Studies in Film Editing
In looking at The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Jaws, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Pierrot le Fou, and references to other films along the way, we can perhaps understand not just what editing is, but what it can be: what its qualities are that show it is clearly a craft, yet also central to evolving an art form. Not everyone took editing so seriously: Claude Chabrol regarded it as the washing-up, and the shoot the main meal. As he believed, “Scriptwriting is like cooking. Shooting the part I like the most is like eating. Editing is therefore, well, the washing-up.” (Film Editing) Sergei Eisenstein would have seen the shoot as no more than preparing the dish, seeing editing as fundamentally important to cinema, perhaps a little like Chabrol’s Nouvelle vague colleague, Jacques Rivette, who said, it is only when editing that he reckons “I really start to see the film.” (Senses of Cinema) Eisenstein was so insistent on the importance of montage that he even saw it in other art forms that would ‘edit’ too. Speaking of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, he saw parallel montage in the novel. A man is giving a speech in the town square and, while he talks, Emma Bovary is being seduced by a young man who speaks to Emma. While the man discusses grand things, Rudolph speaks of intimate ones, and we could easily see a filmmaker cutting between the two moments, with the president in a long shot as he speechifies, and Rudolph and Emma in close-up as we see the intimacy growing between them. Eisenstein writes about this in an essay called ‘Through Theatre to Cinema’, while another theorist, Andre Bazin, wrote one called ‘Theatre and Cinema’, and came to a very different conclusion. As Ben Nicholson says, “for Eisenstein, and many of his contemporaries, the power of the edit allowed shots to be cut together to create brand new meaning that was not present in the original shots.” (BFI) Bazin, however, saw that often editing was overused in adapting plays to the screen because they felt obliged to be cinematic, in the sense that they could show the viewer locations the theatre couldn’t, and cut into scenes as the play could not. Yet Bazin believed it was more important to retain a certain objectivity, “to adopt the viewpoint of the spectator, the one denominator common to stage and screen.” The film could provide us with numerous elements the stage play would have to eschew because a play takes place in a theatre, while a film can photograph the world. Yet Bazin thought a play adaptation shouldn’t photograph the world. What he admired in a work by Jean Cocteau, Les Parents terribles, which he adapted from his own play, was that, “While the cinema allowed to seize upon the drama from many angles”, Cocteau chose to avoid using these elements that Eisenstein would have so emphasised. While Eisenstein saw in the novel the burgeoningly cinematic, Bazin could see in theatre the constraints that might prove useful to a cinema based on the long take rather than the edit.
Turning to our examples, some of these notions will prove pertinent, but first of all let us see how The Good, the Bad and the Ugly plays with both the long take and editing to create tension, and whether it would have been better using more cuts or far fewer: whether it should have been more Eisensteinian, or more Bazinian. Sergio Leone’s film opens with a widescreen landscape before a man’s face enters the shot, and we get an immense close-up of his haggard, drawn features. The film cuts to a very long shot as we begin to see in the distance two men on horseback coming towards the camera. We realise it is a point of view as Leone cuts back to the haggard man, and then to another long shot with the riders more discernible, before tight close ups on the faces of these two men. The film moves back and forth between the two who have come into town, and the third who sees them arrive. We have no idea who is the hero, who the villain, or whether they are friends or enemies. The film cuts back and forth as they get closer, and Leone relies chiefly on close-ups so we don’t know the exact proximity between them, before a long shot reveals they are a few metres apart as the film offers a series of side elevations in medium shot. It turns out they are friends, or at least complicit, as the three enter a salon and start shooting away. We don’t go in with them, as the camera tracks right and a man jumps through the glass window and escapes. Here the film introduces us to the first of what will be our three leading characters: he is the ugly, and soon enough we will see the bad, and then the good.
