8 Rhythmic and Graphic Editing

An introductory text on film aesthetics argues that creative editing “offers the filmmaker four basic areas of choice and control:

1. graphic relations between shot A and shot B
2. rhythmic relations between shot A and shot B
3. spatial relations between shot A and shot B
4. temporal relations between shot A and shot B.”¹

These four areas are universally available in the editing process, regardless of the genre. An experimental film might be constructed graphically, so that the edits are chosen solely on whether there is, say for example, the form of a circle present in each outgoing and incoming frame. Or that same film might be structured overall as a temporal reversal, so that the edits are chosen based solely on whether the incoming shot occurred before the outgoing shot. At the same time, these areas of control rarely exist “in a vacuum” as distinct categories: as editors, we might consider how a cut alters the spatial relationship of two shots, but that does not mean that other relationships – say, the graphic or purely pictorial parameters of the two cease to exist. Often, the editor merely is choosing which of these four to privilege at the cut or in the sequence. As we have seen, this phenomenon is what Eisenstein refers to as the emergence of the “dominant” in a sequence, and in classical Hollywood, the dominant was clarity in spatial and temporal relations between shots. As we saw in Chapter 3, that demand for clarity diminished in the 1960s: Walter Murch’s “Six Rules for the Ideal Cut” place those at the very bottom of his considerations for a cut after Emotion, Story, Rhythm and Eye-trace (or Eye-guiding) (See Chapter 3, p. 87.) Nevertheless, spatial and temporal concerns remain paramount in most editing decisions, a simple acknowledgement of the central aesthetic foundations of the medium. The noted art theorist Erwin Panofsky once described the unique potential of motion pictures as the ‘dynamization of space’ and the ‘spatialization of time’.² In other words, inherent in the film medium is the ability to dynamically transport the viewer anywhere by a cut to another location, and the ability to depict the space before the camera over time (i.e., every shot necessarily reveals a sense of time inherent within it.)

Because continuity editing is the dominant style of editing in narrative filmmaking, we tend to forget that it is a creative choice. We have seen the influence of continuity editing throughout this book in establishing what is known as the “zero point of cinematic style,” the “default mode” of editing. Continuity editing in the fiction film is a precise approach to mise-en-scène and cinematography that takes a series of discontinuous shots, and cloaks their discontinuity in a system of cutting that renders them “continuous.” Michael Betancourt acknowledges the long-standing maxim that editing simply mirrors the process of sequential photography that creates motion pictures in the first place:

The “transparency” of classical film editing organizes shots into a larger structure that keeps the spatial/temporal/causal relationships clear throughout the course of a film. The general “invisibility” of continuity editing is supported by research finding that viewers have difficulty recalling the particulars of a film’s editing, and instead recall events in the film as one continuous progression.⁴ In many ways, this centrality of continuity editing has shaped our examination of all the theories examined here: it is the foundation, the normative “field” against which other “figures,” other approaches stand in relief.

The rules governing this style of editing are well codified, but more difficult to master than one might think: one need only watch amateur films to see the myriad ways in which the continuity system can be poorly executed. The system’s main rules are well known: the 180° rule for shooting coverage, the 30° rule for moving the camera between takes and cutting on action to facilitate smooth transitions from shot to shot. Continuity editing is frequently “analytical” meaning it smoothly cycles from establishing shots – providing the audience with the locale, time of day, relative position of the characters – through a series of closer shots that use continuing graphic, index or motion vectors to keep the audience spatially oriented. Continuity editing often returns to the establishing shot to “reestablish” the larger space as a character crosses or exits, uses cutaways to cover mismatches in action, and relies on transitions like dissolves and fades to signal temporal relations between shots and scenes, etc. But it is important to notice that while spatial and temporal concerns often prevail in continuity editing, rhythmic and graphic concerns remain, albeit as considerations that are generally less dominant. For example, regardless of the spatial and temporal relations between shot A and shot B, they will not cut seamlessly if the internal rhythm (what Tarkovsky calls “time pressure”) is mismatched in the two shots. Or if the basic graphic parameters of the two shots are mismatched – one of the shots is severely underexposed or mismatched in color balance – the cut cannot be seamless. (This, at the most basic level, is one meaning of the term “graphic match,” though the term “color correction” is more commonly used to describe how mismatched shots are “smoothed” against each other.) So when editing that makes temporal and spatial coherence the accepted goal is the “zero point” of style, it is not surprising that editing styles that move beyond that stand out as exceptional for their creativity and their expressivity. They also tend to be fertile ground for analysis, since they often expose assumptions about how the continuity editing system works at large. With that in mind, we will shift focus in this chapter from spatial and temporal questions to understanding the rhythmic and graphic possibilities of editing, primarily as these potentials are used in narrative filmmaking.

Rhythmic Relations in Editing

Pacing was identified early on in the history of motion pictures as an element that distinguishes a good silent picture from a bad one. D.W. Griffith once wrote,

We identified three aspects of pace in the last chapter: “the rate of cutting, the rate of concentration of movement or change in shots and sequences, and the rate of movement or events over the course of the whole film.”⁶ In this chapter, we will focus on the first two, rather than the latter – analyzing the pace of entire feature films – and our purpose will be to understand some of the basic aspects of filmic rhythm and graphic relations in narrative films. Two caveats are worth noting here. The film theorist Jacques Aumont notes that the ear, not the eye, is our most accurate sense organ for determining rhythm. Unlike the perception of musical rhythm to which the ear is very precisely tuned, the eye is not adept at perceiving duration, so Aumont argues that rhythm in film is a combination of temporal and plastic rhythm, which are quite distinct.⁷ Plastic rhythm is characteristic of visual arts where repeated objects or shapes recur in a regular arrangement. We will examine some film scenes that foreground plastic rhythm below. And while the limitations of the visual system in determining duration may be significant, Karen Pearlman argues that we have intuitive access to rhythm:

Pearlman goes on to say that editors use their innate “kinesthetic empathy” or “corporeal imagination” to read the rhythm in rushes, and their own bodies to write filmic rhythm, in the same way that a musician’s body participates in the transmission of musical rhythm, “the rhythm of the material passes through the rhythms of the editor on the way to being formed.”⁹ “Reading” the rhythm of a shot we are intuitively deciphering internal rhythm; “writing” the rhythm of the edit by cutting, we are creating the external rhythm of a sequence, a scene, an entire film.

Early on, the French critic Léon Moussinac distinguished between diegetic elements that control rhythm and those created by the timing of the cuts, and the concept was expanded upon by the theorist Jean Mitry who first coined the terms internal rhythm and external rhythm.¹⁰ Mitry was a French film theorist and filmmaker who co-founded France’s first film society in 1925. A significant figure in the development of French cinema, Mitry directed and edited cutting edge films like Le Rideau Cramoisi (Astruc, 1953) and his own Pacific 231 in 1949. Mitry was highly influential as a film historian and film theorist, publishing his seminal The aesthetics and psychology of cinema, an extensive two-volume work in 1963 that systematically examined forms and structures that had been previously identified and debated by other theorists. Dudley Andrew points out that of all the classical film theorists only Eisenstein exceeds Mitry “in time and energy spent in editing rooms.”¹¹ As a film practitioner, theorist, and historian, Mitry became a member of the inaugural faculty of L’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques, the national French film school when it opened in 1945 and later taught film studies at the University of Montreal.

Mitry endorses the notion that rhythm, or “perceived periodicity,” is tied to the two psychophysiological cadences of life – our heart-beat and our breathing – that establish:

• the concept of musical measure – the normal resting human heartbeat is 80 beats per minute
• the concept of “fast versus slow rhythm” – one faster or slower than normal resting heartbeat
• the rhythmic concepts of “tension, release, and rest” – the rhythmic pattern of breathing.¹²

Mitry says that only music can create pure rhythm, a system of strong and weak melodic or harmonic beats, while rhythm in literature, employing words, is less pure but attainable. For example, poetry creates a pattern of stresses on words within lines and measures of verse based on a preexisting pattern imposed by the form, as in this famous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Film rhythm, however, is more like rhythmic prose. Mitry argues film rhythm is linear, “It is the rhythm of narrative, whose continuous flow never repeats itself. . . it is the free and ‘continuous’ rhythm of rhythmic prose, never imposing a metric system on its cyclical forms but rather allowing its own requirements to dictate its terms of reference.”¹³ In contrast to the poetry above, consider the rhythm of prose in this line from the opening of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, in which the character Gibreel is thrown from an exploding plane,

In this instance, there is not an external, abstract form determining how the rhythm of the passage unfolds, but rather an unfolding rhythm continuously moving through the text. Given that film automatically captures time unfolding in a certain space, the existence of film rhythm seems indisputable: Mitry notes that there are film genres that “quite consciously involve the use of a specific rhythm. Clearly, a psychological film does not have the same rhythm as, say, an epic; it would be foolish to think otherwise.”¹⁵ Moreover, narrative filmic rhythm is “not produced, as in music, by rhythmic form but by events being followed through in the sequence. It is time experienced by characters objectively presented to us, not a sequence of time formulated and conditioned by pure rhythm.”¹⁶ The shots themselves, Theo Van Leeuwen notes, provide potential cutting points: “[F]ilm editors [do not] impose their rhythm on images, the images and sounds impose their rhythms on the editors, restrict them as to where and how the film can be cut.”¹⁷

Mitry points out that editors of narrative film are generally trying to determine the “life of the shot,” to use a familiar term. He says their aim is to create shot durations

