Editing & SoundRelating Images & Listening to the Cinema

Film Editing• Editing: the process linking different images or shots

(continuous images, regardless of camera movement, flowing between cuts).

• Editing may emulate, transcend, or disrupt ordinary ways of seeing.

• Film editing juxtaposes images to tell a story or convey ideas. Films convey perspectives by linking shots in various relationships, guiding the viewer’s perception.

• Precursors: Magic Lantern, Chronophotography

• Photographs can be deliberately arranged to highlight relationships between different images. Collages often served a similar purpose.

• Early cinema often used stop motion photography to simulate motion.

Early Cinema & Continuity Editing

• Earliest films consisted of a single, continuous shot.

• Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903)

• D. W. Griffith: Crosscutting/Parallel Editing (alternating between two or more strands of simultaneous action).

• Merging of Technique and Ideology (ex. Birth of a Nation, 1915)

• “Classical Narrative Style” (1910s-1950/60s): Privileges Narrative Continuity

1919-1929 Soviet Montage

• Montage: an editing style emphasizing breaks and contrasts between images joined by a cut.

• Intercutting: the interspersing of shots of different images and lengths, spliced together.

• Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potempkin (1925)

• Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929): Illustrates editing within the shot.

1930-1959: The Studio Era

• Classical Hollywood Style: Continuity Editing; goal of achieving an expansive sense of realism.

• Dominant style of Hollywood & mainstream storytelling, in which the film’s aesthetics privilege the narrative.

• Prewar v. Postwar: Influence of Italian Neorealism (fewer cuts, imagistic, new storytelling structures).

1960-1989: Modern Disjunctive Editing

• “New Hollywood”: incorporation of experimental film & editing styles.

• Styles reflect temporal disjunctions, or disconnections of the modern world using editing to visibly disrupt continuity by creating ruptures in the story, radically condensing or expanding time, or confusing the relationships among past, present and future.

• Influenced by Soviet Montage (1920s) & French New Wave (1950s); Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960)

1990s-Present

• Nonlinear Digital Editing

• Individual takes can be organized and accessed instantaneously, sound and picture can be simultaneously combined, and optical effects can be visualized earlier in the editing process.

The Elements of Editing: Cuts & Transitions

• Cut: the break in the image that marks the physical connection between two shots from two different pieces of film.

• Shock Cut: juxtaposes two images whose dramatic differences creates a jarring visual effect.

• Fade-Outs: gradually darken and make one image disappear (Fade-Ins do the opposite).

• Dissolve: two images are overlapped in the printing process to briefly superimpose one shot over the next, which takes its place: one image fades out as another fades in.

• Optical Effects: Iris In/Out (iris matte expands or contracts to reveal or obscure the image), Wipes (joins two images by moving a vertical, horizontal, or diagonal line across the image to replace it with a new image. These effects are achieved with an Optical Printer.

Continuity Style• Verisimilitude: the quality of having the appearance of truth; the

quality of fictional representations allowing viewers to accept a story’s plausibility.

• Hollywood Continuity Style: The commercial U.S. film industry’s dominant editing style, stressing spatial & temporal continuity. This style constructs a logic & rhythm that mimic human perception.

• Continuity Editing: a system that uses cuts and other transitions to establish verisimilitude and to tell stories efficiently, requiring minimal effort for viewers. Each shot has a continuous relationship to the next shot.

• 180 degree space in which action will develop.

• Approximate the experience of real time by following human actions.

• Invisible Editing: minimizing the perception of breaks between shots.

Continuity Style Continued• Establishing Shot: an initial long shot that establishes the

setting and orients the viewer in space to a clear view of the action.

• Two-Shot: standard practice in filming a conversation which presents a relatively close shot of two characters in a recognizable spatial orientation and context that initiates a conversation.

• Reestablishing Shots: restore a seemingly ‘objective’ view, making the action perfectly clear to viewers.

• Insert: a brief shot, often a close-up, inserted into a scene. These may support or disrupt continuity. An insert that disrupts continuity is called a Non-Diegetic Insert.

