Once again this week, I have divided up this PowerPoint into Part 1 and Part 2. And so here in Part 1, we're going to get an overview on how editing has evolved over history, what the editor's job is, and then some specific terminology to describe edits and transitions in film. As cinematography evolved from shooting on film to shooting digitally, so did editing. And so it went through a similar process where when we were shooting on film, editing had to be done on a device like this, which is called a flatbed. What you would do is you'd take a reel of film that you had shot, you'd put it on one of these spools, you'd run it through them, and it'd run through this mechanism and come out on this side. And in this mechanism, each frame of film...
would be projected up onto either monitors or into a little viewfinder. While you're watching it, you can then make cuts. You are literally chopping the film strip in half when you decide to do that.
So it is a far more permanent choice. But because you had to watch it from one point to another point, this was called linear editing. When... Editing evolved into a digital format using programs like Final Cut Pro or Avid and you have digital files. You're able to drop those digital files into a timeline, arrange them however you please, make a cut, you can jump to the end of your timeline and then jump back to the front and so this comes to be known as non-linear editing.
So there is linear editing and non-linear editing. But this is the evolution of editing over film's history. Not to say that this has gone away entirely, but more often than not, you will convert any film shot traditionally on film stock to digital files and edit it.
And so even if you're shooting on film, 99.9% of the time, you're using digital editing software to edit. I want to get into what it is that editing contributes to film as an art form. First, I want to show a very short clip from a film called Collateral by a director called Michael Mann.
I'll leave you where you stood. We'll get into the clip here in a second. First of all, what I want to establish is that when movies were first introduced in the late 1800s, editing didn't exist. You would record these short clips and that would be it.
As it progressed, filmmakers started to realize we can cut these film strips in half, connect them with other film strips, and not be bound by the limits of a single piece of film. As this becomes the norm, you start getting people studying the idea of comparing one image to another image through a cut. And so in the 1920s, a bunch of Russian film theorists and filmmakers, they start to write on and speak about what editing does to an audience. One of the main ideas that comes out of this period is from a guy called Liev Kuleshov.
And this is why I've shown the collateral clip. And what he does is he runs this experiment where he brings in a famous Russian actor and he records him with the most blank expression possible. and then he records three other pieces of footage a bowl of soup a woman laying flirtatiously on a couch and a coffin with a child in it and he then edits footage of the actor's blank face with each of those different shots individually and then he brings in an audience and he shows them one at a time so he may show one audience the man looking at the bowl of soup and then that audience leaves and another one comes in and he shows him looking at the coffin and he asks them afterwards What did you think of the actor's performance?
And they say, oh my god, he was so grief-stricken. Oh, he was so hungry. And so what Kuleshov realizes and proposes is that those two shots react with one another once you cut them together. If he's looking at a coffin, we read sadness into his face, even though that wasn't there to begin with.
In this collateral clip, those coyotes running across the street, that was just some B-roll footage that the production picked up. They were out shooting one night, and this actually happened. When they're editing the film together, they cut together some generic shots of Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx looking around in the taxi that they're in. They cut that together with the coyote footage. And so now it looks like they are looking at those coyotes and responding to them.
That is the Kuleshov principle still in action. And this is ultimately what the Soviet theorists proclaim, is that editing, or what they call montage, all editing is montage, what they say is it is an accumulation of shots that end up producing meaning. Each individual image may have its own meaning.
One of these images may be the meaning might be he's looking out the window. And then you might have another image that is Coyote running across the street. You cut those images together, and you end up with a third new idea.
And of course, an entire film... It is a montage of images together that create a whole new meaning. However, there is a particular type of montage that has come to be known as the American montage.
And you all have seen this hundreds of times in your movie watching life. What these versions of montage do is they compress time and they compress narrative. To give you an idea of this, I'm going to show you a clip from Rocky IV. And so let's take a look at that.
Thank you. I just always like to stop on that guy nodding. If somebody hasn't turned that into a meme, they need to.
This is participating in the kind of montage that the Soviet theorists are talking about. You have a Russian boxer being trained in this artificial way. And then you have Rocky training out in the countryside. He's...
Chuck and Wood. He's running in the snow. Each of those could work on their own, but when you put them together, it's about the contrast between these two guys and the similarities.
They're both training, but they're training in these different ways, and of course, because Rocky is our hero, his way seems more pure. But it is also an American montage. because of the way that it is compressing time and narrative.
And just for the fact that there's music playing over it, that's generally what distinguishes an American montage. But in terms of compressing time, we don't know. This could be weeks, this could be months, but time is clearly passing very fast. It's also, of course, compressing narrative in that way, in that we don't have to see individual scenes of each of these guys learning something as they train. And so it's about getting across these ideas quickly.
I mentioned up top that At the beginning of cinematic history, editing didn't exist. As it became more common, there was still a worry that audiences would be confused. Gradually, editing started to incorporate these kind of ideas, but for the longest time, there was still a hesitancy about making editing too noticeable.
And so the idea was to hide it, to make it invisible. The common editing practice became this practice of invisible editing where you would hide a cut on an action. And in this way, it was meant to be missed.
You would register it unconsciously. It wouldn't make you aware of the process of filmmaking. You were meant to kind of ignore it.