With Mitry in mind, we will use the term internal rhythm to mean “the rate of concentration of movement or change in a shot,” a term that encompasses character movement as well as any aspect of mise-en-scène that contributes to the perception of that change. Under that expansive term, we can also apply Herbert Zettl’s nomenclature describing timing and principal motions on the screen for greater precision. Describing event motion relative to the camera, Zettl uses the term primary motion that “always occurs in front of the camera, such as the movement of performers, cars, or a cat escaping a dog.”¹⁹ Zettl defines secondary motion as “camera motion, such as the pan, tilt, pedestal, boom, dolly, truck, and arc. Secondary motion includes the zoom, although only the lens elements, rather than the camera itself, move; aesthetically, we nevertheless perceive the zoom as camera induced motion.”²⁰ Zettl argues that a director’s first concern should be with primary motion and camera placement that is best placed to capture that natural flow. Zettl points out that camera movement is independent from whatever action is happening in front of the camera and therefore, if used incorrectly, can bring attention to itself, rather than reinforce the intended effect of a sequence. “Nevertheless, secondary motion fulfills several important functions: to follow action, to reveal action, to reveal landscape, to relate events, and to induce action.”²¹

We will use Herbert Zettl’s term tertiary motion as the equivalent to external rhythm. External rhythm is sequence motion or dynamism, “the movement and the rhythm induced by shot changes by using a cut, dissolve, fade, wipe, or any other transition device to switch from one shot to shot.”²² Zettl acknowledges that external rhythm of a sequence is primarily determined by the simple rate of cutting within a sequence, how slowly or quickly the cuts follow one another. But what he wants us to recognize is that, at the most abstract level, the change from one vector field to another vector field as the shot changes has its own visual energy, an energy that can be different depending on whether the change is a cut, a dissolve, a wipe or a fade. Given this fact, “Transition devices and the length of shots determine the basic beat and contribute to the rhythm of the sequences and the overall pace of the show.”²³ We will examine this idea further below.

Music: Internal or External Rhythm?

Finally, there is often some debate about how to classify sound elements under this scheme. Should music used to drive the cutting rhythm of a scene be classified as internal or an external element of rhythm? A simple resolution is to let the answer hinge on whether the sound element is diegetic or non-diegetic: that is, whether the sound source emanates (or appears to emanate) from the story space or whether it is “outside the story space.” For example, if a piano is being played in a scene, and it is part of establishing the rhythm of a scene, it is an element of internal rhythm, while a musical theme is added to a scene in postproduction is an element of external rhythm.

And here we should pause to note the obvious: the range of aesthetic factors driving the rhythm of a single shot change – much less of a sequence – is vast. For the editor – and for our analysis here – it is often difficult to isolate what the determining factor for a rhythmic cut is, as that factor is part of a complex of aesthetic factors in each shot. Or as Van Leeuwen describes the process from the editor’s perspective, “As there may be (and usually is) more than one profilmic rhythm, editors are faced with the problem of synchronizing the various profilmic rhythms – at least insofar as these have not been recorded simultaneously [i.e., if the shots are captured sequentially rather than with multiple cameras] and synchronously [i.e., if, for example, the dialog is looped], or been postsynchronized, as music often is. To do so, the editor chooses one of the profilmic rhythms, as an initiating rhythm and subordinates to this rhythm the other profilmic rhythms.”²⁴ In short, when we analyze film rhythm here, we will simplify. But thinking through the myriad aesthetic forces that are at work within “filmic rhythm” will help you as an editor: you should emerge with some sense of the range of factors involved and with some tools to evaluate how rhythm is brought to bear in editing.

External Rhythm: Cutting Rhythm and the Decrease in Average Shot Length

We have already seen the leisurely external rhythm that results when a filmmaker relies on the long take championed by André Bazin in Chapter 6, and when Andrei Tarkovsky makes the “time pressure” of a shot the pivotal factor controlling overall rhythm in Chapter 7. On the other end of the “cutting spectrum,” we have seen how the new Hollywood style identified by Bordwell as intensified continuity results in faster cutting in Chapter 4. The average shot length for a Hollywood feature film was between:08 and:11 seconds in the 1930s, and five decades later, that number had dropped to between:05 and:08 seconds in the 1980s. Looking at a film like Almost Famous (Crowe, 2000) with an average shot length of just 3.9 seconds, David Bordwell argues that faster dialogue scenes must be responsible for the shorter shot length and that “Today’s editors tend to cut at every line, sometimes in the middle of a line, and they insert more reaction shots than we would find in movies from the classic studio years.”²⁵

That may account for the accelerated cutting of the romantic comedy genre, but some of the acceleration in average shot lengths can also be attributed to covering the sheer progression of physical movement that unfolds in action movies. These films use extremely short shot durations to increase audience impact, while trying to maintain a level of narrative clarity, or clarity of action. When covering action, Dziga Vertov’s concept of documentary editing may be the most apt: “To edit: to wrest, through the camera, whatever is most typical, most useful from life; to organize the film pieces wrested from life into a meaningful rhythmic visual order, a meaningful visual phrase, an essence of ‘I see.’”²⁶

In cutting an action scene, the question for the editor often is what will give the audience that essence of “I see”? In this regard, Karen Pearlman talks about three kinds of “movement” that unfold across any scene. First, there is physical movement in a scene – the editor focuses on actor movement, its arc, its acceleration, its velocity, its flux, etc. – by which the viewer experiences “kinesthetic empathy” (what Eisenstein termed the “motor imitative response”). Secondly, there is emotional movement in a scene where an editor might focus less on physical movement than on emphasizing the “dance of emotions” across a scene. (Pearlman admits that is a subtle difference, since emotion will often emerge from a movement pattern.) Finally, there is the movement of events across a scene, which includes things like the revelation of new information (significant or insignificant), the change of a direction in the pursuit of a goal, the reversal of a character’s objective, etc.²⁷

To thrill audiences with the sheer kinesis that escapist films offer, action scenes staging a race, a fight, a rescue, a chase, etc., often focus on the first factor: physical movement. The editor works to enhance internal rhythm of the action covered in the source footage through fast paced, nonstop cutting. The dystopian action-thriller-chase Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015), a film that brought the director’s wife Margaret Sixel the Oscar for Best Editing in 2016, provides a wealth of examples of editing for physical action. Miller wanted the film to be comprehensible without dialogue, saying

Fury Road was extensively storyboarded to facilitate the roughly 2,700 cuts in the film. The cutting rhythm of the film is very fast. The Cinemetrics website tallied the first half hour of the film at 665 shots at an average shot length of 2.6, and a mean shot length of 1.7 seconds.²⁹ John Searle, ASC, the cinematographer for the film, said that Miller, knowing the cutting would be fast, was adamant that the center of interest for every shot be placed in the center of the screen, so that

Halfway through the film, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) negotiates with a biker gang, offering gasoline for safe passage through a canyon. See Critical Commons, “External Rhythm: Mad Max Fury Road, Quick Cuts.”³¹ The bikers believe her to be alone, but one of the women in Furiosa’s party, hiding in the gasoline tanker, begins to moan because she is in labor. Sensing that the standoff is about to go downhill, Furiosa leaps in to action to escape the canyon. This scene continues for sometime, but for the sake of brevity, we will look at the first:30 seconds of this sequence. It contains 27 shots, and the longest shot – at 54 frames or 2.25 seconds – is a wide shot of a single motorcyclist charging down the hill to attack the tanker. The shortest shots are both seven frames in length – a duration of roughly 1/3 of a second. One of these shots shows the motorcyclist sliding from frame left under the tanker and the other shows Furiosa looking down at her feet dangling through a hole in the tanker floor, after that same motorcyclist has grabbed her legs (though he’s not visible in this shot.) The average shot length here is thus 26 frames, or slightly over one second.

The first shot of action shows Furiosa diving over the trailer hitch, and the next shot continues that action as she rolls onto the ground on the other side of the trailer. The match is smooth, carried in part by the attack in the soundtrack of machine gun fire, which begins in the outgoing shot but syncs to her roll into the incoming shot with three bullet hits that kick up small clouds of dust. Centering in both shots is clear as she dives (outgoing) and particularly as the dust clouds erupt kinetically (incoming) precisely on the spot that she hits as she rolls. As she stops and turns to scramble aboard the tanker, which begins to roll out of the canyon, the action of the truck begins to dominate the primary motion vector: this is the first of a series of three shots moving left to right, that will be followed by a z-axis neutral close up of Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) driving the truck away. A high angle long shot from the other side of the canyon reverses the screen direction. From this point forward, with the tanker at the bottom of the canyon, and gunfire and motorcycles harassing “The War Rig” tanker from both sides, screen direction will shift quickly (yet appropriately) with an occasional neutral shot to soften the shifts. At durations of roughly:01 second, these reversals hardly “read” as screen direction reversals. And even at that extreme pace, the continuity cutting of the physical action is well matched and flows naturally throughout.

Once the motorcyclist has grabbed her legs, seen from under the truck, six neutral, z-axis shots follow, either from inside or from under the long tanker. The cutting here is quick and covers Furiosa’s struggle to kick free of the biker (Figure 8.1). The shot transitions from interior to exterior are very clean, because the primary motion vector is z-axis, and the action centered. The shots show Furiosa’s shock at being grabbed and then three kicks that break her free: one from inside the tanker, the next from the front undercarriage and the last from the rear undercarriage that show the motorcyclist sliding into the camera. This last moment of the biker rolling into the camera cuts seamlessly with the final shot – 22 frames long – that shows the fate of the motorcyclist, crushed under the armored wheels of the tanker. This explosive montage of struggle and death is the essence of action cutting: a clear string of six “cause-and-effect” shots in seven seconds that end “punctuated” with an easily readable moment of finality. While the pace of the cutting rhythm is blazing, Miller’s focus never leaves continuity of action.

