LOOKING AT EDITING 375uses is to portray both participants in a telephone
conversation simultaneously on the screen. Unlike
parallel editing, however, which cuts back and forth
between shots for contrast, the split screen can tell
multiple stories within the same frame.
The split screen was used by other early film-
makers (e.g., D. W. Griffith and Erich von Stroheim),
but never on the scale or with the technical ingenu-
ity displayed by Buster Keaton in The Play House
(1921), for which he invented a process (later, the
industry standard) that split the screen into nine
slivers of space. Buster plays all the parts, includ-
ing actors, stagehands, and audience; he does drag
and a dazzling imitation of a monkey. At one point,
he portrays nine characters on the screen at once.
In Napoléon(1927; editor: Gance), Abel Gance
introduced Polyvision, a multiscreen technique, as
in the epic pillow fight between the young Napoléon
(Vladimir Roudenko) and other boys in their school
dormitory. The fight begins on a single screen; con-
tinues on a screen split into four equal parts, then
on one split into nine equal parts; reaches its cli-
max on a single screen with multiple, superim-
posed full-size images; and ends, as it began, on a
single screen.
The split screen has figured prominently in other
films, including Norman Jewison’s The Thomas
Crowne Affair(1968; editors: Hal Ashby, Byron
Brandt, Ralph E. Winters), in which the editors cut
between many small screens, which expand to fill the
entire screen and then return to their smaller place
within the composition; Gus Van Sant’s To Die For
(1995; editor: Curtis Clayton), in which there are 1,
then 4, and then 64 screens near the end of the movie;
Mike Figgis’s Timecode(2000; editor: uncredited), in
which the screen is divided into quarters that simul-
taneously show four different 90-minute shots (see
the image on page 153); and Hans Canosa’s Conversa-
tions with Other Women (2005; editor: Canosa), a
movie shot so that the footage could be edited into a
work consisting entirely of split screens. In The Rules
of Attraction(2002; editor: Sharon Rutter), a dark
satire about college life, sex, and love, director Roger
Avary uses various editing techniques, including the
split screen, to emphasize people who want to be
together, or think they do, but never make it.
Looking at Editing
When you watch a movie, you seethe mise-en-scène,
design, and acting, you hearthe dialogue, music, and
sound effects, but you feelthe editing, which has
the power to affect you directly or indirectly. Good
editing—editing that produces the filmmakers’
desired effects—results from the editor’s intuition
in choosing the right length of each shot, the right
rhythm for each scene, the right moment for cutting
to create the right spatial, temporal, visual, and
rhythmic relationships between shots.The split screen as would-be matchmaker The Rules
of Attraction is about several pairs of people who want, or
think they want, to be together but haven’t learned the so-
called “rules of attraction.” Sean Bateman (James Van Der
Beek) receives love notes from an anonymous admirer whom
he believes to be Lauren Hynde (Shannyn Sossamon), simply
because he’s in love with her. And Lauren is attracted to
Sean, but backs off when she discovers him in bed with her
roommate. In fact, the letters were written by a desperate
young woman who kills herself after a series of encounters in
which Sean pays no attention to her. Both Sean and Lauren
plan to attend a special Saturday tutorial, and in a long,
lyrical sequence of shots, edited into a split screen, we follow
him (on the left) and her (on the right) as they walk from their
dorms across the campus and into the classroom building.
Here, in one image from the sequence, Sean walks toward us,
as does Lauren, who’s just learned that the professor has
canceled the session. Still in split screens, the two meet at the
corner where the two hallways join, these long shots
becoming two close-ups that fill each screen. After they talk
briefly, recognizing each other’s names and finding a few
things they have in common, a special editing effect literally
pulls the two together in medium shot in a single frame. This
suggests that editing can be a match-maker—that they might
become a couple after all—but that never happens.