Leone’s purpose isn’t to come down on the side of montage or the long take, but to combine them all the better to elongate the tension. In principle, this should be the long take’s purpose, as the filmmaker shows in detail the process of an action. If a person strips down a car, burns through a safe, or climbs across a rooftop, we want to know how they did it, and editing risks foreshortening our curiosity in the action. Equally, if the person has only a few minutes to strip down that car before the police arrive, has only a few minutes to get through the safe after the alarm has gone off, or our central character is being chased across that roof, we might accept a slight foreshortening of the specific movements so that we can crosscut to how close they are to being caught. There is both the deed we want to observe, and the contracted time that means we want them to get on with it. As a rule, the long take extends time; editing contracts it. Yet Leone wants to elongate and contract simultaneously. What he brought to cinema that seemed new in the mid-sixties was his ability to slow time down without making it dull or empty. Instead, it became a temporally dramatic tease, with the viewer less wondering whether these people will ever come into contact, as Leone holds the shot for a few seconds on a face, and then for several seconds on those side-elevation shots, than who they are and what they want from each other. He uses the principle of the extended shot to slow the film down, but edits just enough to quicken the viewer’s pulse as we watch with foreboding.
Most filmmakers are understandably pragmatic about whether to emphasise the longer take or attend more to the editing. Usually, it depends on what the scene demands. Hitchcock could offer longer takes when Marion is driving in the car in Psycho, and faster ones when she is taking a shower, getting killed by Norman Bates. The shots of Marion in the car aren’t that long, but they can seem extended partly because the information the film offers is, from a certain perspective, irrelevant. Marion drives out of town, continues to drive out of town, and gets further out of town, escaping with $60,000 she stole. But, of course, Hitchcock emphasises the theft and Marion’s anxiety over it, and so the scene remains exciting no matter if we watch her travelling through the night over several minutes. In contrast, the shower sequence has a “total number of camera setups (78) and cuts (52) in the scene, which itself lasts a mere 45 seconds.” (BFI) Like Leone, Hitchcock might say that the length of the take is like the length of a piece of string: it depends on what you need it for.
Yet some filmmakers have been much more intransigent over montage versus the long take. Andrei Tarkovsky insisted that the Soviet montage filmmakers like Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov had it all wrong. “I cannot accept that editing is the main formative element of film, as the protagonists of ‘montage cinema’ […]maintained in the ‘twenties, as if a film was made on the editing table.” He says of his 1974 film, Mirror, “there are about two hundred shots” (Sculpting in Time), which is still a large number next to a filmmaker like Miklos Jancso, whose yen for the long take was so insistent that some saw self-parody; others remarkable graft and craft. Electra My Love and Sirocco had about a dozen each, while Red Psalm had twenty-six. Tarkovsky may have theorised better than anybody on the length of a shot, as he insisted that rhythm “is not the metrical sequence of pieces; what makes it is the time thrust within the frames. What is different about cinema editing is that it brings together time, imprinted in the segments of film.” (Sculpting in Time) But nobody put the notion into practice more insistently than Jancso. Whether this was too insistent is a matter of taste, but any contemporary filmmaker taking advantage of digital’s ability to make a film without a cut (as opposed to celluloid’s maximum magazine time of about ten minutes) will likely have Jancso hovering over them, whether it is Alexander Sokurov with Russian Ark or Sebastian Schipper with Victoria.
Spielberg would be a lot closer to Hitchcock and Leone than to Tarkovsky and Jancso. One reason he is a commercial master, like the Italian and the English director, rests on his ability to tell a story with the minimum amount of theoretical intervention, and maximum awareness of what a potentially bored viewer won’t tolerate. Probably no filmmaker has internalised the commercial imperatives of the medium better than Spielberg, and perhaps no Spielberg film ever did it better than Jaws, no matter his repeated box-office successes with Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. and Jurassic Park. And yet even Spielberg could be dogmatic on occasion. He gave his editor on Jaws, Verna Fields, footage from a sequence where cop Brody (Roy Scheider) and his wife and kids are eating, saying to her, though he shot lots of coverage, if she could do it without any close ups that would be wonderful. Fields says, “I could of cut the sequence very easily using close ups, in a few hours probably. As it was, it took me days, but once it was together, it was exactly as he wanted it.” (Super8Filmaker) Yet let us look at another scene in the film that shows the director’s pragmatic brilliance, which might be just another way of saying his capacity to internalise the spectator.
