6 Chapter 6: Editing

What Is Film Editing?

At its most basic level, editing involves the post-production selection and assemblage of individual
shots (and “takes,” or versions, of those shots) that transform raw film footage into a meaningful sequence.

The Shot

Postproduction

With this chapter we move from production into the realm of postproduction.^[3] By definition, the material recorded during production cannot be put together into its final form until production has finished and every scene has been filmed. Indeed, by the time editing begins, the cast is heading home, along with most of the preproduction and production crew. Suddenly, from a team of hundreds bustling about before and behind the camera, the work splits off into teams who will work on the raw material that the production process has generated—sound editing and design, special effects, and, of course, our topic for this chapter: editing.

Perhaps it is for this reason that we tend to undervalue the importance of and creative artistry behind editing and most post-production work (except special effects). There are no celebrities on hand for this labor; usually only the editor and director (and sometimes a producer) are present. As Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited every Martin Scorsese film since Raging Bull (1980),  put it, “Editing is a lot about patience and discipline and just banging away at something, turning off the machine and going home at night because you’re frustrated and depressed, and then coming back in the morning to try again.” But even as she acknowledges the unromantic aspects of film editing, she also reminds us that, ultimately, it is in the editing room that the raw materials of a film become a work of art:  “It’s hard for people to understand editing, I think. It’s absolutely like sculpture. You get a big lump of clay, and you have to form it—this raw, unedited, very long footage.” Ultimately, editing has a major effect on a film’s manipulation of time and space. Additionally, editing contributes significantly to a film’s representation of the physical and psychological milieu.^[4]

In the following video, Schoonmaker describes the process she used to edit a crucial scene in Raging Bull.

Editing in Raging Bull

Kuleshov Effect and Montage

The earliest motion pictures were often single-take actualités, unedited views of a man sneezing, workers leaving a factory, or a train pulling into a station.^[5] It took a few years before filmmakers understood the storytelling power of the medium, before they realized there was such a thing as cinematic language. Filmmakers like Georges Méliès seemed to catch on quickly, not only using mise-en-scène and in-camera special effects, but also employing the edit, the joining together of discrete shots in a sequence to tell a story. In this early period, it was the Russians who focused specifically on editing as the essence of cinema. One Russian in particular, Lev Kuleshov, led the way.

Kuleshov was an art school dropout living in Moscow when he directed his first film in 1917. He was only 18 years old. By the time he was 20, he had helped found one of the first film schools in the world in Moscow, and he was keenly interested in film theory, more specifically, film editing and how it worked on an audience. He had a hunch that the power of cinema was not found in any one shot but in the juxtaposition of shots. To test his hunch, he performed an experiment. He cut together a short film and showed it to audiences in 1918. Here’s the film:

After viewing the film, the audience raved about the actor and his performance (he was a very famous actor at the time in Russia). They praised the subtly with which he expressed his aching hunger upon viewing the soup, and the mournful sadness upon seeing the child in a coffin, and the longing desire upon seeing the scantily clad woman. The only problem? It was the exact same shot of the actor every time! The spectators projected their own emotion and meaning onto the actor’s expression because of the juxtaposition of the other images. This phenomenon – how we derive more meaning from the juxtaposition of two shots than from any single shot in isolation – became known as The Kuleshov Effect.

Other Russian filmmakers took up this fascination with how editing works on an audience, both emotionally and psychologically, and developed an approach to filmmaking known as the Soviet Montage Movement. Montage is simply the French term for “assembly” or “editing,” but Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s were pushing the boundaries of what was possible, testing the limits of the Kuleshov Effect. In the process, they were accelerating the evolution of cinematic language, bringing a sophisticated complexity to how cinema communicates meaning.

The most famous of these early proponents of the Soviet Montage Movement was Sergei Eisenstein. Once a student of Kuleshov’s (though actually a year older), Eisenstein would become one of the most prolific members of the movement. Perhaps his most well-known film, Battleship Potemkin (1925), contains a sequence that has become one of the most famous examples of Soviet montage, and frankly, one of the most famous sequences in cinema period. It’s known as The Odessa Steps Sequence. Here’s the clip:

One thing you might notice about that scene: it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, at least in terms of a logical narrative. But Eisenstein was more interested in creating an emotional effect. He achieves this by juxtaposing images of violence with images of innocence, repeating images and shots, lingering on some images and flashing on others. He wants viewers to feel the terror of peasants being massacred by troops, even if spectators don’t completely understand the geography or linear sequence of events. That’s the power of the montage as Eisenstein used it: a collage of moving images designed to create an emotional effect rather than a logical narrative sequence.

