hypothetical movie; the screen duration of this
scene is 10 minutes, but the implied duration of the
plot event is 4 hours. In Terrence Malick’s Days of
Heaven(1978; screenwriter: Malick), a 30-second
sequence of time-lapse cinematography shows the
seeds of a wheat plant germinating under the soil,
the wheat grass sprouting, and its tips turning a
golden color. This haunting shot, which is a
metaphor for the more gradual changes that occur
on farms in the cycle from planting to germination
to harvest, depicts in a very short time on the
screen a growth period that lasts much longer. In
Citizen Kane, Welles depicts the steady disintegra-
tion of Kane’s first marriage to Emily Norton
(Ruth Warrick) through a rapid montage of six
shots at the breakfast table that take two minutes
on the screen but depict seven years of their life
together. Through changes in dress, hairstyle,
seating, and their preferences in newspapers, we
see the couple’s relationship go from amorous pas-
sion to sarcastic hostility. Summary relationships
are essential to telling movie stories, especially
long and complicated ones.
Because it is less common than summary, the
stretch relationship is often used to highlight a plot
event, stressing its importance to the overall narra-
tive. A stretch relationship can be achieved by
special effects such as slow motion, particularly
when a graceful effect is needed, as in showing
a reunited couple running slowly toward one
another. It can also be constructed by editing tech-
niques. The “Odessa Steps” sequence in Sergei
Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin(1925; screenwrit-
ers: Nina Agadzhanova, Nikolai Aseyev, Eisenstein,
and Sergei Tretyakov) uses editing to stretch out
the plot duration of the massacre so that our expe-
rience of it on-screen lasts longer than it would
have taken to occur in reality. Eisenstein does
this because he wants us to see the massacre as an
important and meaningful event, as well as to
increase our anxiety and empathy for the victims.
The real-time relationship is the least common
of the three relationships between screen duration
and plot duration, but its use has always interested
and delighted film buffs. Many directors use real
time within films to create uninterrupted “reality”
on the screen, but directors rarely use it for entire
films. Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon(1952; screen-
writer: Carl Foreman) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope
(1948; screenwriter: Arthur Laurents) are two
outstanding films that present a real-time relation-
ship between screen and plot duration. In Rope,
Hitchcock used the long take (discussed further in
Chapter 6)—an unedited, continuous shot—to pre-
serve real time. One roll of motion-picture film can
record approximately 11 minutes of action, and thus
Hitchcock made an 80-minute film with ten shots
that range in length from 4 minutes 40 seconds to
10 minutes.^5 Six of the cuts between these shots are
virtually unnoticeable because Hitchcock has the
camera pass behind the backs of people or furni-
ture and then makes the cut on a dark screen; four
others are ordinary hard cuts from one person to
another. Even these hard cuts do not break time
or space, so the result is fluid storytelling in which
the plot duration equals the screen duration of
80 minutes.
In most traditional narrative movies, cuts and
other editing devices punctuate the flow of the
narrative and graphically indicate that the images
occur in human-made cinematic time, not seam-
less real time. As viewers, we think that movies
pass before us in the present tense, but we also
understand that cinematic time can be manipu-
lated through editing, among other means. As we
accept these manipulative conventions, we also
recognize that classic Hollywood editing generally
goes out of its way to avoid calling attention to
itself. Furthermore, it attempts to reflect the natu-
ral mental processes by which human conscious-
ness moves back and forth between reality and
illusion, shifting between past, present, and future.
Abel Gance’s masterpiece Napoléon (1927;
screenwriter: Gance) not only exhibits each of the
relationships between duration and plot that have
just been described, but also includes some of the(^5) Various critics have said that each shot in Ropelasts 10 min-
utes, but the DVD release of the film shows the timings
(rounded off ) to be as follows: opening credits, 2:09; shot 1,
9:50; shot 2, 8:00; shot 3, 7:50; shot 4, 7:09; shot 5, 10:00;
shot 6, 7:40; shot 7, 8:00; shot 8, 10:00; shot 9, 4:40; shot 10,
5:40; closing credits, 00:28.
ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE 151