It is the 4th of July; the killer shark seems to have been caught and killed, and the locals return to the water. Spielberg offers a myriad of cuts and shows numerous people in the scene, but always keeps the central thrust: Brody’s son Michael. As Spielberg shows a family entering the sea in long shot, cuts to a helicopter and the authorities on hand with guns, so he begins to show others having the confidence to take a dip. Amongst them is Michael. Brody tells him to stay in the pond area rather than the open sea, and though Michael says that is for old ladies, he gives the impression he will do his father’s bidding. He disobeys and becomes one of the many people in the water, looking like he could become Bruce’s lunch.
Such a facetious comment might capture well the general tenor of Jaws as a commercial film exploiting the fear of sharks that Jaws enormously exacerbated. But it risks undermining the artistry and even empathy involved in the sequence. Spielberg uses the cuts not only for their potential in punningly anticipating the shark, but also filling out a community that would inevitably be devastated financially, psychologically and emotionally by its presence. Though Jaws could almost pass for a slasher film, a genre Psycho instigated and which never really took off until the success of Halloween in 1978; unlike Friday the 13th or Tenebrae, Jaws doesn’t simply suggest imminent victimhood, but quotidian summer fun. These are wealthy people holidaying at Martha’s Vineyard, and why wouldn’t they want to make the most of the sea on this celebratory day?
As Spielberg shows people frolicking in the water, seen from above and below the sea, he conveys a feeling of fret, but not quite audience relish. If Bruce is looking for his protein fix, that doesn’t mean Spielberg needs to film it as if that is simply what the audience is looking forward to witnessing. When Spielberg suggested to Fields that she should try and cut the family scene with no close-ups, it indicated a director interested in the convivial and the communal, and whatever one’s reservations over Spielberg, and how he retreated from the sense of enquiry evident in many 70s films, he does give us a feel for an American way of life worth protecting, no matter the dangers Spielberg allows to prey upon it, and often from less dubious elements within the nation. Whether it is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T or even Disclosure Day, family and community matter. At his best, and that best might be Jaws, he shows us the importance of these elements, and in this scene blends them.
We first see the fin in the background of the shot, as people play in the water in the foreground. A woman then reacts, and everyone makes for the shore. Spielberg follows their panic with shot after shot of bathers, yet if it feels less manipulative than it might; when we discover it is only two kids having a laugh, it rests chiefly on the director conveying the panic over the suspense. He is with the community, not simply playing up the tension that can be generated out of scare tactics. After all, when we see this fin, we don’t hear John Williams’ distinctive score, as we usually do when the shark appears, and Spielberg edits for the locals’ reactions. He doesn’t edit to make us believe in the presence of the shark, but to believe in the locals’ belief in it. Shortly afterwards, after the authorities spot the boys’ prank, we see something moving in the water. The music comes in, and now we see the real shark. Spielberg has played as fair as we can expect a horror filmmaker to play when offering the ‘cheat’ scene. But he does so partly because he is a director interested as readily in the community as in the manipulation. When it comes to the presence of the actual shark, it is family that becomes emphasised, as Michael is in the water, near where the shark appears, and Spielberg plays up the fret of both Brody and his wife as they race to the rescue. The music is heavily present, and the editing makes the fear ours as Brody and others drag the boy out of the water. Nearby, Michael’s younger brother is crying, as Spielberg shows the boy responding as if his brother is dead. Michael is only in shock. The sequence, lasting about nine minutes, spends far more time on the community’s fear than the actual terror when the shark really is in their midst, and this rests at least partly on Spielberg’s concern with the milieu, as readily as on the tension he can milk.