In the hundred or so years since Kuleshov and Eisenstein, we’ve learned a lot about how editing works, both as filmmakers and as audience members. In fact, we know it so well we hardly have to give it much thought. We’ve fully accepted the idea that cinema uses editing not only to manipulate our emotions through techniques like the Kuleshov Effect, but also to control space and time itself. When a film or television episode cuts from one location to another, we rarely wonder whether the characters on screen teleported or otherwise broke the laws of physics (unless, of course, it’s a film about wizards). We intuitively understand that edits allow the camera – and by implication the viewer – to jump across space and across time to keep the story moving at a steady clip.

Ellipsis

The most obvious example of this is the ellipsis, an edit that slices out time or events we don’t need to see to follow the story. Imagine a scene where a car pulls up in front of a house, then cuts to a woman at the door ringing the doorbell. We don’t need to spend the screen time watching her shut off the car, climb out, shut and lock the door, and walk all the way up to the house. The cut is an ellipsis, and none of us will wonder if she somehow teleported from her car to the front door. If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize that ellipses are crucial to telling a story cinematically. If we had to show every moment in every character’s experience, films would take years or even decades to make much less watch!^[6]

Such assumptions are sometimes exposed by the “slow cinema” of directors such as Béla Tarr. Look, for instance, at the opening shot of Satan’s Tango (1994):

Satan’s Tango

Many viewers claim to desire “realism” in film, and Tarr delivers exactly that: cows walking slowly in real time. What most viewers mean by “realism,” however, involves heavy editing of the “boring” parts: heightened realism that uses ellipsis to eliminate activities generally deemed insignificant or unnecessary to the main action. These ellipses are so common or “invisible” that when a filmmaker such as Tarr removes them (often for particular aesthetic or ideological reasons), a shot, scene, sequence, or even entire film can seem painfully slow.

In contrast, a much shorter clip from Tokyo Fist (1995) contains scores of ellipses that simultaneously delete numerous actions and speed up the scene’s pace by fusing together numerous short shots.

Tokyo Fist

Flashbacks and Flashforwards

Other ways cinema manipulates time include sequences like flashbacks and flashforwards.^[7] Filmmakers use these when they want to show events from a character’s past or foreshadow what’s coming in the future. They’re also a great indicator of how far cinematic language has evolved over time. Back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, when editors were first experimenting with techniques like flashbacks, they needed ways to signal to the audience, “Hey, we’re about to go back in time!” They would employ music – usually harp music – and visual cues like blurred focus or warped images to indicate a flashback. As audiences became more fluent in this new addition to cinematic language, they didn’t need the visual cues anymore. Today, movies often move backwards and forwards in time, trusting the audience to “read” the scene in its proper context without any prompts. Think of films like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) which plays with time throughout, rearranging the sequence of events in the plot for dramatic effect and forcing the viewer to keep up, or a more recent film like Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women (2019), which also moves backwards and forwards in time, hinting at the shift through mise-en-scène and subtle changes in performance.^[8]

Little Women

Here’s a brief video that explains how directors employ flashbacks:

Hauke Sterner on cinematic flashbacks

Flashforwards are far less frequent in films. As the term suggests, flashforwards provide viewers with a look into a character’s future.  Flashforwards are commonly used in science fiction films to reveal alternate timelines. In most cases, though, flashforwards emphasize a character’s ability to change an outcome for better or worse. Sometimes, directors will employ paired flashforwards to show two potential outcomes of a character’s decision, one positive and one negative.

In the scene from Sherlock Holmes (2009) below, a flashforward highlights Holmes’s remarkable analytical abilities even as he faces an apparently insurmountable challenge.

Rhythm

Another, much more subtle way editing manipulates time is in the overall rhythm of the cinematic experience.^[9]  The pace of the finished film, how the edits speed up or slow down to serve the story, produce an overall rhythm. Viewers experience editing rhythm most directly through a scene’s mixture of shot lengths. Shots that deviate from an established pattern (average shot length) will speed up or slow down the rhythm.^[10]

Generally, shot duration is the most important factor in establishing a rhythm, with shorter shots acting as intensifiers and longer shots serving to relieve suspense or establish a reflective mood. Transitions between scenes can also impact a film’s rhythm.

Here’s a video from Studio Binder that explains the importance of editing rhythm.