And yet, fast cutting need not converge on the continuity of physical action. The climatic fight scene between Sugar Ray Robinson (Johnny Barnes) and Jake LaMotta (Robert DeNiro) in Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980) uses quick cutting to synthesize the brutality of boxing with little regard for continuity. The scene was meticulously shot and edited using the collision montage techniques pioneered by Eisenstein. Longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker won the Oscar for Best Editing on the film, a task that took six months rather than the seven weeks that was scheduled. Schoonmaker credits the preproduction of director Scorsese for her award: “I felt that my award was his because I know that I won it for the fight sequences, and the fight sequences are as brilliant as they are because of the way Marty thought them out. I helped him put it together, but it was not my editing skills that made the film look so good.”³² Todd Berliner argues that the film, shot by cinematographer Michael Chapman, was “grueling to plan, shoot, and edit, partly because it violates the logic of Hollywood’s filming and editing conventions which offer filmmakers a ready-made, time-tested blueprint for keeping spatial relations coherent, for comfortably orienting spectators, and for maintaining a consistent flow of narrative information. . . Raging Bull offers an aesthetically exciting alternative to Hollywood’s narrative efficiency and visual coherence.”³³ Berliner points to Scorsese’s application of Eisenstein’s collision montage in some of the violent boxing scenes to underscore not just the physical movement of the scene, but Jake LaMotta’s subjective experience of that brutality. Continuity takes a back seat to the emotional/intellectual effect created by editing for visual/ kinetic conflict. Scorsese creates the experience of Jake’s whipping through collision editing, beyond what would be possible with conventional continuity that covers the scene’s physical movement.

As LaMotta’s life is crumbling around him, he takes on Robinson on February 14, 1951, in a legendary battle that was later known as “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.” The scene opens in the final, savage 13th round, and after a minute, the two challengers face each other exhausted, with LaMotta on the ropes taunting Sugar Ray to continue. Internal and external rhythms slow as the scene cuts to Robinson, centered in the arena lights, breathing heavily. Scorsese uses a dolly zoom – a dolly back as the camera zooms in – coupled with a fade to near silence in the soundtrack to temporarily arrest the progression of “clock time,” to move the emotional tone of the moment into the uninterrupted flux of slowed, subjective time, a shift marked by a shot nearly:12 seconds in duration. The caesura continues in the reverse shot: a slow motion, push in of almost:09 seconds with LaMotta still on the ropes, standing almost dazed, as smoke swirls behind him. He appears almost Christ-like, seeming to accept the punishment that must come.

In the next shot –:02 seconds, 13 frames long – internal and external rhythm begin to accelerate. The soundtrack goes from eerie silence to a deafening roar, as Robinson, and the “sound space” around him advances to thrash LaMotta. Robinson moves forward to strike as the camera zooms in on his taut face, centering his predatory eyes, while his fists remain oddly quiet by his side. A punishing upper cut is shown in the next close up – technically, mismatched continuity – but a satisfying “energy release” that fulfills Sugar Ray’s forward, aggressive surge in the outgoing shot. From this point forward, Berliner notes, creating the subjective experience of LaMotta through collision montage dominates over continuity concerns, as mismatched action, jump cuts and nine violations of the 180° rule are obviated by the speed and intensity of colliding shots:

There are seldom slight changes in angle on the physical action; rather, the shots change dramatically from one side of LaMotta to the other side (Figure 8.2), from high to low angle placements, moving erratically to close ups of disparate material. See Critical Commons, “External Rhythm: Raging Bull, Quick Cuts, Collision Montage.”³⁵ Berliner focuses on seven shots in the sequence to demonstrate just how far Scorsese goes to make the fight montage collide:

All of the conflict emerging from the juxtaposition of these close ups is augmented by irregular bursts of “flashbulbs from the press cameramen”, bright illumination that sometimes blows the exposure of the entire frame to a white flash. The flashing increases the internal rhythm of the scene through the irregular pulse it creates, while the cutting rhythm is very fast – the longest shot is 27 frames and the shortest is 9 frames, with an average shot length of just 21 frames. Berliner concludes that, unlike Eisenstein’s use of collision montage,³⁷ which builds visual metaphors through the non-diegetic insert (i.e., Kerensky + peacock = Kerensky is vain), Raging Bull remains in the extant space of the boxing ring, using agitated editing to convey LaMotta’s inner experience of violence. This places the scene more in the company of non-traditional representations of the subjective experience of violence like the shower scene from Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) than Eisenstein’s efforts to “seize the spectator” with an edit that signifies a larger meaning.

Factors that Control Internal Rhythm

As we said earlier, internal rhythm is controlled by elements within the shot, mainly the movement of objects and people (primary motion). While any aspect of the mise-en-scène – not merely sets, props, costumes, but also camera or lens movement (secondary motion) and other elements like focal length, camera placement, and lighting – can make significant contributions to internal rhythm, we will begin by looking at primary motion, the movements of objects and people, movements that can be further classified by their tempo direction and pattern of the movement on the screen.³⁸ To understand how primary motion controls internal rhythm, we can begin by looking at a scene from Citizen Kane that has very little cutting: the scene where Kane demolishes Susan’s bedroom after she leaves Xanadu. This scene demonstrates the importance of tempo. See Critical Commons, “Citizen Kane: Internal Rhythm, Movement of People and Objects and Composition (Repeated Forms).”³⁹

Internal Rhythm: Tempo of the Action

Kane stands in the doorway of the Susan’s bedroom and, and as she leaves, he is clearly overcome with emotion, and turns back into the bedroom. The room is quiet. Kane walks stiffly to the bed and fumbles to place some of the clothes Susan has left behind into a suitcase. His anger is evident as he grapples with the latch. He turns abruptly and throws the suitcase (Figure 8.3). His blood begins to boil. The camera remains low and wide to show his full figure as he throws another suitcase and pulls the bedspread to the floor. The camera cuts closer as he proceeds to destroy the room in earnest, the sound level rising as he rips a bed canopy from the wall, and moves deeper into the room to smash a lamp with the sweep of one arm. From this point, Kane’s movements become more erratic, and the level and tempo of the soundtrack increase, growing denser and more chaotic. Welles holds his upper body in check, creating a contrast between the awkward, stiff movements of the elder Kane, and the expanding destruction around him. As Kane staggers through the wreckage of the room, tossing over a dresser and a chair, a match cut to a low angle shot brings the action close, and Kane looms in the foreground. He wrenches a small shelf of bric-a-brac from the wall and tosses it aside as his focus turns elsewhere. The pace is rising as he attacks another shelf, and the soundtrack is fierce with the clatter of books hitting the ground. He finds a bottle in his hand, and pauses to glance at it. He hurls it against the far wall, the singular crash marking a momentary pause. Kane lurches for a mirror and rips it from the wall. Fatigued, he stumbles against an overturned chair and circles back towards the camera, gasping for breath.

Now the pace is slowing, and the soundtrack returning to normal levels, as Kane comes close to the camera. He sends a final group of perfume bottles crashing to the ground, and pulls up short in a tight framing that shows only his hands and the bottom of his suit jacket. There is a moment of pause and dead silence. The camera tilts slightly as Kane carefully picks up a glass globe and moves towards the door, brushing an overturned nightstand out of his way. His outburst concluded, there is a welcome caesura: Kane pauses and looks down at the globe, and the film cuts to a close up of the snow filled globe seen at the beginning of the film and later on Susan’s dresser in the “love nest.” “Rosebud,” he whispers, and the camera tilts up to reveal the broken Kane staring into the middle distance, his eyes glistening with tears. To recap, the internal rhythm to this point has chaotic forward propulsion that steadily builds across most of the scene, broken only by moments of Kane staggering to the next section of the room he is intent on destroying. Once his anger is spent, however, the rapid deceleration in his pace is punctuated by only a few destructive bursts that tail off in to silence and this single word of dialogue.

From the point that Kane turns to destroy the room, the action plays out in four wide shots that run:46 seconds,:19 seconds;:07 seconds and:45 seconds. As an example of pacing controlled by character action, this two-minute scene shows the remarkable ability of Orson Welles to regulate the “time pressure” of his anger in a meaningful trajectory. The scene concludes as a slow dirge that brings Kane out of the bedroom into the halls of Xanadu. His household staff stand by silently, their inertia marking their emotional distance from him. Kane presses forward down the hall, condemned to loneliness, the figure of a “dead man walking.” As he passes an arched hall of mirrors, the stiff, “mechanical trance” of his broken walk is the primary motion controlling internal rhythm. But repeated in an infinity of mirrors, the multiplication of this action adds its own plastic rhythm to conclude the scene. We will address other examples of plastic or compositional rhythm later in this chapter (see p. 290 below).