• Ubiquitous Perspective & Spatial Continuity: perception of cuts is minimized because the angle from which objects/characters are filmed remains consistent, and because viewers expect certain editing conventions to represent particular types of scenes.

180 Degree & 30 Degree Rules

• 180 Degree Rule: the primary rule of continuity editing that consistently films a space as if bisected by an imaginary line called the “axis of action.”

• Taking all shots on the same side of the axis ensures that the relative positions of people and objects, as well as their gazes and movements, remain consistent (do not seem reversed).

• 30 Degree Rule: preserves spatial unity by stipulating that each shot must be taken from a position greater than 30 degrees from that of the last shot. Changes in perspective under 30 degrees are achieved instead through camera rotation or movement. This technique lessens the perception of cutting.

Shot/Reverse Shot, Eyeline Match & POV

• Shot/Reverse Shot Sequence: a pattern often used during conversations, beginning with a shot of one character taken from an angle at one end of the axis of action, cutting to a shot of a second character from the ‘reverse’ angle at the other end of the axis, and proceeds back and forth.

• Eyeline Match: a rule implying spatial contiguity, or the impression that consecutively depicted spaces are adjacent ones. If a character looks offscreen to the left, the next shot will show the person/object the person is looking at in a screen position that matches the character’s gaze. This technique gives the impression of continuous & consistent offscreen space.

• POV: editing techniques juxtapose shots and use cinematography to suggest a character’s optical point of view, as if the camera were seeing from one character’s perspective.

• Reaction Shot: depicts a character’s response to something that viewers have just been shown.

Editing & Temporality: Chronology• Film Chronology: how editing organizes a film’s narrative time.

• Flashback/Flashforward: follows one or more images of the present with one or more from the past/future.

• Narrative Frequency & Duration

• Descriptive/Temporally Ambiguous Sequences

• Ellipsis: temporal abridgment; a cutting strategy within and between scenes.

• Cutaway: when the film interrupts an action by “cutting away” to another shot.

• Overlapping Editing: Repetition of an action in several cuts, violating continuity.

• Pace: long/short takes; Sequence Shot: when an entire scene plays out in one take; often with a long take.

Graphic, Movement, and Rhythmic Editing• Montage in Hollywood: denotes thematically linked sequences or

sequences that show the passage of time with rapid cuts or other devices.

• Graphic Editing: linking or defining a series of shots by formal qualities like shapes, masses, colors, lines, and lighting patterns within images.

• Graphic Match: when a dominant shape or line in one shot provides a visual transition to a similar shape or line in the next shot.

• Movement Editing: editing so that the direction and pace of actions, gestures, and movements are linked with corresponding and contrasting movements in one or more other shots.

• Match-on-Action: when the direction of an action is edited to a shot depicting the continuation of that action.

• Rhythmic Editing: organization of editing according to different paces and tempos determined by how quickly cuts are made, sometimes to suggest mood or emotion.

Scene, Sequence, Segmentation

• Scene: one or more shots that describe a continuous space, time, and action.

• Sequence: any number of shots that are unified as a coherent action, or as an identifiable motif, regardless of changes in space and time.

• Narrative Segmentation: tracing the logic of a film’s editing organization; the connections among narrative units demonstrates how editing extends from the juxtaposition of shots to structure a whole film.

The Significance of Film Editing• 1. Generates emotions and ideas through the construction of

patterns of seeing.

• 2. Moves beyond the confines of individual perception and its temporal and spatial limitations.

• “Kuleshov Effect”: in the absence of an establishing shot, viewers assume pairs of images to be linked in space and time.

• Analytical Editing: follows the logic of human interaction and cuts the world the the measure of the body, centering on human perspective. Used in Classical Hollywood and Continuity Narratives.

• Disjunctive Editing: editing based on formal constructions and oppositional relationships, rather than human perception. This style is often called “visible editing.”

• to call attention to editing for aesthetic, conceptual, ideological or psychological purposes.

