Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition

by Stephen Prince

  plied the style of the French New Wave, primarily

  budget Western teaming Brando with Jack

  jump cuts and other unconventional edits and op-

  Nicholson and widely regarded as a failure, Penn

  tical effects, to a mainstream U.S. film with Bonnie

  worked infrequently and without commercial

  and Clyde (1967), an important work of modern

  impact. Four Friends (1981) was barely released,

  cinema. Using slow motion and multicamera film-

  Target (1985) was an efficient demonstration of

  ing for its scenes of violence, audaciously mixing

  Penn’s ability to make a plot-driven thriller, and

  high comedy and brutal violence, Penn’s film

  Dead of Winter (1987) was an effective, if cold-

  captured the rebellious spirit of the times with its

  blooded, psychological chiller that Penn directed

  unconventional style and countercultural portrayal

  as a favor to friends who would have otherwise

  of Bonnie and Clyde as youthful heroes taking on

  been unable to get their script produced.

  the establishment. Alice’s Restaurant (1969) and

  Penn’s checkered film career demonstrates the

  Little Big Man (1970) quickly followed, essential

  essential interconnection of film and society. Penn

  documents of late 1960s film and society.

  thrived during a period of social turbulence when

  Penn faltered in the 1970s. With the eclipse of the

  the film industry welcomed innovative, cutting-

  social idealism and political excitement of the 1960s,

  edge work and when he could connect his artistic

  and with Watergate the dominant metaphor of social

  visions to the political dramas unfolding around

  corruption in the next decade, Penn was disillusioned

  him. Disillusioned with the 1970s and disappointed

  and cut off from the social ferment that nourished his

  with the special-effects-driven blockbuster fanta-

  films. However, he managed a stunning artistic expres-

  sies that dominated U.S. film from the latter half

  sion of a bleak cultural period. Night Moves (1975), a

  of that decade, Penn simply stopped working in

  detective film, brilliantly captures the national dark-

  films, except on an irregular basis, and turned his

  ness, despair, and confusion experienced in the wake

  energies to a deepening involvement with the New

  of the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy and

  York-based Actor’s Studio. Returning to his roots,

  Martin Luther King, Jr., and the collapse of the 1960s’

  he had been directing for television when he died

  social movements. It is, perhaps, Penn’s best film.

  in 2010. ■

  BONNIE AND CLYDE (WARNER

  BROS, 1967)

  The slow-motion, bloody deaths of

  Bonnie and Clyde changed American

  cinema forever. Penn’s gut-wrenching

  images established a new threshold of

  brutality on film, yet they seem almost

  tame by today’s standards. Unlike later

  filmmakers interested in gore for its own

  sake, Penn used violence as a way of ex-

  ploring the cultural climate of violence in

  American society. Frame enlargement.

  Eisenstein’s elaborate montages created conflicts of movement, rhythm, tone, lighting, and graphical properties among the shots. In many scenes, the editing has a harsh and jagged quality, as Eisenstein pushes these conflicting visual elements to the limit.

  The huge and extended massacre of civilians by Czarist troops in Battleship Potemkin is the most famous and influential example of Eisensteinian montage. Eisenstein’s editing fragments space and time by fracturing it into a multitude of brief shots that violate 176

  Editing: Making the Cut

  continuity principles. Actions are repeated, omitted, viewed simultaneously from multiple angles, slowed down, and speeded up and have their screen direction abruptly reversed.

  The editing is as violent as the drama that it visualizes. In this sequence and elsewhere, Eisenstein showed other filmmakers the power of montage as a tool for fragmenting time and space, and in this regard, it has been profoundly influential.

  Eisenstein also practiced what he called “intellectual montage,” using the editing to suggest ideas and guide the viewer’s thought process. The massacre sequence in Battleship Potemkin concludes with a vivid example of intellectual montage. To defend the massacre victims, a battleship fires its guns at the headquarters of Czarist troops. As their palace explodes, Eisenstein cuts together three quick shots of different statues of lions. The first stone lion sleeps, the second sits upright, the third roars. The montage, however, makes it look like a single, sleeping lion has awakened with fury.

  The symbolic idea is that the wrath of the people against the Czar is now aroused; the lion of revolution stalks the land.

  (a)

  (b)

  BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925)

  Eisenstein’s thematic montage creates a symbol for

  the people’s revolution. Three separate statues of

  lions, skillfully edited, become a single lion, roused

  from its slumbers and roaring its defiance. Because

  the shots are so brief, the editing imparts a sense of

  movement to the statuary. Frame enlargements.

  (c)

  177

  Editing: Making the Cut

  SPATIAL FRAGMENTATION Montage editing used to create spatial fragmentation tends to forgo the use of a clear master shot, the matching of action to that master shot, and the systematic repetition of familiar camera setups. Moulin Rouge , for example, breaks almost all the rules of continuity in its editing. Eyelines, camera angles, and object positioning fail to match from shot to shot. The cutting is so quick, though, that the viewer has little time to concentrate on these continuity problems.

  FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT

  Sergei Eisenstein

  Sergei Eisenstein was one of the greatest Soviet film-

  far more than individual heroes, and he uses montage

  makers working in the silent and early sound period,

  to show class conflict as a motor of social change.

  and his ideas about film editing have exerted tre-

  Unlike the continuity editing that prevailed in

  mendous influence over filmmakers throughout the

  American cinema, Eisenstein used editing analytically,

  world. While most directors recognize editing as a

  to clarify the class basis of the conflicts in his stories.

  key element of filmmaking, for Eisenstein it was de-

  Strike (1923), his first film, climaxes with an attack by

  cisive. He felt that cinema, more than anything else,

  soldiers on the striking factory workers. As the soldiers

  was an art of montage.

  slaughter the workers, Eisenstein abruptly intercuts

  We know exactly what Eisenstein thought be-

  shots of a bull being killed by a butcher, and the idea

  cause, unlike most filmmakers who do not think and

  motivating this shocking montage is that the soldiers

  write analytically, he wrote numerous essays about

  treat the workers as so many animals.

  cinema and about the art of editing. The most im-

  Eisenstein avoided using establishing shots

  portant of these are collected in volumes entitled

  or matches of direction and motion because he

  Film Form and The Film Sense . Eisenstein wrote that
/>
  wanted viewers to supply the missing information

  meaning in film depends far more on editing—on

  and build a comprehensive sense of the screen

  how shots are arranged in a sequence—than on

  world in their minds, based on the fragmentary

  their content, on what is photographed. Montage

  views that he gave them. This gives the montages in

  determines meaning, according to Eisenstein.

  many of Eisenstein’s films a nervous, jumpy, aggres-

  Eisenstein practiced what he called “dialectical

  sive quality that he believed was an accurate mirror

  montage,” ordering his shots according to principles

  of dynamic energies at work in the world.

  of conflict. This might involve conflict of movement

  In the 1930s, Eisenstein fell out of favor with

  from shot to shot, of lines, of volumes (for example,

  Soviet authorities who felt his work was too radical

  masses of people in the frame), or of tempo. As a

  and cutting-edge. They wanted a more realistic, nat-

  Marxist, he believed conflict—or the dialectic, as it is

  uralistic style in cinema, and Eisenstein’s films were

  termed in Marxist philosophy—was the fundamental

  anything but. In the sound era, therefore, he did not

  truth of life and of history. And as a good dramatist,

  work as frequently, and he worried that the addition

  he knew that conflict was essential to his stories.

  of spoken dialogue in cinema would diminish the

  Strike (1923) portrays a rebellion by factory work-

  medium’s poetic force by making filmmakers more

  ers and the violent repression it elicits from fat-cat

  literal and less imaginative in how they edited scenes.

  businessmen and politicians. Battleship Potemkin

  Eisenstein was right to worry. Sound did take

  (1925) portrays a mutiny by sailors aboard a battle-

  cinema in a more naturalistic direction, and the

  ship in pre-Revolutionary Russia, and October (1926)

  wildly imaginative montages of the silent era grew

  dramatizes key events in the October Revolution.

  less common. Eisenstein made three sound films—

  Eisenstein builds the stories according to a Marxist

  Alexander Nevsky (1936), Ivan the Terrible Part I

  analysis of history, in which groups of people matter

  (1944), and Ivan the Terrible Part II (1946)—in which

  ( continued)

  178

  Editing: Making the Cut

  he attempted to create poetic combinations of im-

  films as The Bourne Ultimatum would not exist were

  age and sound. But dialectical montage was now

  it not for Eisenstein. These films, though, borrow

  frowned upon by the authorities, and the editing in

  Eisenstein’s technique but not his worldview and

  these films is far less aggressive than what he had

  Marxist rationale. In his work—and the theories of ed-

  practiced during the silent era.

  iting he developed in his essays—Eisenstein presented

  The rapid, poetic, often brutal editing of Eisenstein

  cinema as a construction rather than a mirror on the

  has exerted a strong influence over contemporary

  world, as a medium constructed according to the laws

  film. Hitchcock staged the shower murder in Psycho

  of montage, in which meaning was not something

  (1960) using Eisensteinian montage, and the rapid

  to be recorded by a camera but was created and ar-

  montages that violate continuity principles in such

  ranged by a filmmaker using the art of editing. ■

  BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN

  (1925)

  This kind of shot is rare in

  Eisenstein’s work. It provides

  an expansive and clear view of

  a key moment in the drama—

  during the Odessa Steps mas-

  sacre, a mother carrying her

  wounded child (foreground)

  confronts the murderous sol-

  diers (background) who have

  fired on the citizenry. More

  typically, he built a scene by

  showing fragments of its ac-

  tion. Frame enlargement.

  Viewers probably notice them subliminally, however, because the editing does feel wild and jagged, not smooth and flowing.

