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What message is sent by using either of these
methods? These are the questions that should be
continuously addressed during post-production.Editing theory in practice
Modern practice says there’s an appropriate
time to use each style. Let’s start with wide
shot of a room as two people walk and talk.
Half way through the conversation someone
picks a gun up off a table in the background
and shoots the other person, then we see the
villain make themselves a drink and sit around
until the cops show up and arrest him. You
later fi nd out through verbal exposition that
someone was watching the whole thing and
he gave up because he knew he was seen. It’s
a valid approach, but your audience might feel
a little cheated. It’s not very exciting and it just
doesn’t work cinematically.
Instead, let’s try a bit of editing montage. We
again see our characters talking. Now we’ll use
an insert shot to call out something that alreadyphy. While not as popular today, it is certainly
a valid approach, and has been used quite ef-
fectively in many instances. Think of the slow
cinema movement pioneered by directors like
Gus Van Sant. Indeed, it is also seen often in
music videos of all things, where the single shot
concept has been used almost as a rebellion
against the fast and furious cutting of old.
These notions encapsulate the primary and
perhaps pinnacle of most modern editing
theory. While you’re trying to decide which shot
to place next to the other to produce the desired
emotional and motivational content, you are
both looking to fi nd the exact frame that will
either continue or contrast the action from the
previous shot and at the same time thinking
about what will be derived from the big picture
as a whole. Will a jump cut excite your audi-
ence, unsettle them or just confuse them? Is the
overall story and the theme of the work best
served by placing an action scene right after a
slow moment, or intercutting between them?“The Great Train Robbery” is credited as one of the first examples of a modern editing style and a precursor to parallel editing. Above, we
see three separate lines of action — the discovery of foul play, the unsuspecting marshal and the train bandits as they make their escape.Workers Leaving the Lumiére Factory Lumiére Brothers First projected film YoutubeA Trip to the Moon George Méliés Stop trick / cross dissolves YoutubeThe Great Train Robbery Edwin S. Porter Simultaneous action YoutubeKuleshov Effect Lev Kuleshov Influencing emotion through editing YoutubeMother Vsevolod Pudovkin Leitmotif https://archive.org/details/Mother_883Battleship Potemkin Sergey Eisenstein Intellectual Montage https://archive.org/details/BattleshipPotemkin
The 400 Blows Francois Truffaut Objective realism (French New Wave) AmazonLadri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) Vittorio De Sica Italian Neorealism NetflixRope Alfred Hitchcock The long take GoogleREQUIRED VIEWING
390 C01 Editing.indd 36 9/24/19 2:18 PMEDITING NOVEMBER 2019
VIDEOMAKER >>> NOVEMBER 2019 37
Peter Zunitch is an award-winning editor working in New York.exists in the scene: our shooter’s eyes as he
glances down. We’ll use a motivated cut — one
that has a visual or audio incentive to be used
— to show the item and its location: It’s the
gun on the table. A close up shot, used to see
greater detail, shows the table, the gun and the
villain’s leg behind it. This table is the very table
the he is standing next to. Thus we’ve built both
understanding and tension. Let’s go back to the
wide for a while and slowly build anticipation
of the oncoming conflict. The perp. looks back
down at the gun. We’ll use this look and go to a
thematically matching shot of our outside ob-
server looking into their binoculars. “Sight” and
“looking” have morphed into a theme.
This cutaway shows us what’s happening
outside the scene. Next, a point of view shot
shows the audience what the watcher is looking
at. It’s the window outside the room, and the
victim has just crossed to it. We then go back to
the wide shot in the room where we match cut,
aligning the movement from one shot to the
next, and see the victim just coming to rest at
the window; they are looking out.
Let’s pick up the pacing now and build the
tension to a breaking point. Note the irony —
we’re going to speed up the scene by extend-
ing time. Here real time and screentime are
rather different. We’ll use a thematic montage
to bring the scene together. The perp. looks
back at the gun. The victim looks up and out
the window. The binoculars point of view show
she’s looking right at the voyeur. The voyeur
looks back through the eyepiece. Now some
parallel editing to show all that is taking place
with our three characters in a single instant
of time. The victim is taken back and goes to
reach for her companion to join her at the
window. The perp. gets fed up and reaches for
the gun. The voyeur is panicked and their hand
reaches for the phone. The gun goes off. A
ringing sound is heard, the victim falls slowly
to the floor. The rest of the scene must release
the tension and resolve the story.
We use another motivated cutaway of the
phone at the police station ringing and an of-
ficer picking it up. We’ll cut back to the outside
window where the shooter stands over his
victim, then looks out the window and notices
the watcher. The watcher has the phone in their
hand. The shooter knows he’s been caught,
and resolves himself to his fate. We then cut
to a drink being poured and match it with one
last tear falling from our victim. It’s an intel-
lectual montage where shots represent the“The Great Train Robbery” is credited as one of the first examples of a modern editing style and a precursor to parallel editing. Above, we
see three separate lines of action — the discovery of foul play, the unsuspecting marshal and the train bandits as they make their escape. Truffaut’s “400
Blows” ends with
a long take of the
main character
running across
an empty beach.
Instead of guiding
the viewer to a
solid conclusion via
montage, the long
take helps convey a
sense of uncertain-
ty and ambiguity.bigger meaning letting us know that it’s all over
for everyone. Finally, we’ll end the scene with
a cross dissolve, or fade between shots, to help
show that some time has passed. The police are
putting the handcuffs on the shooter and lead-
ing him out.
This scene was much better served by using
the montage style of cutting. So what about
the long take? When would that be appropri-
ate? Let’s consider one more scene as a single
shot. We’ll start at some hands in handcuffs.
As they move away from the camera, we see it
is our shooter. We follow his face as he walks
and walks, in and out of pools of light. As he
walks his expression turns from stern neutral-
ity to sadness and loneliness, seclusion. Finally
he turns and we see him led into a cell where
the door is closed. The guards walk away, and
so does the camera, returning on the path it
just followed as the prisoner remains locked in
his cell and fades into the distance. We’ve told
all we needed to and conveyed all the emotion
necessary in one single shot, and its length
underscores the theme of the scene. The isola-
tion, the loneliness, the “long time” to come.
We could have used multiple shots here, but it
would have been overkill.
While the montage and the long take are
fundamentally opposed, they should not be
considered mutually exclusive. An editor should
recognize that effectively combining them is
possible and in some cases helpful. This is the
heart of editing theory. When we understand
“why” editing works, the how becomes almost
instinctive, our cuts become precise, our mean-
ing apparent and our audience becomes even
further drawn into our presentation.Workers Leaving the Lumiére Factory Lumiére Brothers First projected film YoutubeA Trip to the Moon George Méliés Stop trick / cross dissolves YoutubeThe Great Train Robbery Edwin S. Porter Simultaneous action YoutubeKuleshov Effect Lev Kuleshov Influencing emotion through editing YoutubeMother Vsevolod Pudovkin Leitmotif https://archive.org/details/Mother_883Battleship Potemkin Sergey Eisenstein Intellectual Montage https://archive.org/details/BattleshipPotemkin
The 400 Blows Francois Truffaut Objective realism (French New Wave) AmazonLadri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) Vittorio De Sica Italian Neorealism NetflixRope Alfred Hitchcock The long take GoogleYou can comment on this article by going online:
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