An Introduction to Film

376 CHAPTER 8EDITING

You can most effectively analyze an editor’s con-
tributions to a film by examining individual scenes
and trying to understand how their parts—the
shots that make up those scenes—fit together. One
useful tool for helping you to see the parts clearly
and to analyze their relationship to the whole is to
create a shot-analysis chart similar to the one
shown in Table 8.1 (pages 378–380). By carefully
noting details about each shot in a sequence—
including its length, the type of shot it is (long,
medium, close-up, etc.), and details about the
action included in the shot—you can “map” a scene
to get a better sense of its shape and rhythm.
In the example we’ve provided in Table 8.1,
which lays out the shots in the famous scene from
D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation(1915; editors:
Griffith, Joseph Henabery, James Smith, Rose
Smith, and Raoul Walsh) that re-creates the assas-
sination of Abraham Lincoln, we can see that the
scene consists of thirty-nine shots running just
under 3½ minutes. Perhaps the first thing we
notice about this sequence of shots is that they are
all fairly short. The average length of a shot in this
scene is approximately 5 seconds, and no shot lasts
longer than 14 seconds. The effect of all of these
short shots is a heightening of dramatic tension, an
effect that is especially important when the action
in the scene is already known to the audience (obvi-
ously, everyone watching the film knows that Abra-
ham Lincoln will be shot in the head by the end of
the scene). Looking at the descriptions of each
shot, we can also see that Griffith rarely carries the
action over from shot to shot, but instead presents
a cumulative series of details from different view-
points. According to British film editor and direc-
tor Karel Reisz, who has written extensively on
editing, this style of editing has two advantages:

Firstly, it enables the director to create a sense of

depth in his narrative: the various details add up to

a fuller, more persuasively life-like picture of a situ-

ation than can a single shot, played against a con -

stant background. Secondly, the director is in a far

stronger position to guide the spectator’s reactions,

because he is able to choose what particular detail

the spectator is to see at any particular moment....

Griffith’s fundamental discovery, then, lies in his

realisation that a film sequence must be made up of

incomplete shots whose order and selection are gov-

erned by dramatic necessity.^9

As an innovator of film form, Griffith cared not only

about what happened within shots but also about

what happened between shots. Through cinematog-

raphy, Griffith constructed credible visual represen-

tations of the sights surrounding the assassination

of Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre and re-created the

actions of the assassination as faithfully as was pos-

sible at the time. But the realistic tableaux and cho-

reography that Griffith constructed within the

shots come alive only because of his editing of these

shots, which makes us feel the fateful pace of the

impending tragedy.

Now, let’s look closely at a contemporary film to

see how editing has evolved (or not) since Griffith’s

time.

Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s City of God

City of God (2002), codirected by Fernando

Meirelles and Kátia Lund and edited by Daniel

Rezende, also relies on editing to tell its story. But

the filmmakers take a very different approach from

Griffith’s. The movie opens with a section entitled

“Chasing the Chicken.” The film’s title and credits

appear over this sequence, beginning with “A Film

by Fernando Meirelles” and then running for 3 min-

utes, 7 seconds until the movie’s second section

begins. The movie, set in a violent, drug-ridden

quarter of Rio de Janeiro, is narrated from the

point of view of Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues). In

this opening sequence, we are introduced to Rocket

(^9) Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar, The Technique of Film Editing,
2nd ed. (London: Focal Press, 1968), pp. 22, 24.
Shots from the assassination scene in The Birth of
a Nation(opposite)[1] is from shot 21, [2] is from shot 22,
[3] is from shot 32, [4] is from shot 33, [5] is from shot 38,
and [6] is from shot 39.