• to disorient, disturb, or viscerally affect viewers.

Distanciation & Alienation Effects

• Drawing attention to a film’s structure by using effects to alienate viewers from its artistic and social aspects.

• Jump Cut: a disjunctive cut that interrupts one particular action and creates discontinuities in the spatial or temporal development of shots. Jean-Luc-Godard’s Breathless (1960).

• 1. The viewer notices how the action is depicted, rather than simply taking in the action.

• 2. Effects encourage reflection on the process of viewing a film: how can we assume that the action we are viewing is happening now?

Montage

• Dialectical Montage: when two shots linked dialectically become synthesized into something greater, a visual concept.

• Modernism: artistic and experimental films (not Hollywood) have often used disjunctive montage styles to imply fragmentation of space and time characteristic of artistic Modernism.

Early Film Sound

• Films combine visuals & sounds to create spectacles.

• Melodrama (stage music dramas), later Vaudeville

• Phonograph (Edison 1877)

• Sound Cylinders: provided a way of synchronizing soundtracks with film images.

• “Silent” Cinema was often noisy, accompanied by lecturers, organs, orchestras, and audiences.

1927-1930: Transition to Synchronized Sound

• Influences: relationship to radio, vaudeville, theater, the Great Depression.

• Expensive process to convert theaters so that “talkies” could be screened by audiences.

• Warner Bros. - Vitaphone sound-on-disc system (1926)

• Releases The Jazz Singer (1927): the first feature film with recorded sound or “talkie,” starring vaudevillian Al Jolson.

• Fox - Movietone records sound optically on film (1928)

• Western Electric adopts sound-on-film system more flexible than Vitaphone.

• 1930s-1940s: Challenges and Innovations in Cinema Sound

• Many film artists had difficulty adjusting to “talkies” as they became the primary form of Hollywood films.

• Film industries acquired national specificity with language barriers.

• 1950s-Present: From Stereophonic to Digital Sound

• 1950s: Stereophonic; 1970s: Dolby & Surround Sound; 1990s: Digital Sound

Elements of Film Sound: Sound and Image

• Synchronous/Asynchronous Sound: synchronous sound has a visible onscreen source, while asynchronous sound does not.

• Onscreen/Offscreen Sound: sounds that emanate from an object onscreen or offscreen.

• Parallelism: occurs when the sound and image “say the same thing.”

• Contrapuntal Sound: occurs when two different meanings are implied by the image and sound.

• Diegetic/Non-Diegetic Sound: sound that occurs in the world of the film is diegetic, while sounds that characters cannot hear are non-diegetic.

• Source Music: Diegetic Music

• Voiceovers: Semi-Diegetic/Internal Diegetic

Sound Production• Sound Recording: takes place simultaneously with the filming of a

scene, under the direction of a sound designer.

• Clapboard snapped to synchronize recorded sound with recorded images; Boom: a microphone on a long pole, suspended directly above the action.

• Direct Sound/Reflected Sound: sound captured directly from its source is direct sound while reflected sound creates reverberations.

• Production Mixer: creates the final “mix” (master track to match the final film) by combining different recordings/sources, adjusting their relative volume & balance. The sound editing interacts with the image track to create rhythmic relationships, establish connections between sound and onscreen sources, and smooth or mark transitions.

• Sound Bridge: when a sound carries over a visual transition in a film.

• Spotting: determining when in a film’s sequence music and sound effects should be added. Foley Artists can simulate and record sounds.

• Postsynchronous Sound: recorded after filming, then synchronized with film. Looping is the process of re-recording actors’ voices onto the soundtrack.

Voice, Music & Sound Effects: Voice• Dialogue:

• Sound Perspective: the apparent distance of a sound source.

• Overlapping Dialogue: mixes characters’ speech simultaneously.

• Voice-Off: a voice that can be seen to originate from an onscreen speaker or a speaker who can be inferred to be present in the scene but who is not currently visible.