Rhythm in editing

Continuity Editing

Maybe it’s obvious, but if editing is where the grammar and syntax of cinematic language come together, then the whole point is to make whatever we see on screen make as much sense as possible.^[11] Just like a writer wants to draw the reader into the story, not remind them they’re reading a book, an editor’s job, first and foremost, is to draw the viewer into the cinematic experience, not remind them they’re watching a movie. (Unless that’s exactly what the filmmaker wants to do, but more on that later.) The last thing most editors want to do is draw attention to the editing itself. We call this approach to editing continuity editing, or more to the point, “invisible” editing.

The goal of continuity editing is to create a continuous flow of images and sound, a linear, logical progression, shot to shot and scene to scene, constantly orienting the viewer in space and time and carrying them through the narrative, all without ever making any of that obvious or obtrusive. It involves a number of different techniques, from cutting-on-action to match cuts and transitions, and from maintaining screen direction to the master shot and coverage technique and the 180 degree rule.

The first problem an editor faces is how and when to cut from one shot to the next without disorienting the viewer or breaking continuity, that is, the continuous flow of the narrative. Called, appropriately enough, cutting-on-action (or match-on-action), the trick is to end one shot in the middle of an action – a character sitting down in a chair or climbing into a car – and start the next in the middle of the same action. Our eyes are drawn to the action on screen and not the cut itself. The edit disappears as we track the movement of the character. Here’s a quick example of a cut on action from Buster Keaton’s Neighbors (1920):

Neighbors

The two shots are radically different in terms of the geography of the scene – one outside of the apartment, the other inside – but by cutting on the action of the character entering the apartment, it feels like one continuous moment. Of course we notice the cut, but it does not distract from the scene or call attention to itself.^[12]

Shot-Reverse Shot

The shot-reverse shot is another very common technique for establishing continuity editing. Such editing, which generally requires two camera set ups, takes the most basic unit of film, the shot, and pairs it with another shot. Among other possibilities, the shot-reverse shot can help create a rhythm within a conversation, emphasize reactions, build suspense (especially if a character is looking offscreen), establish a mood, and give the illusion of continuous action. Here’s a scene from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) that employs a series of shot-reverse shots in a tense moment.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Now, Voyager (eyeline cut)

2001: A Space Odyssey (graphic match cut)

Lawrence of Arabia (subject or associative match cut)

Now that you know what to look for, you’ll see these techniques used in just about every film or television show, over and over.

Almost all of these examples rely on a hard cut from one shot to the next, but sometimes an editor simply can’t hide the edit with some matching action, image or idea. Instead, they have to transition the viewer from one shot to the next, or one scene to the next, in the most organic, unobtrusive way possible.  We call these, well, transitions. As discussed in Chapter Two, you can think of these as conjunctions in grammar, words meant to connect ideas seamlessly. The more obvious examples, like fade-ins and fade-outs or long dissolves, are drawn from our own experience.

A slow fade-out, where the screen drifts into blackness, reflects our experience of falling asleep, drifting out of consciousness. Dissolves, where one shot blends into the next, reflect how one moment bleeds into and overlaps with another in our memory. Some transitions, like wipes and iris outs, are peculiar to motion pictures and have no relation to how we normally see the world. Sure, they might “call attention to themselves,” but somehow they still do the trick, moving the viewer from one shot or scene to the next without distracting from the story itself.^[16]

Fade in and fade out are opposite effects.^[17] Fade in is a shot that begins in total darkness and gradually lightens to full brightness. This is a type of transition is similar to “dissolve,” which is mentioned below. A sound fade in gradually brings sound from being inaudible to a required volume.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006; fade in)

Dissolve is a transition between two shots during which the first image gradually disappears while the second image gradually appears; for a moment, the two images blend in superimposition. Here’s a dissolve transition from Out of the Past (1947):

Out of the Past

A third type of transition is the wipe. A wipe is a type of film transition where one shot replaces another by travelling from one side of the frame to the other (right, left, up, down, diagonal) or with a special shape (e.g. iris, heart, clock.)

Wipes in Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)

Here is a video by Joey Scoma that compiles a host of transition types:

Crosscutting/Intercutting/Parallel Editing

Rather than moving us quickly through time, other scene-to-scene edits can move us quickly in space. A crosscut assembles footage from two separate spaces in order for the audience to see two events happening simultaneously. This type of editing is also called parallel editing, because the film treats the two scenes as parallel events which take place side by side in time. Crosscutting (also called intercutting) can have a variety of effects and meanings. It can create tension or dramatic irony by letting the viewer in on a truth that only they can see.