Yet this interest resides in the edit, even if for Bazin and others the point of the longer take was to show the environment from which the characters come, and this is central to the longer takes in Bicycle Thieves. As Bazin says, when speaking of director Vittorio De Sica’s approach, while in many a film “the breaking up of the scenes into shots and their assemblage is the equivalent of an expressionism in time, a reconstruction of the event according to an artificial and abstract duration: dramatic duration. There is not a single one of these commonly accepted assumptions of the film spectacle that is not challenged by neorealism.” (‘De Sica: Metteur en Scene’) Spielberg does break up the action and offers numerous shots but, in its own way, within the context of the blockbuster cinema that Jaws instigated, it too respects what we might call a communal unity: a sense of place and what happens when it comes under threat. The editing doesn’t undermine this aspect. It augments it.
One of the reasons American films of the ‘long seventies’ (1968-1982) were viewed as so innovative was because they were influenced not just by the continuity editing of classic Hollywood, taken to new levels of skill and efficiency, but also by the European new waves of the 1960s, especially in France, but also in Britain, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Some of the directors from these waves went on to work in America, with Roman Polanski making Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, Milos Forman directing Taking Off and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Ivan Passer Born to Win and Cutter’s Way, while John Schlesinger made Midnight Cowboy and Karel Reisz The Gambler. But while occasionally French filmmakers worked Stateside (Jacques Demy directed Model shop; Agnes Varda directed Lions Love), the impact of the Nouvelle Vague was based more on Americans adopting aspects of montage over the French directing American films. Arthur Penn, Hal Ashby, Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola were all drawn to elements of work by Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Francois Truffaut. Godard and Truffaut were touted for Bonnie and Clyde. “Having originally planned to shoot the film on location in Texas to remain true to the exploits of the legendary couple, it was even envisaged that the film be made in France to satisfy Truffaut. It was suggested that Jean-Paul Belmondo play Clyde Barrow.” (Indiewire)
If French filmmakers generally retreated from making American films, they nevertheless enormously influenced them. As Scorsese reckoned, "the French New Wave has influenced all filmmakers who have worked since, whether they saw the films or not. It submerged cinema like a tidal wave.” (NewWaveFilm) The disorienting 360-degree shot in Taxi Driver at the garage, might owe a debt to the 360 shot in the farmyard in Godard’s Weekend, while the first few minutes of Hal Ashby’s The Landlord absorb several approaches the Nouvelle Vague made, if not popular, at least permissible. Beau Bridges’ central character directly addresses the audience sitting on a sun lounger in front of a large house, as the film cuts between his remarks and scenes that would seem to have nothing to do with what he is talking about: black experiences in Harlem, as one man tries to hail a cab; another gets a haircut. We then watch two guys playing squash, a moment that seems irrelevant to the Bridges scene, nor the ones in Harlem. Ashby’s cutting feels indebted to the juxtapositional moments in Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, as the film would cut between scenes of the Rolling Stones putting together the song of the title and scenes with the Black Panthers. The film also shares similarities with Alain Resnais’ work, where he would blend the personal and the political, the present, the past and the future.
In Hiroshima Mon Amour, the film opens on two bodies embracing, covered in what looks like radioactive dust, before dissolving into another couple of bodies that are free from dust and covered in perspiration, post-coitum. Two voices are heard that we might assume belong to the bodies we are watching. The man says, “You saw nothing in Hiroshima, nothing.” The woman says, “I saw everything.” The film then offers a montage of things she believes she has seen. The camera tracks forward down a hospital corridor, and to patients in bed, as Resnais match-cuts while their bodies turn on their sides. The film cuts back to the corridor, and then back to the two bodies as the man insists once more that she saw nothing in Hiroshima. She goes on to say she visited the museum four times in the city, while the film cuts to angles on the building, the stairs and the interiors. While in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Jaws, whatever the inventiveness of Leone, and the skill with which Spielberg incorporates fear into a scene that could have been played for lazy tension, neither director offers the radical approach to editing Resnais adopts. During a roundtable at the magazine Cahiers du cinema, Godard, Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and others offer their perspective on the immense significance of Resnais’ film, as most saw a cinematic breakthrough. Rivette also viewed it as a continuation of Eisenstein by other means. Rivette adds that Resnais’s great obsession “is the sense of the splitting of primary unity – the world is broken up, fragmented into