• Voiceover: distinguished from “voice-off” because characters in the film cannot hear a voiceover (non-diegetic). Voiceover is the cornerstone of the documentary tradition.

• Talking Head(s): a style of voiceover that is authoritative, anonymous (usually male) that explains and interprets film images (derived from “talking heads” on-camera interviews from documentary films).

• Synchronization: the visible coordination of the voice with the body from which it is emanating, anchoring otherwise autonomous sounds.

Music in Film• The only element of cinema that is primarily non-diegetic.

• The musical score is often a crucial element generating our affective, emotional responses to films.

• Music is nonrepresentational and can thus be more suggestive, and thus can convey the irrational and emotive.

• Underscoring: background music.

• Cue: a piece of music composed for a particular place in the film.

• Narrative Cueing: how music tells us what’s happening in the plot.

• Stingers: sounds that force us to notice the significance of something onscreen.

• Prerecorded Music: often from pop music artists, often used as commercial tie-ins with blockbuster films.

Sound Effects

• Offscreen sounds can create a sense of space and time.

• Our acceptance of simulated asynchronous sound is the result of our impulse to perceive effects realistically.

The Significance of Film Sound: Authenticity & Experience

• Continuity Approach: describes a range of scoring, sound recording, mixing and playback processes that strive for the unification of meaning and experience by subordinating sounds to the aims of the narrative. This approach bolsters the film’s sense of authenticity, visceral experience, and emotional impact.

• Montage Approach: explores the concrete nature of sounds and their potential independence of images and each other, making us conscious of their violation by calling attention to the actual sound recording process or how sounds create emotional cues.

Sound Continuity

• Relationship between image and sound, and among separate sounds is motivated by dramatic action or information.

• The sources of sounds (except for background music) are identifiable.

• The connotations of musical accompaniment will be consistent with images.

• The sound mix will emphasize what we should pay attention to.

• The sound mix will be smooth and will emphasize clarity.

Sound Montage• Often derives practices in direct opposition to sound continuity.

• Calls attention to distinct, autonomous elements that make up a film.

• Aims for non-naturalistic use of sound and its relationships to images, and among sounds.

• Prioritizing sound makes us attend to the film’s structure and aesthetic components.

• Stresses the fact that images and sounds communicate on two different levels, calling attention to how each element contributes differently.

Movements & Trends• Early Cinema: Realism (presentation) & Experimental (text,

story)

• Hollywood: Classical Narrative Style (Prewar & Postwar)

• International Cinemas as Responses to Hollywood Narrative Style: German Expressionism, Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, Japanese Cinemas

• New Hollywood, Blockbusters & Indies

• Third Cinema: Cinema of the former “third world”

• During the Cold War, the U.S. and other Western, Capitalist countries were known as the “First World,” Communist nations were identified as the second world, and all other nations were known as the “Third World.”

• “Third Cinema” refers to an international movement in which art films take up issues of colonialism, post-colonialism, tradition & modernity, and national meaning/representation. “What does it mean to be ________ ?”

Memories of Underdevelopment & Cuban History

• Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez-Alea (1968) & Based on a novel by Edmundo Desnoës called Inconsolable Memories.

• Spanish Rule until 1902 (Spain loses control of Cuba as a result of the Spanish-American war).

• 1953-9 Cuban Revolution: Fulgencio Batista overthrown in “26th of July Movement,” led by Fidel Castro.

• Bay of Pigs Invasion (April 1961): U.S. CIA launches a failed invasion of Cuba by arming existing anti-Castro militant groups.

• Cuban Missile Crisis: (Oct. 1962): An international panic that ensued when it was discovered that Soviets were supplying medium-range ballistic missiles to Cuba. An agreement was reached between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. to remove the missiles.

• Memories of Underdevelopment: Sergio reflects on his past and the history of Cuba, as an upper-class, Europeanized aspiring writer living coping with the country’s socialist future. As his family and friends flee to Miami, Sergio indulges in his dwindling sense of privilege and cultural bias. [Hanna/Laura/Noemi/Elena]