional art must be destroyed and that a
new art, appropriate to the machine age, must be created.
Hence the futurists took their subjects from modern life and
exploited a technique of shocking juxtapositions.
Poetry, in particular that of Mayakovsky, was also 'shattering
words and reassembling them in brutal images'.

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 The Kuleshov effect and its
consequences
In the dawn of the 20th century, cinema was a
new art form, comprising many techniques that
hadn’t been developed. And the ones that had
had not been studied to the needed extension.
The elements of editing were among them.
Filmmakers knew that you could cut and splice
the film strip, but they didn’t thoroughly
comprehend the purposes of doing so.

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 The Kuleshov Experiment
Lev Kuleshov, a Soviet filmmaker, was among the first to
dissect the effects of juxtaposition.
Through his experiments and research, Kuleshov
discovered that depending on how shots are assembled the
audience will attach a specific meaning or emotion to it.
In his experiment, Kuleshov cut an actor with shots of
three different subjects: a hot plate of soup, a girl in a
coffin, and a pretty woman lying in a couch.
The footage of the actor was the same expressionless gaze.
Yet the audience raved his performance, saying first he
looked hungry, then sad, then lustful.

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The Kuleshov Experiment

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 Watch the video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gGl3LJ7vHc
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 Hitchcock says…
In a 1964 interview for the show Telescope, Alfred Hitchcock
called this technique “pure cinematics – the assembly of
film.”

Hitchcock says that if a close-up of a man smiling is cut with

a shot of a woman playing with a baby, the man is portrayed
as “kindly” and “sympathetic.”

By the same token, if the same shot of the smiling man is cut
with a girl in a bikini, the man is portrayed as “dirty.”

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 Watch it here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md6folAgGRU

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 Four different Types of 

film montages
The first two categories of montage outlined below are
frequently, although not exclusively, used in Soviet film;

The last two categories deal with montage techniques that are
often to be found in mainstream films.

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 Intellectual montage
Intellectual montage (also called dialectical montage or discontinued
editing)

In this type of editing, shots are placed together to emphasize

their differences. They are in 'collisions' with each other.

For example, in OCTOBER a shot of mechanical golden

peacock is placed next to a shot of a man (the peacock does not
form part of the world of the film, that is, it is non-diegetic).

The audience draw the conclusion that the man is vain. In this
type of editing, the audience are not passive as they play an
active part in producing meaning from the film.

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 Linkage Editing
Linkage editing (also known as constructive editing)

Mainly used by Pudovkin, who proposed a theory of montage

based on this principle.

In linkage editing, individual shots are used to build up

scenes. The shots are not in collision with each other, but are
used as fragments or parts of a whole scene.

The technique can be seen in the MOTHER and THE END

OF ST PETERSBURG.

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 Hollywood montage
Often used to show a quick succession of events over a
period of time. For example, in Raging Bull (1980) Martin
Scorsese shows the successful career of the boxer Jake La
Motta by combining shots (mostly still photographs) taken
from a number of different fights interspersed with home
movie footage of La Motta’s home life.

The shots are clearly intended to flow into each other rather
than to be in conflict. The music played on the soundtrack
over the images reinforces the sense of continuity.

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 Fast cutting
In which editing is used primarily to build suspense or
tension. For example, in the gunfight at the climax of The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly(1966), Sergio Leone creates a
dramatic effect by using a combination of music, tighter and
tighter close-ups of the three characters, and a shortening of
shot length.

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 Statistical analysis of 

Soviet films
Soviet films, because of the use of the montage technique,
contain many more shots than Hollywood films of the same
period.
David Bordwell (1986) claims that the Soviet films of the
1920s contain on average between 600 and 2,000 shots,
whereas the films made in Hollywood between 1917 and 1928
contain on average between 500 and 1,000 shots.

He further suggests that Hollywood films had an average shot

length of five to six seconds while for Soviet films the
average shot length was two to four seconds.

The comparison provides concrete evidence of the unique

nature of the editing used in the Soviet films during this
period.
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OTHER FEATURES OF SOVIET
MONTAGE CINEMA
Aside from editing, these films have other features which
separate them from the dominant Hollywood cinema. In
keeping with a Marxist analysis of society, plots frequently do
not centre on the individual; for example, in Eisenstein’s Strike
,October and Battleship Potemkin, individual heroes are replaced
by a mass of people. The only characters that are individuated
are those that wield power or have wealth.

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Pic: Irene Morra, Film Editor, 1933