are watching is at least partly fantastical and that
we should be ready to suspend our disbelief.
The most common manipulation of time through
editing is ellipsis, an omission between one thing
and another. In a quotation, for example, an ellipsis
mark (... ) signifies the omission of one or more
words. In filmmaking, an ellipsis generally signifies
the omission of time—the time that separates one
shot from another. Ellipsis in movies is first and
foremost a practical tool; it economizes the pres-
entation of plot, skipping over portions of the
underlying story that do not need to be presented
on-screen to be understood or inferred. But its
use requires the filmmaker to have carefully estab-
lished the time, place, location, characters, and
action so that viewers are able not only to follow
what they see but also to make the intuitive infer-
ences that fill in the material that was left out. This
is what happens in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cow-
boy(1989; editors: Mary Bauer and Curtiss Clay-
ton) when a policeman asks Bob (Matt Dillon), a
heroin addict, “Are you going to tell us where you
hid the drugs, or are we going to have to tear the
place apart bit by bit?” When the next shot shows
Bob’s house torn apart, the cut implies an ellipsis of
time, and it presents us with everything we need
to know about the period of story time that has
elapsed.
The effect of an ellipsis on viewers is determined
by how much story time is implied between shotsAABBAAThe Kuleshov effect In the 1920s, Soviet film pioneer Lev
Kuleshov conducted an experiment to investigate editing’s
ability to create new meaning. He juxtaposed a shot of an
actor wearing a neutral expression and looking offscreen
with a number of other shots and then screened them in
sequence for a test audience. When the viewers watched a
series of shots like the ABA sequence above (from the DVD
tutorial re-creation of Kuleshov’s experiment), they
interpreted the character in shot A as looking at the soup
and assumed he was hungry. When shown a sequence using
the same shot of the expressionless actor but juxtaposed
instead with the image of a dead man, viewers assumed a
relationship between the character and the corpse and felt
the actor was expressing grief or remorse. With this simple
experiment, Kuleshov demonstrated a creative capacity of
film editing that is still utilized by editors: the juxtaposition of
images can create new meaning not present in any single
shot by itself.THE FILM EDITOR 347