Internal Rhythm: Pattern of Movement and Lens Usage

Another key parameter for the control of internal rhythm is the pattern of movement within the frame. As we noted in Chapter 1, Arnheim described the motion picture as something between two-dimensional and three-dimensional, a medium which has “simultaneously the effect of an actual happening and of a picture.”⁴⁰ When we look at “pattern of movement” as a part of a scene’s internal rhythm, we try to focus on how action and composition produce the “pictureness” or two-dimensional composition in a frame. Again, this is “plastic rhythm” resulting “from the organization of the frame’s surface content or its division in terms of lighting intensities, colors, or any other compositional factors. Such plasticity in the image follows from classic issues dealt with by such theorists of twentieth-century painting as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.”⁴¹ Like any complex phenomenon, “pattern of movement” in a film is hard to describe in words, not only because words like “flowing” or “balanced” or “staggered” or “chaotic” are broad terms, but also because in every shot, other factors interact to facilitate the pattern, notably lens usage, camera placement, lighting and color. Concrete examples here will illustrate how a pattern of movement influences internal rhythm, and the comparison of two scenes of men marching from the work of Stanley Kubrick will be our starting point.

See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: Barry Lyndon, Pattern of Movement, Marching Comparison.”⁴²

In Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975), one of the early scenes of the film shows a British army company led by John Quin (Leonard Rossiter) parading for the people of Bradytown in Ireland, as they prepare for war against French invaders. The scene opens with a classically composed wide shot of the company standing to attention in a field with no real sense of the surrounding space: in this instance, the men are arranged as a long, flat, red “graphic area” that fills the lower third of the frame. They face head on to the camera as two flags flap in the breeze, the composition flattened by the use of a long lens. As Captain Quin orders the company to forward march, the fife and drum corps begins to play “The British Grenadiers.” The lines of men are straight and their bayonetted muskets are all properly aligned, and their marching is precisely coordinated. They all start off in unison on their left foot, standard procedure that is initiated after the preparatory command “Company . . . ” and the command of execution, “Forward march!”

A slow zoom out –:20 seconds of a:47 second long shot – accompanies their march forward revealing the assembled townspeople in the foreground, and fields in the middle ground and a mountain in the distance. The soldiers are now considerably smaller in the frame as the camera zooms out, but they continue as a single unit, marching towards the camera in tight formation. With aerial perspective from the haze in the valley flattening the composition, the scene ends as a stable, balanced, symmetrical arrangement, the internal rhythm of the marching slowed since the formation occupies a smaller portion of the frame. In this shot, the zoom is useful as a device to literally “open the scene” and reveal the townspeople present. Zoom outs are a common aesthetic device in Barry Lyndon: 36 appear in the film, including six of the first eleven scenes in the film that each begin with a long zoom out.⁴³ In addition, this is the first of a number of marching scenes that will appear in the film. The stable primary motion created by the march itself, augmented by the slow zoom out, and the balanced composition that ends the shot, gives a feeling of quaint patriotism, particularly in comparison to some of the later marching scenes where the soldiers calmly advance into withering, deadly fire from the enemy. Overall, the opening rhythm here is lively and stable.

Later in the scene, the company marches right to left across the screen in perfect formation, with the camera trailing behind them in a slight pan to the right. The closer placement and horizontal movement in the frame is more dynamic, but controlled and even, still following the cadence of the original shot. Two closer shots introduce Quin, and show Barry (Ryan O’Neal) looking on enviously with his cousin Nora (Gay Hamilton). The scene closes as it opened, with a return to the opening wide shot as the soldiers raise their muskets and fire a salute, startling the crowd and their horses. The regularity and bright energy of this marching scene will stand in contrast to ones that come later.

Thinking that he has killed Captain Quin in a duel, Barry escapes to join the army. He fights in battle, and ultimately deserts the British army by stealing a courier’s uniform and horse. Barry is exposed as a fraud and forced to join the Prussian army. Later in the film, a four-shot sequence shows the dissipation of the Prussian army at the end of the Seven Years’ War, and links that decline to the moral fall of the protagonist. The internal rhythm established in this scene is more rambling and loose, and the lens usage here plays a more important role in flattening the movements of the army into a visual pattern covering the screen (Figure 8.4).

The sequence uses foot soldiers that are staged marching carelessly towards the camera in three telephoto shots and one wide-angle shot. In the first shot, Barry is centered in an uncoordinated platoon of soldiers who loosely march towards the camera. The action is staged with Barry centered in the bottom third of the frame, the platoon walking roughly in time with the march of a fife and drum corps that accompanies the scene. The soldiers move down a slightly sloped field, and the telephoto lens used flattens the perspective of the shot so that the army is spread across the frame, with a few rows in the back in slightly soft focus. The lines are ragged and irregular. The soldiers do not coordinate the alternate hand forward as they step. Their muskets are held at a variety of angles, particularly Barry’s which is sloping towards his right shoulder, making it one of the more visibly “out of formation.”

The fife and drum song continues, and in a second wide shot, the musicians lead the platoon as it snakes down a hillside. Here, their movement is no longer directly along the z-axis towards the camera, but rather, off axis, so that the platoon is seen almost like a river of men flowing down the hill, with a camera placed “on the river bank”. Given that the shot is wide, the platoon’s movements are no longer “spread” across the screen. Consequently, the effect is as if they are moving in a formation that is tighter than the previous shot.

The third shot returns to a long lens with the action directly towards the camera, but this time the framing is wider than the first shot. The wider scope reveals roughly 10 rows of soldiers marching, their lines extending deep towards the horizon. Here, two flapping flags and an officer who leads on his horse breaks the offhand formation of the lines while overlapping rows of soldiers fill the spaces in between. With the flattened perspective of the lens, the mass of men fills the frame and seems to oscillate forward at a pace that loosely follows the drum corps. The scene closes with a telephoto shot that singles out Barry using selective focus, as the ragged procession continues to shamble towards the camera. Here again, the telephoto lens slows the primary motion of the shot since its inherent aesthetic retards z-axis motion towards (or away from) the camera. The disorder of this scene visually encapsulates how the war has worn down and commandeered the lives of the impoverished Prussian soldiers, particularly in comparison to the polished, but untested, vigor of Quin’s regiment seen earlier. Pattern of movement and internal rhythm make the comparison clear.

Another exceptional example of the telephoto lens effect on internal rhythm is found in an airport scene in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Alfredson, 2011). See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Telephoto Lens Slows Motion Towards the Camera.”⁴⁴ A retired British intelligence officer George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is trying to get Toby Esterhase (David Dencik) to reveal the location of a safe house where Soviet spies are meeting with a British agent. Smiley threatens to send Esterhase back to Hungary, where he would be treated as a traitor. At the airport, Esterhase and Smiley are talking on the tarmac, when suddenly in the distance a plane drops into the frame and lands on the runway behind them. The plane represents an immediate threat to Esterhase, and as the plane taxies forward, he tries to explain his way out of being sent back.

The approach of the plane is acutely slowed and the space of the runway “flattened” so much so that it almost appears as if they are standing in front of a digital projection of a plane. Esterhase is unnerved by the plane’s approach, whose arrested movement seems ominous and dream-like (Figure 8.5). This visual “spell” is broken at the end of the shot as the plane finally pulls close enough to come into focus, turns slightly and brakes while killing its engines. Smiley’s dialogue punctuates that moment in rhythm by finishing Esterhase’s thought: “Operation Witchcraft. Yes, I know,” and the shot ends with a cut to the next shot. Esterhase pleads for his freedom, but ultimately gives up the address of the safe house. The scene was reportedly shot with an extremely long, 2000mm lens.

One final example will illustrate how patterns of movement and lens usage can work together to control internal rhythm. In Aguirre: Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972), the Spanish soldier Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) leads a group of conquistadors down the Amazon River in a mad search for the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. After enduring months of treacherous slogging through the jungle with European armor, guns and canons wholly unfit for the jungle, the decimated party builds a raft to float down the Amazon. By the end of the film, all of the party except Aguirre has died from starvation, disease or from the arrows that constantly strike them from unseen natives on the banks. See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: Aguirre, Character Movement, Wide Angle Lens.”⁴⁵

The sequence opens as Aguirre cradles his daughter, killed by an arrow. He surveys what is left of the raft, now overrun by monkeys. In a voice over peppered throughout the scene, Aguirre’s metal illness and megalomania is fully revealed. His raft is slowly sinking, but he is thinking grandiose thoughts that he narrates intermittently across the entire scene:

Throughout, the wide angle lens is used for practical reasons – it is easier to maintain focus and framing when hand-holding a camera – as well as aesthetic ones – its great depth of field and distorted perspective allow Herzog to push in unnervingly close to Kinski, whose unstable stance and piercing gaze carry the authentic look of insanity (Figure 8.6).

A number of shots in this sequence are particularly telling of Aguirre’s lunacy. As he stands defiant in the center of the raft, a handheld, wide angle shot pushes so close to his face that the proxemics of the shot become intimate, uncomfortably close, and time seems to slow as the shot holds for:15 seconds. Proxemics in film refers to the effects of spatial relations between camera and subject on the kinetic and emotional impact of a scene.

As the camera sways slightly with the rocking of the raft, Kinski stands upright and intractable, the intensity of his madness written in his eyes. (Apropos Murch’s blink theory, notice that Kinski does not blink in this shot.) Here, character movement is absolutely minimal, so the camera’s instability and wide lens’ power to slightly distort his face and maintain close focus amplify what little primary motion is present to an acute level: there is an energy present in Aguirre that projects into the space. Interviewed once about The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (Herzog, 1974) Herzog commented on his use of the handheld camera versus the tripod:

A second shot that exemplifies internal rhythm well is a: 53-second wide shot in which Aguirre walks in his armor, helmet, sword and leather boots across the sinking raft. The footing is clearly treacherous, but Aguirre’s gait has the air of a mad man, staggering in an angular walk and kneeling to come face to face with a group of monkeys cowering on the corner of the raft. In stark contrast to his grandiose scheme to conquer New Spain, he is literally “lording it over the monkeys.” The pattern of chaos created as the monkeys scurry across the raft, leaping in fear from log to log and scrambling over one of the dead crewmembers suggests that maybe even they understand that Aguirre is unhinged. At the end of this shot there is a jump cut to Aguirre staggering forward to catch his balance against a canon.