This became the only kind of editing that happened throughout what's called the classic Hollywood period. Now, it is still used today. You will still see in most modern releases this approach to editing being practiced regularly.
but let's take a look at a clip from a film noir called Laura so that I can then point out where the invisible edits are and you all can see an example of what they look like yep there that stuff surprised us come in here please that's the lie decker oh you recognize me that's it sit down please Nice little place you have here, Radecker. It's lavish. I call it home. I suppose you'll hear about the Laura Hunt murder. Yesterday morning, after Laura's body was found, I was questioned by Sergeants McAvity and Schultz.
And I stated... let's go back and take a look so first up you have the moment when the detective goes through this door this is an invisible edit because if you'll notice his hand reaches out to pull the door open and then our next shot that we cut to has him completing that action this is what i mean by cuts on action and so The idea is that this motion, him opening the door, is supposed to carry us through and allow us to ignore or miss the actual edit. Later, we get a shot of the man in the bath. He's pulling out his little portfolio there, and see he lays it down on the table, and then we cut to him opening it.
This is what invisible editing looks like and how it works. Start looking for it in the shows and movies that you're watching, and I think you will see it. Even though original filmmakers had a hesitancy about it that audiences would be confused, what's called parallel editing became a norm and a standard pretty early on.
Because what was found very quickly was, no, audiences could follow. If you did cut from a burning building to a fire truck driving up, we're able to make those cognitive leaps pretty easily. This practice of what's called parallel editing or cross-cutting became very standard. To go between multiple locations, even between... time periods or different storylines.
As film history progressed and audiences became comfortable with how the medium speaks to us, parallel editing becomes incredibly common. And so I'm going to show you a clip from a film called The Blues Brothers to give you an example of what parallel editing is. Thank you. we are cutting between two actions.
The Blues Brothers themselves trying to make it to the top of this building, and then the SWAT team, the military, everybody trying to chase them down and surround this building that they're in. We're getting this contrast between quiet Blues Brothers in the elevator, listening to the, you know, to the elevator music, and then all of this action and insanity going on outside. And so parallel editing here is being used to contribute to The humor. The longer that film has existed, you've started to see much more experimentation with editing and with what audiences are able to understand through editing. In the late 50s, early 60s, you get this movement called the French New Wave that starts to just subvert all of the established rules of cinema.
Invisible editing was the standard. They start incorporating edits that are blatantly obvious and in fact remind you as a viewer that you are watching a movie. These are called jump cuts.
They are the opposite of invisible editing. Instead they were originally intended to be very jarring. What it always appears like is if frames have been removed. it calls attention to the cut, but it also usually leaps through information that we don't need to see. And especially nowadays that we are used to not needing to see.
And so to give an example of this, I'm just, I'm not even going to show the clip. I'm just going to scroll through this scene to save a little bit of time from Spring Breakers. You see how very abruptly one action is happening where they're talking to each other. And then we cut to a little bit later in that conversation.
We don't need to see the amount of time it takes to get from here to here. We just jump to it. And then as they're talking again, at the very end of the scene, we get this other jump cut where...
we miss the frames essentially where they turn and start walking away. And instead we simply jump cut to that as they exit the scene. And so that is the idea of a jump cut. Match cuts have also become a very common way of heightening or enhancing the juxtaposition of one shot to another or one object within the frame to an object within a different frame.
And so this relies on composition a lot of the time to make sure that the two figures or objects being compared are composed in a similar way so that when you cut between them there is a visual match. And so to give you an example that I'm going to show you easily the most famous match cut in film history in this very short clip from 2001 A Space Odyssey. In that example you get a bone which has just been used to kill another creature so it has become a tool of murder. It flies up in the air and we get a match cut from it to this spaceship.
Essentially the composition of these two shots is relatively similar but so one tool of destruction to another one because this ship if you look really closely it has a nuclear emblem on it. The consistency and destruction across the human race from the very beginning of time to the far, far future, just by juxtaposing those two weapons of destruction in a match cut. On this slide, we're going to look at a couple of different editorial transitions. compared to clips from famous examples.
What we've seen up to this point, whether that is a jump cut or just a cut between two shots, those are generally called a hard cut. These transitions are another way of getting from one shot to the next shot. First, you have a fade out or a fade in, and so we're going to look at the opening to There Will Be Blood.
we go from a black shot and we gradually fade into the image and of course a fade out would be the opposite of that. So we might go from this image of the mountains and it would slowly fade to black or to white or to any other solid color. There is also the dissolve and in this example you have two shots that briefly overlap with each other as you transition from one to another. Let's look at an example from Psycho. And so you might even call that a match dissolve because we're dissolving from the drain of the shower to the character's eye.
There's also something that you don't see often anymore. If it is used, it's usually as kind of a reference to an older period of film history, but that is the iris in or out. And it looks a little something like this.
Now, the iris is that ring, and this relates to the iris of a camera, where originally the iris of the camera, you could close it down to black, or you could open it up and open from black and iris out. That shot did not completely close, but that is essentially what an iris looks like. Lastly, you have the wipe, and this is where you'll get one shot that will cover over another shot. Star Wars is full of these. Those are wipes.
Very easy. And so those are some other transitions outside of hard cuts. Thank you for watching part one. Please remember to go watch part two.