a series of tiny pieces, and it has to be put back together again like a jigsaw. This went much further than Soviet Montage, whether the more practical approach adopted by Pudovkin, or the more radical notion offered by Eisenstein. In a dispute between them, Pudovkin would speak of how, to film a car crash, he would break the sequence down into a series of moments. “The separate pieces are cut together in a short, very sharp rhythm. In order to represent the accident on the screen, the director dissected analytically the whole abundant scene, unbroken in actual development, into component parts, into elements and selected from them – sparingly – only the six essential.” (A Montage of Theories) This was very different from Bazin’s later insistence on the long take, but it was also quite divergent from Eisenstein. “At regular intervals he [Pudovkin] visits me late at night and behind closed doors we wrangle over matters of principle[…] He loudly defends an understanding of montage as a linkage of pieces.” Eisenstein “confronted him with my viewpoint on montage as a collision. A view that from the collision of two given factors arises a concept.” (A Montage of Theories)
When Rivette proposes that Resnais was indebted to the radical Russian montage filmmaker, he says “in the sense that you can see some of Eisenstein’s ideas put into practice in a very new way.” Central to the similarity was the notion of a concept. Yet while Eisenstein often thought of this as metaphorical and illustrative, Resnais saw it more as allusive and elusive. In other words, while Eisenstein often believed he could retain unity of time and space, yet with a symbolic dimension, Resnais reckoned he could fragment time. This was all the better to allow a proposition to appear that wouldn’t be representing an idea, but would enable thinking. This might seem like a subtle distinction, but it is central to Rivette’s claim about absorbing Eisenstein, and yet in a new way. Eisenstein wanted both the symbolic and the political. As Ben Nicholson says of a key moment in Battleship Potemkin, “For Eisenstein, and many of his contemporaries, the power of the edit allowed shots to be cut together to create brand new meaning that was not present in the original shots. Among the most famous examples of this are three successive shots of lion statues in different states of repose that appear to suggest the lion waking from its slumber – and, symbolically, the waking of the Soviet people to their oppression.” (BFI) Of course, Pudovkin believed the meaning was in the shots, and the director’s purpose was to assemble them in the most dramatically dynamic manner. Eisenstein reckoned they could do more than that: they could convey an abstract meaning as well. Yet this abstraction would still be clear, as Nicholson notes when saying the lions symbolise the proletariat. Resnais abstracts as well, but the meaning associated with this abstraction becomes harder to discern.
Godard in the roundtable on Hiroshima, Mon Amour, says “let’s start by saying that it’s literature”, and this wouldn’t only be because it was written by the novelist Marguerite Duras, and where her written voiceover has such lines as “metal made as vulnerable as flesh”, with temperatures of 10,000 degrees in the city. It was also because film could now be comprehended with the same level of ambiguity and indeterminacy as literature. Duras was a writer of what was called the Nouveau Roman, and Roland Barthes saw in such works a different demand; they become writerly texts. “Barthes used the terms lisible (“readerly”) and scriptible (“writerly”) to distinguish, respectively, between texts that are straightforward and require no special effort to understand, and those whose meaning is not immediately evident and demand some effort on the part of the reader.” (Britannica) Hiroshima Mon Amour became a key work in writerly cinema. Resnais followed it by working with another Nouveau Roman novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet, in Last Year at Marienbad, a film that perhaps remains synonymous with ambiguous film. Did the relationship it focuses on at Marienbad take place last year, this year or at all? Who are these people? Robbe-Grillet would say, “We know absolutely nothing about them or about their lives. They are nothing beyond what we see them to be: guests in a big hotel, cut off from the outside world and in its own way a prison. What do they do when they’re somewhere else? One is tempted to answer – nothing. Elsewhere, they have no existence.” (BFI)
Rather than asserting meaning, as Eisenstein proposed, Resnais’ work complicated it or dissolved it. Two shots joined together didn’t create the third meaning Eisenstein insisted upon, but risked leaving the viewer puzzled. What are we to make of those mingling bodies at the beginning of Hiroshima Mon Amour? And are those images of the hospital and museum the female character’s memories of her visit? In Last Year at Marienbad, the images become unreliable products of the characters’ recollections. In a typical flashback, a character invokes the past, and we assume what we see is ‘true’, and when it isn’t, as in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, we might feel the filmmaker has played unfairly. In Last Year at Marienbad, the film plays very unfair indeed, as the story’s certitude collapses around the subjectivity of the characters. But that unfairness insists that we acknowledge the potential unreliability of images.
