and end); and establishes and resolves the charac-
ters’ problems.
In short, continuity editing tells a story as clearly
and coherently as possible, as in this example (on
pages 356–357) from Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca
(1942: editor: Owen Marks). The movie opens by
explaining that, prior to the outbreak of World War
II, the French Moroccan city of Casablanca was a
major rendezvous for Europeans seeking exit visas
that would permit them to flee the Nazi offensive. In
an atmosphere of intrigue over the buying and sell-
ing of such visas, there is civil unrest, including
murder, as a major Nazi official arrives in town. The
continuity editing, represented by this panel of
images, establishes that Rick’s Café Americain is an
elegant, sophisticated rendezvous for everyone, a
place for all nationalities and languages, and that its
proprietor, Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), is and
will be at the center of the story.
But this is not the only approach to film editing.
Discontinuity editingbreaks the rules of continu-
ity editing by seeking to achieve transitions
between shots that are not smooth, continuous, or
coherent. It permits a filmmaker to make abrupt
shifts between shots, resulting in mismatches in
the location of characters or objects, the direction
or speed of movement, mise-en-scène, lighting,
camera angles, or even colors. Instead of invisibly
propelling the film forward, unlike continuity edit-
ing, it calls attention to itself as an element of cine-
matic form. It was pioneered by Soviet filmmakers
(see Chapter 10, “1924-1930: The Soviet Montage
Movement,” page 448) and greatly influenced the
French New Wave directors, including Jean-Luc
Godard in Breathless(1960). It has become a stan-
dard tool of today’s filmmakers.
Like the tension between realism (verisimili-
tude) and antirealism more generally, continuity
and discontinuity are not absolute values but are
instead tendencies along a continuum. An average
Hollywood movie may exhibit continuity in some
parts and discontinuity in others, even if the over-
all tendency of the movie is toward classical conti-
nuity. Similarly, an avant-garde film that is mostly
discontinuous can include scenes that employ con-
tinuity editing. We don’t need to look any further
than Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spot-
less Mind(2004; editor: Valdis Óskarsdóttir) or Fer-
nando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s City of God
(2002; editor: Daniel Rezende)—to cite just two
cases—to find examples that use both of these
major approaches to editing as well as many of the
specific tools of editing described in this chapter.Conventions of Continuity Editing
Continuity editing, now the dominant style of edit-
ing throughout the world, seeks to achieve logic,
smoothness, sequential flow, and the temporal and
spatial orientation of viewers to what they see on
the screen. As with so many conventions of film
production, the conventions of continuity editing
remain open to variation, but in general, continuity
editing ensures that>what happens on the screen makes as much
narrative sense as possible.
>screen direction is consistent from shot to
shot.
>graphic, spatial, and temporal relations are
maintained from shot to shot.The two fundamental objectives of continuity edit-
ing are to establish coverage of the scene through358 CHAPTER 8EDITING
DVDThis tutorial explores montage and dis-
continuity editing in Sergei Eisentein’s film The
Battleship Potemkin.