That cut is part of a strategy of hard cutting across the scene so that the external rhythm reinforces the edgy internal rhythm that is unfolding across the raft. Shot in cinéma vérité style, the coverage lends itself to elliptical cutting, and jump cuts propel Aguirre forward in the scene, while cuts to the monkeys roving across the raft serve as the “objective correlative:” they are forcible images of his deterioration. If we consider only the progression of Aguirre’s placement in scene, the elliptical cutting moves him from cradling his daughter to a close up in the center of the raft looking over his right shoulder, to a circling close shot looking over his left shoulder, to the long shot just described where he staggers along the edge of the raft, to the canon, to the final tracking shot over his shoulder where he corners a group of monkeys. Spatially, Aguirre ranges erratically across the raft, via a weaving camera that follows him and via the jump cuts that render his movements even more volatile.

In the last shot particularly, the wide-angle lens brings the viewer into Aguirre’s madness by dynamically spatializing his walk. As he moves past a flag, the camera crosses very close on the other side, sweeping it across the foreground and energizing it with distorted perspective. As he moves under a wooden tent pole, the camera ducks under with him, as if the viewer is prowling behind. At the close of this careening shot, the camera pushes in for a climatic moment: Aguirre grips a small monkey who writhes and screams in fear. He declares aloud, “I am the Wrath of God. Who else is with me?” Then, in an inspired moment where Kinski truly inhabits his character, he casually tosses the monkey into the river. Herzog says of the film’s ending, “it isn’t so much a happy ending as an exact one, a suitable ending – there is no deeper meaning in it. As for the monkeys on the raft at the end of Aguirre, that was the only way to end the film, the only way to get an appropriate ending.”⁴⁷

Internal Rhythm: Camera Placement

Beyond character movement and lens usage, the placement and movement of the camera itself can contribute to the internal rhythm of a shot. Again, the range of potential choices here is vast, but a few examples can illustrate the underlying rhythmic principles an editor must be aware of in constructing a scene. Camera placements that are at the eye level of the actor are considered normative, and elevations above or below this placement frequently connote power or lack of it. As Herbert Zettl notes,

Moreover, traditional screen aesthetic holds that camera elevation has an effect on internal rhythm: a high angle shot tends to slow or diminish internal rhythm, while a low angle shot tends to accentuate internal rhythm. See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: Citizen Kane, Low Angle Increases Internal Rhythm.”⁴⁹

Low angle camera placements are used throughout Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941), and the film was notable for showing the ceilings of its set – made from stretched muslin – a rarity for a Hollywood studio production of its era. In the film, the political boss Jim Gettys (Ray Collins) uses Kane’s affair with Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) to destroy Kane’s chance to be elected governor and end corruption in the state. In the morning following Kane’s loss, Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten) comes to the campaign headquarters drunk and angry that Kane has failed his family, his friends and electorate of the state. Character movement in the scene is minimal, and the pacing of the dialogue is even, save for those moments when Leland presses Kane to let him go to work on the newspaper Chicago, the first crack in their solid friendship. Neither actor is heroic in this scene, so the choice of the low angle, wide shot to “elevate” them, to “look up to them” is not a thematic concern.

What does emerge from the low camera placement is a kind of smoldering anger, a tension that builds as they circle each other. Leland dresses Kane down for his failure to really love anyone, but Kane is unwilling to acknowledge and accept his failures. The low placement helps carry the threat implied in their body language and dialogue that this encounter might spill over into hostility and even violence. The scene begins to pivot when Jedediah’s criticism of Kane becomes more pointed (Figure 8.7). He finally says, “You don’t care about anything except you.” Now Kane retreats toward a nearby table, and the low placement reveals a reminder of his failure – a “Kane for Governor” banner on a ceiling beam – and renders his crossing of the room dynamic and charged with emotion in a way that an eye level placement could not. The staging, the use of ceilings and the low placement playing against the traditional “elevation” of the character energize Kane’s movements so that they read more like “caged animal” than “hero.”

Jedediah continues his attack, and the shot changes to another low angle wide shot as he walks forward, marching into Kane’s personal space to ask for a transfer to Chicago. Now both men loom in the foreground as they struggle over the issue, and as it becomes clear that Jedediah will resign if he’s not granted a transfer, Kane relents and says he can go. But as Kane pours himself a drink, he tries one more time to convince Jed to stay, only to be interrupted, “Will Saturday after next be alright [for me to leave]?” The low placement continues to energize the internal rhythm of their dialogue and their movements as the stare each other down, the hostility and disappointment between them palpable. Kane closes the scene with a toast: “To love on my terms, that’s the only terms anybody ever knows – his own.” Throughout, the visual dynamism of the low placement has enlivened the emotionally charged exchange between the two old friends.

An altogether different use of camera placement crowns the ending of the 1960s classic film, Blowup (Antonioni, 1966). Here, the central character Thomas (David Hemmings), a swinging London fashion photographer, returns to a park where he believes he has photographed a murder. Antonioni’s film expresses deep reservations about a “mod” world in which the photographer is so distracted by the surfaces of the world he inhabits that he lacks the moral gumption to actually deal with what he believes to be the death of another human being. At the same time, Antonioni asks the audience to address questions about whether what the photographer sees may or may not be true. Those two ideas dovetail effortlessly in the closing sequence of the film. See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: Blowup, High Angle Camera Placement Decreases Internal Rhythm.”⁵⁰

The photographer wakes up at sunrise in a house where he partied all night long, and returns to the park alone, having failed to convince anyone of what he thinks he has seen. He finds nothing to prove there was a murder, and is leaving the park when a troupe of anarchic mimes arrive in the park and begin to “play tennis” in pantomime. The photographer looks on as the “match” progresses, and is slowly drawn into the “game,” as one of the mimes appears to hit the tennis ball over the fence and out of the court. The camera tracks the illusory “ball” as it rolls to a stop, and the female tennis mime gestures for the photographer for help retrieving it. As the troupe looks on silently, he trots over to retrieve the “ball.” Setting his camera on the grass, he “hefts” the imaginary ball and runs towards camera, “heaving” it back onto the court. Here, the camera holds him in a medium close-up for:36 seconds, while the sounds of a tennis ball being volleyed back and forth are slowly sneaked underneath the shot. In a remarkable moment, the photographer’s eyes begin to follow the “ball” until he pauses, and seems to be thinking back over what has transpired.

The film then cuts to an extremely high angle wide shot (Figure 8.8), a framing that not only trivializes the main character and all he represents, but that also reduces his movements to a slow crawl as he walks idly back to pick up his camera. He then walks to the center of the frame and pauses, swinging his camera slightly by his side. With this placement, the film’s momentum gradually winds down. The high angle shot brings down the curtain on his moment of contemplation and serves as a visual marker that slows his actions. An instant later, Antonioni dissolves to the same framing without the photographer, essentially erasing him from the film in a moment of overt directorial control, and triggering the appearance of the end credits. Roger Ebert summarizes the ending of the film this way:

A similar effect where the high angle shot slows the primary motion of many actors can be seen throughout the climactic battle scene in Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960), a Roman epic that Kubrick was brought on to direct after Anthony Mann was fired early in the production. The film was shot in an ultra-widescreen Super 70 Technirama format, a horizontal 35mm format for blow up to 70mm that is similar to VistaVision. The wide, high definition image was used to capture large panoramic scenes, including one battle scene with 8,000 Spanish soldiers playing the Roman army. In the scene, the opposing forces occupy opposite sides of a valley. Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) and his rag tag army of rebellious gladiators face a much larger force of disciplined Roman legions lead by Crassus (Laurence Olivier). Spartacus’ army holds the high ground while the legions organize their formations in the valley, preparing for the assault. See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: Spartacus, High Angle Camera Placement Decreases Internal Rhythm.”⁵²

Shots of the legions marching into position are captured in extreme wide shots from a high angle position, while the long shots showing the concerned reactions of the rows of soldiers in each army are much closer, and often below eye level. The sheer magnitude of the Roman legions is impressive, and once they move to mid-valley and pause, the camera’s point of view remains with the gladiators as the legions approach. Pre-battle maneuvering was a common Roman legion tactic as commanders prepared for an impending clash. The tempo of the legion’s choreographed formations moving into position – shot from an aloof angle that scales their forward march into sweeping formations – is slowed by the high camera placement, allowing the patterns to play out in very long, leisurely takes. As the tension of the impending battle builds, a line of Roman soldiers moves into a forward line, while the legions in the rear close ranks into a tighter formation. A high angle side shot brings the two armies to a face off from opposite sides of the frame, while the sound of thousands of shields being raised in unison creates a thunderous noise. As the legions begin their charge, Spartacus, in a series of closer shots, orders flaming logs rolled down the hills to halt the Roman attack (Figure 8.9).

But Kubrick stays with the high angle wide shot as the battle begins to turn, the blazing logs breaking the Roman ranks as the gladiators’ counterattack commences. For the opening of this battle, the high angle wide shot is a choice that reveals the scale and pattern of the maneuvering legions, a choice that will be fully evident in the 70mm widescreen distribution for which it is intended. Moreover, the high angle shot slows the pace of the ponderous pre-battle, providing contrast to the aggressive, close combat to follow. Kubrick will move the camera closer and lower as the battle plays out, but even here will often stay above the fray so that the sheer scale of the production is written across the big screen.

