Introduction to Film Studies

Montage

Editing Devices

• Cheat Cut - in the continuity editing systyem, a cut which presents continuous time from shot to shot but which mismatches the position of figures or objects

• The lady on the phone, the wall and the people at dinner table, Meet me in St. Louis

Editing Devices

• Establishing shots are for identifying the context for a scene by showing the relationship between important figures and their surrounding. Generally they are filmed in long or extreme-long shot at the beginning of a scene. Vertigo

Editing Devices

• Establishing shot not only introduces the viewer a location, but also determines the spatial relationship in it, very importantly, the axis of action for the 180° rule (system) Vertigo

Editing Devices

• Cross-cutting or Inter-cutting (shots of two or more, usually concurrent actions, are interwoven.)

• A classic example: D.W. Griffith’s Lonedale Operator In its ending the telegraph woman sends for help and ward off the robbers and in the meanwhile help is arriving in a train.

Editing Devices

• Cross-cutting – editing that alternates the shots of two or more lines of action taking place in different places but simultaneously. Multiple actions are linked and multiple characters from different shots are associated. Godfather

Editing Devices

• Jump Cut – editing device in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from (slightly or just slightly) different camera positions. Through this editing, an action can jump forwards in time by eliminating part of it. It manipulates the duration of the action. How to make a jump cut

Editing Devices

• Cut-in: The change of framing from distant to closer view. In Dancer in the Dark Selma and Bill are having a conversation in his car. An extreme long shot of Bill’s car cut in to the medium long shot of Bill and Selma. Cut-in

Editing Devices

• Cut-away – the interruption of a continuous action by inserting a view of something else. The cut-away shot is followed, though not always, by a cut back to the previous action.

• The Odessa Steps montage Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin

Editing Devices

• More jagged jump cut, in which an action is cut abruptly before it completes and an action starts abruptly in the middle of it, fractures the duration of time forward. Violation of classical continuity editing.

Editing Devices

• Jagged jump cuts are frequently and extensively used in contemporary artistic films such as those in Dogme 95

• Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark

Duration of Time in Editing

• Temporal ellipsis – jumping forward in story time by not showing what may have happened between the last action and the next.

• In Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, events over a night is eliminated by the shot of the old parents waiting for a train cut to the shot of a railway station in the morning and their son in his office.

Duration of Time in Editing

• The passage of days is eliminated by using a series of unmatched shots of holiday-makers arriving at the beach town and indicating a holiday season is approaching.

• Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws Holidaymakers

Duration of Time in Editing

• One of the boldest graphic matches in cinema history and one of the largest temporal ellipsis. Between the shot of a bone spinning in the air and that of a space station orbiting the earth, two million years has passed in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey

Duration of Time in Editing

• Story time (the length of time passes in the story) can be prolonged as discourse time (the length of time spent to tell the story) by adding extra shots in the process of editing.

• In Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, a fight is greatly extended by including extra shots.

Duration of Time in Editing

• Another bold ellipsis of time in which not only a considerable length of time is omitted but also it jumps a considerable geographical space from Cairo to the Arabian Desert in Lawrence of Arabia.

Editing Devices

• Double (multiple) exposure – the superimposition of two or more exposure to create a single image. It has been used in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now opening

Editing Devices

• The footage shot by multiple cameras can be edited together so that the scene gain dynamism as frequently used in sports broadcasting.

Editing Devices

• The final battle scene of Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa was shot with eight cameras and the footage was skillfully edited and mixed with enhanced sound effects.

Editing Devices

• Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millinaire was shot with 26 portable digital video cameras at most. excerpt