An Introduction to Film

MAJOR APPROACHES TO EDITING: CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY 365

Legendary match cut in Lawrence of Arabia Director
David Lean and his editor, Anne V. Coates, created a
legendary match cut in Lawrence of Arabia(1962) by literally
cutting from a shot of a match flame [1] to a shot of the sun
rising on the desert [2]. Although Lean wrote, “I am not
absolutelyconvinced that the match incident is worth the
footage involved [less than a minute],”^7 once you’ve seen it,
you’ll no doubt disagree. To make this shot even more
interesting, Lean created a sound bridge to link the two
images. He said: “I thought Lawrence should blow out the
match, and I wanted the sound to blow in the desert. What I
did was this. He [Peter O’Toole, who plays T. E. Lawrence in
the film] holds up the match and he blows. Now, I laid the
first half of the blow over Peter and last half over the sunrise
in the desert, so that the blow noise carried from his close-up
over to the long shot. He was still blowing on the long shot. If
I’d had him blow out the match and after the sound had
faded I cut to the long shot, it wouldn’t have had the same
effect.”^8

1

2

(^7) Lean, qtd. ibid., p. 116.
(^8) Lean, qtd. in Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: A Biography(New
York: St. Martin’s, 1996), pp. 471–472.
Match-on-Action Cut A match-on-action cut
shows us the continuation of a character’s or object’s
motion through space without actually showing us
the entire action. It is a fairly routine editorial tech-
nique for economizing a movie’s presentation of
movement. Of course, the match-on-action cut has
both expressive and practical uses.
Graphic Match Cut In a graphic match cut, the
similarity between shots A and B is in the shape
and form of what we see. In this type of cut, the
shape, color, or texture of objects matches across
the edit, providing continuity. The prologue of
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968; edi-
tor: Ray Lovejoy) contains a memorable example of
a graphic match cut in which the action continues
seamlessly from one shot to the next: a cut that
erases millions of years, from a bone weapon of the
Stone Age to an orbiting craft of the Space Age.
The weapon and the spacecraft match not only in
their tubular shapes but also in their rotations.
Alfred Hitchcock gives us another classic exam-
ple of the graphic match cut in Vertigo(1958; editor:
George Tomasini) when John “Scottie” Ferguson
(James Stewart) places a necklace around the neck
of Judy Barton (Kim Novak). This action occurs in
a sequence: a medium shot of Barton and Ferguson
in front of a mirror as Ferguson fastens the neck-
lace followed by a dolly-in right to a close-up of him
looking at her reflection; cut to a dolly-in to a close-
up of the necklace on Barton’s neck followed by the
match cut to a dolly-out from a close-up of a simi-
lar necklace in a portrait.
Graphic matches often exploit basic shapes—
squares, circles, triangles—and provide a strong
visual sense of design and order. For example, at the
end of the shower murder sequence in Psycho(1960;
editor: George Tomasini), Hitchcock matches two
circular shapes: the eye of Marion Crane (Janet
Leigh), tears streaming down, with the round shower
drain, blood and water washing down—a metaphori-
cal visualization of Marion’s life ebbing away.
Eye-line Match Cut An eye-line match cutjoins
shot A, in which a person looks at someone off-
screen, and shot B, the object of that gaze looking
back. In Irving Rapper’s Now, Voyager(1942; editor:
Warren Low), Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid) lights
two cigarettes, one for him, the other for Charlotte
Vale (Bette Davis). As he hands one to her and