Internal Rhythm: Scope of the Shot

Classic screen theory holds that the scope of the shot can affect the perceived duration of a shot. Jean Mitry acknowledges that hard-and-fast rules about the relationship between the scope of a shot and perceived duration are suspect because of the large possible number of variables involved. Nonetheless, he claims that, in general, “the more dynamic the content and the wider the framing, the shorter the shot appears; the more static the content and narrower the framing, the longer the shot appears.”⁵³ If we first consider “movement energy” in the frame, it seems obvious that – given two shots of the same scale – shot A of a moving scene or high dynamism action will appear shorter than shot B of a static scene or low dynamism action. Further, if any given action C is framed as a wide shot, if feels shorter (duration) than if C is framed in close up, since the viewer often has the need to visually scan the frame in a long shot. As the viewer interacts with information distributed across the frame, the time it takes to completely survey and absorb the image can feel abbreviated by the cut. Conversely, if action C is framed closer, it can feel longer since the viewer has “nowhere else to look.” Or to put it another way, closer shots concentrate and enhance dynamism or internal rhythm, and so they generally need less screen time than wide shots.

Zettl expands this idea further by noting that a close up usually carries the same impact as if we are close to an actual subject. In other words, the close up replicates the same proxemics as actually being close. Zettl says, “Long shots and close-ups differ not only in how big objects appear on screen (graphic mass relative to the screen borders) but also on how close they seem to us, the viewers. Close-ups seem physically and psychologically closer to us than long shots.”⁵⁴

We can see this principle at work in shots at the opposite end of the shot scale from those we looked at in Spartacus. The “Life Lessons” segment of the short film anthology New York Stories (Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, 1989) provides a compelling example. Here, the extreme close up adds energy and increases internal rhythm by narrowing and concentrating the field of view. In the film, the painter Lionel Dobie (Nick Nolte) struggles to complete a number of large works for a show that is opening soon, while struggling to keep his young assistant Paulette (Rosanna Arquette), with whom he shares a loft, in an exploitive relationship. As Lionel struggles for inspiration, he is sexually distracted by the presence of Paulette, who has decided to leave him. See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: ‘Life Lessons,’ Close up and Color Usage.”⁵⁵

Lionel finally quits procrastinating and gets down to painting. He puts in a cassette of the 1960s blues classic “Politician” by Cream. Director Martin Scorsese opens the scene energetically with a series of tracking shots, but the camera quickly moves in close, as Lionel sees a nude photograph on an art magazine strewn on the floor and seems to take that as a momentary inspiration. What follows is a:30 second sequence of eleven extreme close ups of oil paint squeezed from a tube or swirled onto the canvas, intercut with two extreme close ups of Lionel engrossed in the creative process as he contemplates his next brush stroke. The shot length is short, with an average shot length of 2.5 seconds, so the external cutting rhythm contributes to the burst of creative energy that is expressed in the sequence. But the pinpoint framing of the extreme close-up contributes equally to the aesthetic energy of the scene by heightening the internal rhythm of brush strokes pushing paint into visceral shapes (Figure 8.10).

The paint colors are vibrant, and the kinetic process as Lionel works the material on the canvas is magnified by the narrow field of view, which is only slightly larger than the painter’s hand (Figure 8.10). The framing brings a haptic intensity to the moist textures and fluid physicality of the oil paint as it squirts onto the palette and swirls in broad curves across the canvas, one layer smothering another. The framing also ensures that the motion vectors of Lionel’s aggressive brush across the canvas are essentially mapped “stroke for stroke” across the film screen, an intensification of the brush’s primary motion that communicates the essential qualities of Lionel’s active technique.

Internal Rhythm: Camera Movement

Conventional aesthetics assumes that a moving camera increases internal rhythm more than a static camera. This dynamic “boost” is partly because the move overcomes the limitations of the camera’s fixed aspect ratio – a tilt can show the height of a towering tree, a pan can show the sweep of a river – and partly because the gradual revelation of the profilmic material over time is more dynamic than a fixed shot. Here again, the work of Stanley Kubrick provides many examples of moving camera, particularly the reverse dolly shot that he used extensively. In Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957) Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) is leading a regiment engaged in vicious trench warfare in France, while his superior, the ambitious General Mireau (George Macready) tries to engineer a battlefield victory no matter what the cost. Mireau leaves his palatial office and comes to the trenches to fire up the troops for their impending charge “over the top” into “no man’s land.” This is the viewer’s first introduction to the realm of trench warfare, and most of the scene is captured in a single:90 second reverse dolly shot that will match its movements to those of the General. The tempo of both character and camera movement here is deliberate and unhurried, with pauses to converse with the troops. See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: Paths of Glory, Reverse Dolly.”⁵⁶

Mireau, living in the comfort of a rear echelon, has been largely removed from the reality of the trenches. The scene opens with a wounded man carried away from the camera as Mireau approaches with his aide-de-camp. The general strides confidently and offers breezy salutes to the enlisted men, his crisp uniform and cape at oddly out of place in a dirty trench that is lined with irregular wooden bulwarks. He stops three times to make awkward chat with his foot soldiers, playing up to each with the line, “Ready to kill more Germans, soldier?” The tracking shot pauses for each interlude as the general dispenses platitudes freely. But when he stops to tell a soldier that a rifle “is a soldier’s best friend, you be good to it and it will be good to you,” an exploding shell in the background ironically undercuts the small talk (Figure 8.11).

The general continues his inspection, the camera leading his confident stride through the long trench, and revealing the impressive scale of the battle preparations. He comes to group of soldiers in a fire bay and the steady rhythm of his review comes to an abrupt end, as the camera track pauses for the final time. His question, “Ready to kill more Germans, soldier?” is met with an awkward, extended silence from a soldier who is unresponsive. As the general tries to learn what the problem is, Kubrick turns to traditional coverage for the dialogue scene that follows, and medium close ups of the soldier show his empty stare as he talks vacantly about his wife back home. Appeals from his buddies that he is suffering from “shell shock” (the World War I name for “posttraumatic stress disorder”) are dismissed. “I beg your pardon, Sergeant, there is no such thing as shell shock,” the general counters. The soldier quickly breaks down in fear that he will never see his wife again. The general promptly slaps him and orders him dismissed from the regiment, “I won’t have my brave men contaminated by him.” The scene ends with a tracking shot that follows the general away from the men as his aide-de-camp ironically congratulates Mireau on his decisive action: “You know general, I’m convinced that these tours of yours have an incalculable effect on the morale of these men.”

Throughout this scene, there is ebb and flow between movement and conversation, a rise and fall that the reverse dolly is uniquely adept at capturing, simply by taking its cue from the pattern of Mireau’s movements. The unfolding architecture, the scale of the space and the feel of the trench can best be communicated by actually moving through it, not cutting the space into a series of shots. And for the viewer, the rhythm of that “discovery” is controlled completely by the pace and pattern of Mireau’s movements, underscored in the track by a single, crisp military snare drum that evenly punctuates his stroll, and resolves in a drum roll as he pauses. As we noted above, because that sound is non-diegetic – external to the story space – it is ordinarily classified as part of the external rhythm of the scene. We will examine other external rhythm devices below.

Wes Anderson is another filmmaker who uses a range of camera movements throughout his films, in conjunction with very formal compositions and traditional editing structures. In Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012), he captures the routines of the Khaki Scouts at summer camp with orderly camera moves, impeccably staged military spaces, and exquisitely framed compositions. In the film, Sam (Jared Gilman) resigns from the Khaki Scouts, and runs away with Suzy (Kara Hayward). They are nerdy, innocent adolescents, and they retreat to a secluded island cove that they name Moonrise Kingdom. Eventually, they decide to see if Cousin Ben (Jason Schwartzman) who works at Fort Lebanon, a Khaki scout camp nearby, will marry them. See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: Moonrise Kingdom, Layered Composition in a Tracking Shot.”⁵⁷

Cousin Ben meets the fugitive Sam, and first advises him on his best chance to escape. Their clipped, military dialogue plays out in a remarkable tracking shot in which multiple planes of the shot are chock full of motion: in the foreground, a picket fence rattles across the frame while Cousin Ben and the younger scouts walk in time with the camera; while in the middle ground, lines of troops hike the opposite direction against symmetrical rows of canvas tents and an obstacle course of old tires, while in the distance, scouts run in single file against a row of flag poles and a climbing ropes obstacle that more scouts clamber over. The regular cadence of the snare drum is a complimentary postproduction element of external rhythm that syncs closely to the primary motions in the foreground – the group following Cousin Ben and the regular ratatatat of fence pickets sliding across the frame (Figure 8.12). The sheer number of visual rhythms at work in the shot reflects Anderson’s meticulous control of mise-en-scène. The visual variation in the shot emerges from the steady march of Cousin Ben’s group, holding a fixed position relative to the camera, in contrast with a range of other visual rhythms: the “chatter” of fence pickets crossing the bottom of the frame, the triangular tents crossing at various speeds due to parallax, the unruly flow of loose troop formations, the single lines of boys crossing a rigid row of flags in opposite directions.

Sam agrees to leave, but when he says he wants to bring his “wife Suzy,” the film cuts to a static shot and the visual rhythm screeches to a halt as Cousin Ben turns in a cartoon-like “take,” trying to understand what he has just heard. Suzy steps into the arrested frame and notes dryly, “But we’re not married yet.” No longer moving the camera to enliven the background, Anderson resorts to a model rocket launch and a Khaki scout on a zip line in the back ground to punctuate the foreground dialogue. The scene ends with a complete change of axis of movement: in the next shot, Ben enters vertically by sliding down a pole and walking towards the camera. His unorthodox entrance underscores the tongue in cheek warning he delivers as the scene ends, ordering the young couple to “go over by that trampoline and talk it through” before they take such a momentous step.