Jean-Luc Godard went as far as Resnais, but perhaps for different reasons. Godard possessed something of Eisenstein’s dogmatism, but contained it within a far greater perversity, constantly willing to upend his own apparent assertiveness all the better to leave the viewer amused, bemused, befuddled, baffled and infuriated. One viewer might have all these responses over certain moments; another viewer might have similar ones at others. Television unites; cinema divides, Godard once proposed, and whether it is a perceptive claim, generally, it is a useful way of comprehending Godard’s work. It can move from the horribly serious to the facetious; from the whimsical to the profound, from the trivial to the trenchant. What are we to make of a scene where central character Ferdinand in Pierrot Le Fou sleeps over at Marianne’s, his ex-girlfriend’s place, and we see on the walls prints by Picasso, Renoir, Modigliani and others, while propped up against those walls is an array of assault rifles? Marianne then moves around the apartment and starts singing as if she is in a musical, as she passes a man lying face down, covered in blood, dead on a bed. As if the scene itself isn’t inexplicable enough, Godard also creates in the edit even more confusion, or at least allusive elusiveness. He cuts from a balcony shot of Marianne to part of a Renoir painting, as Ferdinand says in voiceover, Marianne Renoir. Later in the scene, there will be a series of insert shots to the parts of the paintings on the walls, as Godard edits for maximum allusive elusiveness. And what are we to make of the piano that comes in as Marianne sings? This is the non-diegetic (the piano) meeting the diegetic (her singing), as the former comes from the film, while the latter is within the scene.
Most films distinguish between the diegetic (music a character plays on the radio, record player, etc.) and music that is a property of the film (suspense music during a thriller; sentimental music during a weepie). Godard plays with these distinctions as he gives sound editing a complexity few have matched. In Pierrot Le Fou, early in the film, Ferdinand is in the family home and speaks of a Balzac character who would have the 5th symphony resounding in his head and, suddenly, non-diegetically, we hear Beethoven’s fifth. Much later in the film, a character talks about a tune he can’t get out of his head. As he describes it, the music again comes in non-diegetically, and while this figure hears the music in his mind, and we hear it on the soundtrack, Ferdinand tells him he hears nothing at all.
This is all part of Godard’s insistence that we should never take sound and image for granted, just as Eisenstein would have made a similar claim over the image in the 1920s. But they would be making the claim for different reasons. Eisenstein wanted to take reality and shape it into ideological assertiveness, as he wished to convey Communist values. “The revolution gave me the most precious thing in life – it made an artist out of me.” (Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein) Godard was also a figure of the left, flirted with Maoism, and became the central figure in Dziga Vertov, moving from his works like Pierrot le fou and Le Mepris, to Le vent d’est and Vladimir and Rosa. Yet though the latter films were more obviously polemical than the former, the purpose wasn’t to register a claim, but to defy formal expectations in how to make one. In Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October, Eisenstein marshals his images for brilliantly propagandistic purposes. In Godard’s films, the sound and image juxtapositions don’t offer the politically unequivocal, even in his most ostensibly polemical films, because the director wanted to question the very medium he was using. “I’m trying to demystify the movies at the same time as making them,” he told Rolling Stone. This is really the difference between our first two examples, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Jaws, and Hiroshima mon amour and Pierrot le Fou. Resnais, and especially Godard, unmake cinema in the process of making it. Leone and Spielberg make it brilliantly. Most filmmakers merely make it well. Here we can see, in our four examples, editing at its finest, even if we need to distinguish between different types of montage in comprehending this brilliance.
© Tony McKibbin