One of the most famous instances of parallel editing occurs in The Godfather (1972), in which Michael Corleone publically renounces sin to become his niece’s godfather even as he has set in motion a series of murders that will make him the undisputed “godfather” for his crime syndicate. The juxtaposition of religious piety with extreme violence underscores either Corleone’s extremely cold-blooded hypocrisy or else an extreme psychological disconnect between his words and actions.

The Godfather

It can create a sense of romance by showcasing two distanced lovers bonded in time, if not in place. It can also play tricks on the viewer by setting up expectations. For example, Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) assembles footage from inside a house with footage from outside a house to suggest that the same house is being described within the sequence. The editing pace becomes faster and faster as we get closer and closer to entering the house, making the viewer expect that the interior and the exterior belong to the same building. However, the crosscutting conclusion reveals that the inside footage and outside footage actually belong to separate houses; we have been in two separate spaces all along. Surprisingly, this editing “trick” does not break audience immersion, but rather brings the viewer into a deeper engagement with the film by making the viewer think that they must become better film detectives.^[18]

Silence of the Lambs

Much of the editing we have been describing so far has fallen under the most common umbrella of the continuity system, or Hollywood system.^[19] This style of editing is designed to be as invisible as possible so that the audience can feel its effect without necessarily noticing its artistry. Another type of editing is discontinuous and aims to be noticed by the audience in either an obvious or subliminal way. Discontinuity editing does not follow conventional modes of editing from mainstream film. Sometimes it breaks Hollywood rules altogether and draws attention to itself as editing artistry.

In opposition to the long-standing convention of the axis of action and the 180-degree rule, which maintains directionality in conversation scenes, some discontinuous editing will intentionally break the 180-degree rule in order to evoke a sense of unease or disruption in the viewer. Japanese films of the 1930s were some of the first to consistently break this rule. Tense domestic arguments or power imbalances or sword fights would violate the 180-degree rule in order to evoke disorientation in the viewer.

Osaka Elegy (1936)

Though in the 1930s, these violations were much more obvious since they were quite rare, now breaking the 180-degree rule has become quite common and has less of an obvious effect on the viewer. As we have become more film-literate and greater consumers of film material, it takes more radical editing choices to disorient us completely within the film’s time and space. A subliminal feeling of disorientation might linger with some more contemporary 180-degree rule violations. For example, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) concludes with a tense interrogation between Batman and The Joker. As the two characters converse over a table, playing verbal games and outdoing one another’s wits, the camera moves around the table. Each time a character wins the upper hand in the conversation, the camera crosses the axis of action to reveal a power shift by switching the characters’ positions on the screen. Viewers are not necessarily meant to catch this camera trick, as it keeps moving around the action, but we are left with an uneasy feeling that our beloved Batman might not win this round.

The Dark Knight

More playful editing violations of the continuity system poke fun at Hollywood conventions. French New Wave films of the 1950s and 1960s adopt American genres like gangster movies and mysteries in order to twist them into parody by sapping them of their deep metaphors and grand heroes. Just like French New Wave characters float through life without many goals or aspirations, editing techniques like jump cuts describe these flippant lifestyles. Rather than use cuts to move between characters or between camera angles, a jump cut maintains the same camera position with the same footage, but takes out a small piece of film. The effect is jumpy and erratic, like a film mistake. The cut has not done anything for the progression of film time or film space, and so it is discontinuous, pointing attention to the mere fact of cutting in place without creating change or movement.

Alphaville (1965)

Often, discontinuous editing is described as defamiliarization, an art term from Russian Formalism (1910s and 1920s). Discontinuity takes material that is otherwise “normal” and through the form of editing makes it “strange”. The editing points to itself, thus showing itself off, and so it becomes visible whereas most editing conventions ask this art to be invisible. Films like The Graduate (1967) use discontinuity throughout the editing in order to create a sense of disconnection and alienation in the viewer – if you are constantly aware of editing tricks, it becomes difficult to immerse yourself in the story world and to identify with main characters. Other films, like Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963) or even Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016), use discontinuous editing in order to say something about filmmaking itself. In these films, which usually take place on a film set or are told through the eyes of a filmmaker, the discontinuity never lets the audience forget that they are watching a film. Fiction never becomes mistaken for reality. In this way, discontinuity is self-reflexive: it uses the art form to comment on the art itself and the form that it can take.^[20]

Here is a list of visual edits commonly deployed in postproduction:^[21]