Thus far we have looked at smooth, stabilized camera movements: the Kubrick reverse track and Anderson’s formal tracking shot. As we noted above in our discussion of Aguirre, some directors like Herzog regard shots from a tripod as inherently “inhuman,” since the camera’s viewpoint is fixed and “stabilized” and human perception is not. For Herzog, the handheld camera is more in tune with human perception. Silent features used the handheld shot sparingly, due in part to the difficulty with holding and cranking the camera simultaneously. Likewise, shooting handheld for sound pictures on a Hollywood set was prohibited by the noise created by smaller, handheld units. Only newsreels came to use the handheld camera extensively, where the need for speed and immediacy in framing action was paramount. It was not until the early 1960s that the development of a system by Leacock-Pennebaker that paired light weight, self-blimped cameras with small double system sound recorders – all running on battery power – that “direct cinema” documentaries like Primary (Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles cinematography, edited by D. A. Pennebaker, 1960) were possible. Around the same time, French New Wave films quickly made the handheld camera a distinguishing technique in their films in the narrative domain.

Conventional aesthetics holds that the handheld camera increases internal rhythm. If we divide possible camera movement into two large classes – movements possible with a handheld camera versus movements possible on a tripod mount, the most common stable mount, we can see the scope of conceivable camera movements is very large indeed, since the handheld camera can emulate the two primary tripod movements, pan and tilt. In addition, virtually any “stable” camera movement such as a traditional dolly shot, tracking shot, crane shot, or even a Steadicam shot that is done on a stable but mobile mount can be improvised using a handheld camera (with a different aesthetic result obviously). In addition, there are a wide range of handheld camera movements that can emulate almost any human movement but remain largely unnamed. So, given the range of possible movements with the handheld camera, we will simplify here by looking at a single sequence of the technique from Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) in order to clarify how the technique impacts primary motion.

Throughout Saving Private Ryan, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski employs the handheld camera to tell the story of the search for the last surviving brother of four service men following the D-Day landing in Normandy, France. Ryan won five Academy awards, including Best Direction, Best Editing for Michael Kahn, and Best Cinematography for Kaminski’s creative work that helped redefine the depiction of combat violence. In addition to the handheld camera, Kaminski employed short exposure times from a 90° or 45° shutter angle to sharpen the internal dynamism of the combat shots. Shutter angles less than 180° or “full shutter” take short duration samples that are spaced farther apart temporarily, so they add an edgy, “staccato” look to the footage. A look at seven handheld shots in the landing vehicle as the squad led by Captain John H. Miller (Tom Hanks) lands on Omaha beach will demonstrate the contribution of the technique to internal rhythm. See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: Saving Private Ryan, Handheld Camera Increases Internal Rhythm.”⁵⁸

The beach scene opens with almost two minutes of shots that show the rugged transport of landing craft towards the beach. Miller’s squad rides the stormy swells towards the beachhead, his men alternately praying and vomiting as they prepare for the landing ramp to open. Throughout the landing scene, the sky is cloudy, the lighting diffuse, with a somber color palette of desaturated blues, greens and greys. There is a gritty feeling to the scene, and Kaminski says,

ENR is a proprietary film development process used by Technicolor that produces rich blacks, muted colors, and a higher contrast image by leaving silver halide in the image, much like the better known bleach bypass process.

From the point that the ramp opens, the unanticipated strength of the German defensive positions is made tangible and visceral. In shot 1, the camera is placed low and close to the ramp, whose slow descent reveals two soldiers in a waist shot as the German bullets begin to fly. The shot is:01 second, 6 frames long, and roughly half way through the shot, there is a convergence of simultaneous phenomena into a single moment that punctuates the ferocity of the first two deaths shown: the ramp reveals the pair, the flight of bullets is heard whistling through the air, and both soldiers are hit simultaneously and fall backwards. Within such a short shot, this is a moment of cognitive dissonance: we expect the soldiers to charge forward but the impact hurls them back. That impact – the reversal of their primary motion – is reinforced by the handheld camera which careens upwards as the soldiers arms flail backwards, the camera rise clearing the edge of the landing craft enough to create a lens flare that sweeps across the screen. Shot 1 ends before we are sure what we have actually seen, but shot 2 repeats the same idea to reinforce the horror. The medium close up frames three soldiers in a line, on the other side of the landing craft, where the sharp focus falls only on the lead soldier. Shot 2 is only 23 frames long, and the primary motions are minimal, but the bullet hole in the lead soldier’s helmet reads easily, as does the splatter of blood captured mid-air by the short shutter. The camera shake here is more subtle – more like raw vibration from the force of bullets striking hard – but part of the energized chaos that is erupting. We get the sense of lead ripping through the air, and making the bodies of the soldiers almost dance.

Shot 3 reverses direction, shooting from the back of the boat. The handheld placement is centered and slightly above head height, as if from a soldier’s point of view. The camera feels squeezed into the cramped space, “rubbing shoulders” with the other eleven men and contained by the walls of the craft. Explosions lift the surf into the air, creating a vertical primary motion, while the boat and camera tilt right, buffeted by blasts. Since shot 3 holds:04 seconds of screen time, we feel the handheld rhythm of the boat rocking, as a burst of fire tears though men, flinging blood and debris towards the camera, splattering the lens. These lens blemishes, something rarely seen in a Hollywood film, lend a raw, documentary feel to the shot, and are part of a strategy by Kaminski to include “imperfections” in the cinematography:

Shot 4 is nearly as long as 3, a waist shot from the front of the boat that shows helmets flying and men crumpling under the withering fire. Now the camera flails to the right and downwards, towards the bottom of the boat, roughly mimicking the spray of falling bodies, violence almost too searing to take in. The next shot, shot 5, brings a change in perspective: the camera shows the beach from a German pillbox, with a machine gun and cartridge belt in soft focus but clearly silhouetted against the beachhead. The handheld camera tracks to the right side of the gun, revealing the rapid fire of tracers lighting up the muzzle; the camera holds for a beat, then continues to the right, revealing a second machine gun raking the beach below with fire (Figure 8.13).

Here, the short shutter and longer lens create a shaking action in the camera that mimics the machine gun fire: it is brisk, explosive and barely under control of the operator. At:06 seconds, 11 frames, this is the longest shot in the sequence. What the camera movement lacks in elegance and clarity, the silhouette lighting adds naturally: the shape of the machine guns devouring belts of ammo and spitting fire is distinct and instantly identifiable (Figure 8.13).

The next shot, shot 6, covers a line of dialogue that avoids many of the conventions of classic Hollywood war pictures. Captain Miller shouts, “Over the side!” pushing his men to dive overboard rather than be mowed down in the boat. Here, the realism in Saving Private Ryan extends to the audio track, since he is practically cut off by the chaotic sounds of war. Where canonic war films ensure that “If an actor has a line to deliver, the audience can always hear it, even if whispered in a raspy voice by dying man as furious combat rages is all around,”⁶¹ Ryan lets the chaos of war compete with the dialogue track. Shot 6 is barely longer than the line, a mere 46 frames long. Miller’s line covers 32 frames of that time, while the remaining 14 frames show Miller pulling a soldier across the frame. The handheld camera here is intimate and low, the lens still splattered in blood, and in such tight quarters that the soldier who is pulled across the frame almost touches the lens. The contrast to the previous shot is stark::06 seconds versus:02 seconds, the interior of the dark pillbox versus the bleak light of open boat, the rattle of the machine gun versus a single barked line of dialogue. The final shot, shot 7, returns to the back of the boat, with the camera framed tighter. Now more soldiers are hit and the primary motion is downward as they fall out of frame, leaving the kinetic energy deeper in the frame as the pillbox fire continues, and a large explosion lifts the black surf high into the air. Again, the short shutter and long lens enhance the camera’s instability as it rocks in the boat first left to right, then up and down, as if barely able to maintain its balance. The sequence ends with a shot from the side of the boat of the men diving overboard, the handheld camera following into the water before fading to black. The sequence that follows shows the soldiers underwater to a slow-motion world of quiet drowning and death – a stark shift in internal rhythm as the soldiers drift downward – before they return to the surface and struggle towards the beach. Spielberg takes a horrific moment from the first wave of the D-Day landing, and using a handheld camera and tight editing, intensifies the soldiers’ chaotic ordeal.

Internal Rhythm: Color

Classic screen theory holds that color can energize and amplify the emotional impact of scene. Zettl says, “High-energy colors are more active than low-energy colors. For example, the high-energy red of a sports car seems to fit our concept of power and speed, and a red ball promises more fun than a white one.”⁶² The main parameters of color energy in a shot are hue (warm vs. cold colors), brightness (luminous vs. dim), saturation (intensity or degree of difference from white), and contrast ratio (the range of the brightest area to the darkest area). Zettl argues that the highest aesthetic energy in a shot is associated with a warm hue, of high brightness, that is deeply saturated, within a composition that has a large contrast ratio. We will look at three scenes to demonstrate the contribution of color to internal rhythm of a scene.