  During the dance scenes in the Moulin Rouge, the editing fragments the club’s spatial layout by showering the viewer with visual information at a fast rate and by showing many, many close-ups and few master shots. The club is a dizzying montage offering glimpses of people, lights, signs, and faces. Editor Jill Bilcock said that her experience constructing the scenes out of so many close-ups was “like being given thousands of different kinds of colored beads and asked to make a necklace.”

  The editing builds the scene by accumulating details, bits and pieces of space and action. The editing aims to create a collage of discrete visual impressions rather than a spatially ordered, coherent, and stable environment. The scene is organized by a cumulative principle—the piling up of detail.

  While the montage cutting of contemporary films descends from the Soviet model of editing, there are other clear historical precedents. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the film’s main character, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), is murdered in her shower one-third of the way into the film. The murder itself lasts for 40 seconds and is composed of 34 shots. These tend to fall into three categories: (1) shots of Marion struggling with her attacker, holding the killer’s knife arm with her hand, (2) shots of Marion’s face 179

  Editing: Making the Cut

  PSYCHO (PARAMOUNT, 1960)

  Rapid montage editing creates the sensation of a violent murder in Psycho by assembling flash cuts of murderer and victim. The violent pace of the editing intensifies the brutal nature of the scene. Frame enlargements.

  and hands as she writhes in the shower, and (3) shots of the killer stabbing toward the camera. By rapidly intercutting these categories of shots, Hitchcock and editor George Tomasini create a scene of extraordinary violence, but one in which most of the actual violence is suggested because viewers almost never see the knife actually touching flesh.

  The impression of the murder is built up in the mind’s eye by virtue of the rapid editing.

  As Eisenstein showed, montage can fragment space and time, and contemporary filmmakers have used editing in vivid ways to fracture space and distort time. In Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), montage editing slowed action down, interrupted it with cutaways to parallel lines of action, and intercut normal speed and slow-motion footage to create stylish distortions of time and space. During the elaborate gun battle that opens the film, two snipers are shot from their rooftop perch. One man falls from the roof to the ground in slow motion; the other falls forward and into the rooftop ledge at normal speed. The editing intercuts these different time frames to establish an impossible parallel. The man who falls off the roof—traveling a much greater distance and in slow motion—strikes the ground at the same instant that the other victim hits the ledge. The viewer accepts these manipulations as permissible stylistic organizations of the action despite their evident unreality.

  THEMATIC MONTAGE Like Eisenstein, filmmakers may use montage to create ideas in the mind of the viewer. The arrangement of shots cues intellectual, and sometimes emotional, associations by the viewer.

  Familiar with Eisenstein’s work, Charles Chaplin in Modern Times (1936) used a similar bit of associational editing (though it is not a montage because it consists of only two shots). At the beginning of
the film, he cuts from a shot of sheep being herded into a pen to a shot of workers leaving a subway and crossing the street to enter their factory. The viewer is asked to draw the appropriate conclusions based on the comparison of the two categories of images.

  In Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), director Sam Peckinpah used thematic montage to emphasize the irony in the fate of sheriff Pat Garrett, killed by the same politicians who hired him years earlier to kill the outlaw Billy the Kid. Peckinpah intercuts two time frames, one set in 1908 showing Garrett’s assassination, the other set in 180

  Editing: Making the Cut

  THE WILD BUNCH

  (WARNER BROS., 1969)

  Two rooftop victims, two

  different film speeds,

  and the simultaneous

  resolution of these lines

  of action. The editing re-

  configures space and time.

  Frame enlargements.

  1880 showing Billy and his gang shooting the heads off of some chickens. The intercutting shows Billy firing from the 1880 time frame and seeming to hit Garrett in the 1908

  frame. The historical irony is clear. By killing the Kid, Garrett unintentionally brought about a chain of events that ultimately led to his own death many years later.

  Sequence Shots

  In closing this chapter on editing, it is important to note the existence in cinema history of a stylistic tradition in opposition to montage and to the general contribution of editing in structuring a scene. This is the use of the long take , sometimes also known as the sequence shot . The term refers to a shot of very long duration which, in some cases, may last for the entire length of a scene. If a filmmaker chooses to construct a scene using the long take, this decision will substitute for the normative practice of building a scene by cutting among different camera set-ups. In other words, the long take becomes the foundation of the scene, not editing. In Easy Rider (1969), the harvest prayer scene is composed of an extended 360-degree panning shot across the faces of the commune members. Because the scene is composed of one shot, there is no editing.

  Long takes do not always have to be sequence shots. Sometimes a scene can

  be composed of several very lengthy takes. In Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), Kane’s parents strike a deal with a banker, Mr. Thatcher, in which the bank will act as Kane’s guardian and assume control over his estate until he comes of age. The scene is largely presented in two long takes that, together, run for almost four minutes of screen time. Instead of relying on editing to maintain visual interest, Welles sustains it by choreographing elaborate moves by the characters and the camera. In the work 181