are waiting for a train to arrive) and of what we
hear (an equally extraordinary montage of sounds,
the slow, steady rhythm of which establishes an
ominous mood).
These visual and aural images establish a slow,
deliberate pattern of duration, sound, and move-
ment. The shots of waiting for the train’s arrival
last a very long time, made to seem even longer by
the views of the vast prairie on the widescreen for-
mat, but they feature little or no action or move-
ment by the characters. With this long sequence,
Leone calls our attention to the content curve,
which in terms of cinematic duration is the point at
which we have absorbed all we need to know in a
particular shot and are ready to see the next shot.
Because we get very little information from this
sequence, ordinarily we would expect the director
to use shots of a shorter duration and to cut more
quickly from one to the next. However, Leone frus-
trates our expectations by not cutting and traps us
in each shot, making us wait along with the bored
desperadoes.
The montage of natural sounds in Leone’s open-
ing sequence in this film has a different rhythm
from that of the visual images; its purpose is to
underscore the tedium of the wait. The duration of
each sound is shorter than the duration of the
shots, and what we hear are repetitions of the same
sounds: wind, squeaking windmill, footsteps, tele-
graph machine, water dripping, fly buzzing, knuck-
les cracking, and silence. Suddenly this pattern,
pace, and mood are broken by a shot—taken from a
camera positioned underneath the tracks—of a
train speeding toward the station. The pattern of
editing speeds up, with cuts between close-ups of
three men loading their guns; the train approach-
ing at dramatic angle, its sounds now taking prece-
dence over the others; and finally the train coming
to a stop at a right angle to the screen, in front of
the camera, wheels grinding to a halt and whistle
blowing. In a moment, the train departs, leaving
behind Harmonica (Charles Bronson).
The short, abrupt change in editing associated
with the train’s arrival takes on added significance
because of Harmonica, who is to become one of the
heroes of the film. In completing this scene, Leone
returns to the overall pattern established in this
sequence, with slow, quiet, static shots of the four-
way face-off between Harmonica and the despera-
does building up to a rapid-fire shooting sequence
(in terms of both the action being filmed and the
camera shots that are capturing it) in which every
gunman, even Harmonica, catches a bullet.Major Approaches to Editing:
Continuity and Discontinuity
Because the editing of most contemporary narra-
tive movies is made to be as inconspicuous as pos-
sible, the process and the results of editing may not
be apparent to people unfamiliar with filmmaking.
In the editing of such movies, the point is to tell the
story as clearly, efficiently, and coherently as possi-
ble. This style of editing, called continuity editing,
is certainly the most prevalent in mainstream film-
making, and it’s the sort of editing that we’ll spend
most of this chapter discussing. Continuity editing
seeks to achieve logic, smoothness, sequential flow,
and the temporal and spatial orientation of viewers
to what they see on the screen. It ensures the flow
from shot to shot; creates a rhythm based on the
relationship between cinematic space and cine-
matic time; creates filmic unity (beginning, middle,DVDThis tutorial explores the history of
the major innovations in continuity (or classical)
editing in early cinema.MAJOR APPROACHES TO EDITING: CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY 355