A simple use of color tinting – washing an entire frame with of a scene with a single color – is found in the “Life Lessons” segment of the short film anthology New York Stories (Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, 1989) that we touched on earlier. At the end of the sequence where Lionel (Nick Nolte) furiously paints, he comes upstairs to Paulette’s (Rosanna Arquette) bedroom, ostensibly looking for his sable brush. See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: ‘Life Lessons,’ Blue Tint vs. B&W.”⁶³. As she lies in bed, Scorsese uses an iris matte around a medium shot of her foot to mark it as a subjective shot from Lionel’s point of view. She catches him looking at her foot, and he defends himself: “This is crazy, I just had this impulse – I wanted to kiss your foot.” Paulette reacts violently with a jerk of her foot, pulling the bed cover closer to her. This action is covered in a quick cut from the iris shot of her foot – the iris widening instantly – to a long shot of her in bed, as she rebukes him, “You’re nuts!” Lionel unleashes a litany of complaints – he’s working too hard, the opening of his gallery show is in three weeks, his agent is harassing him like a mocking bird – and then feebly tries to excuse his sexual impulse: “I just wanted to kiss your foot. I’m sorry. It’s nothing personal.” When he offers her an olive branch, adding, “You want me to get you anything?” the film cuts to a series of blue tinted, erotic images of Paulette and Lionel, engaged in sexually laden touching, suggesting that he’s imaging the kinds of things he would like to give her in that moment.

The cut to seven blue shaded images is cued by a return to a signature song used earlier in the film “Whiter Shade of Pale,” by Procol Harum who sing “That her face at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale.” Initially, the blue tint seems to be over a black and white image, a kind of literal visualization of the song. But later, Paulette’s fingers and lips reveal a faint hint of red in the image, so the base image is not monochromatic. The character movement here is minimal, smooth, and slow, with a specific action captured in each shot: Paulette turns to look slowly to look over her left shoulder, she strokes her hands across her knees, she lifts her hair and turns to the camera, Lionel lifts her hand and kisses it. A few of these shots are accented by camera moves like slow zoom in/tilt up combinations or by simple follow focus moves.

If we remove the blue tint entirely from the scene, and compare it to the original, the contribution of the blue is clear: the black and white version is formalized, bur it lacks the emotional pull of the blue version. The blue values add a calm, “tranquillizing” effect that slows the stylized primary motion, an effect heightened because the entire frame is cooler. As Zettl says, “Color effects seem to show up best in a positively predisposed context, that is, in a field in which most other elements display similar tendencies.”⁶⁴ Frame tinting and the use of the iris harken back to the traditions of the silent era. By contrast, the structure of Scorsese’s daydream sequence is nontraditional, since the fantasy is launched from Lionel’s point of view (i.e., his “look” in the outgoing shot begins the daydream) but returns from the reverie with Paulette turning towards the camera, a refreshing twist in the edit that suggests perhaps she has been sharing the same thoughts.

The impact of color on internal rhythm can also be clearly seen in Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975). Kubrick uses a specially designed Zeiss 50mm Planar f/0.70 lens to photograph scenes of Barry (Ryan O’Neal) working with the Chevalier du Balibari (Patrick Magee) to cheat European royalty at cards using only the light from candles. See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: Candle Light in Barry Lyndon.”⁶⁵ To film in this low light level, there were technical modifications made to the camera and lens mount, and Kubrick used special candles with three wicks for maximum brightness.⁶⁶ Ed DiGiulio, the President of Cinema Products Corporation, who worked on the project as a technician, asked Kubrick the obvious question, “Why were we going to all this trouble when the scene could be easily photographed with the high-quality super-speed lenses available today (such as those manufactured by Canon and Zeiss) with the addition of some fill light? He replied that he was not doing this just as a gimmick, but because he wanted to preserve the natural patina and feeling of these old castles at night as they actually were.”⁶⁷

Primary movement in the scene is carefully controlled, in part because of the nature of the scene, and in part because the depth of field was so shallow that it would have been difficult to pull focus accurately if the characters’ movement ranged very far. The primary motions in the scene are dictated by the gambling, which begins energetically in the long shots, as Lord Ludd (Steven Berkoff) initially wins a hand. As Ludd begins to lose, and the competition intensifies, Kubrick stays with a tighter shot of Ludd flanked by two ladies, and the same two-shot of the Chevalier and Barry across the table. The primary movements are very small – the kiss of a hand, the roll of a card, the raking of the pot – and these diminutive motions are set against the continuous fluttering of the candelabra that are spread across the table.

The low key, candle-lit table is ceremonial and romantic almost by definition, and the ritual of the gaming table is infused with the soft, flickering presence of multiple candles (Figure 8.14). These candles have their own “hypnotic” effect on the internal rhythm of the scene. The German psychiatrist Paul Näcke (1851–1913), writing about pyromania, argued that the attraction of fire for humans is threefold: phototropic, the simple attractive power of bright light, thermotropic, the magnetic power of warmth, and the attractiveness of its movement. Of this last factor, he writes,

If we set aside the phototropic and thermotropic associations of the candles here, considered here only the movement of the candlelight, they do make a significant contribution to an otherwise restrained internal rhythm. Under Zettl’s scheme, the fact that the scene is warm and that the contrast range is wide would suggest that the color would energize the internal rhythm of the scene. However, the desaturation of the colors, particularly the flesh tones muted by white facial powder, and the low overall brightness level of the scene tend to dampen or lower the dynamism of the scene considerably. In addition, the color palette of the scene – a combination of mise-en-scène and candlelight – creates a narrow, monochromatic design that quiets the scene. The “low energy” lighting underscores the polite etiquette of gaming that unfolds as Lord Ludd first must borrow money from the Chevalier, and then must sign an I.O.U. in front of his friends. It also reinforces the restrained emotions, the self-conscious politeness and elegant posturing that befits both the members of the aristocracy and the scoundrels at table who aspire to that rank.

A contrasting use of bright color is found in the bizarre comedy film Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988). The film opens on Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin) who, in the process of redecorating their country home, take a quick jaunt into town to pick up supplies from the hardware store. See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: Saturated Colors in Beetlejuice.”⁶⁹ On the return trip, Barbara swerves to avoid a dog, the car plunges through the wall of a covered bridge, and they teeter on the edge of the bridge, before plunging into the river below. Throughout, the scene is shot with the popular contemporary look of Kodak 35mm daylight balanced negative film: a fine-grained, deeply saturated film stock with great sharpness and accurate color reproduction. Clearly, the scene is more kinetic than the gaming scene above, and beyond the contribution of character movement to internal rhythm, the high key daylight look in Beetlejuice produces colors that border on cartoonish, adding a distinct aesthetic energy to the scene. Overall, the scene is bright, with a wide contrast range, and the colors are deeply saturated. The super saturated color scheme is particularly prominent in the wide shot where the Volvo protrudes from the fire engine red covered bridge. Large and centered in the frame, the bridge clearly dominates in the composition, with the other colors taking secondary role. The bright, clear northern sky of New England creates an eye-popping field that contrasts with the old white farmhouse, the deep green pastures surround it, and the “corn-on-the–cob” yellow Volvo they drive. The color choices adapt the “triadic” approach, with three colors evenly spaced around the color wheel: here, red, blue and yellow modified by the green landscape that bridges blue and yellow. The color energy here is opposite to the muted colors and low key lighting of Barry Lyndon, the saturated colors and high key lighting brightened by a color palette that is bold and vibrant.

Internal Rhythm: Repeated Forms

As we noted above, plastic rhythm is produced by arrangement of shapes, colors, textures or other visual elements across the two-dimensional space of an image. When composing visual images, repetition is one of the most basic design principles used to create plastic rhythm. In motion pictures, the repetition of forms to create plastic rhythm is augmented by the element of time: the viewer can see the repetition of forms change over time via character motion, reframing, camera movement, etc. Repetition of forms is often used in many motion pictures to create the internal rhythm for a shot or scene that naturally attracts the eye through compelling compositions, as the Hollywood choreography of Busby Berkley from the 1930s clearly demonstrates. Outside Hollywood, Sergei Eisenstein was a film artist who had an abiding interest in repeated forms as a way to enliven the primary motion of a shot. From the soldiers descending the stairs in the “Odessa Steps” sequence of Battleship Potemkin to the German invaders from the “Battle on the Ice” sequence of Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein returns to this device again and again as a way to invigorate patterns of movement within the frame. See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: Alexander Nevsky, Repeated Forms.”⁷⁰

In Alexander Nevsky (Sergei Eisenstein, 1938), there is a moment when the Teutonic knights’ attack on the Russian forces falters, and the invaders use rams’ horns to signal a retreat. As the Germans are forced to regroup, Eisenstein uses reverse motion from a high angle camera placement to “reassemble” their forces into an impenetrable “wall of shields” formation with soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, their shields adjoining. From that point forward, every shot of the formation uses repeated forms of helmets, shields and pikes to give more life to the impermeable German ranks (Figure 8.15). The cutting proceeds inductively, widening from a two-shot of helmeted soldiers to a longer shot of six in a line, with each soldier cloaked in a faceless helmet that suggests the demeanor and beak of a bird of prey. Behind them another row of faceless soldiers stand ready with pikes.

The next shot begins a series of three, widening shots of the same action. In succeeding shots, each wider than the first, two rows of soldiers in the “wall of shields” formation lower their pikes, festooned in flags and a streamers. If we imagine for a moment a singular primary motion – a precisely descending, angular pike set against the soft, swirling form of flags – and then multiply that across a platoon of soldiers, we begin to understand effect, the activating force that the plural form – shield after shield, helmet after helmet, pike after pike – adds to the shot. It is the plural form that truly activates the plastic rhythm of the shot. And it is through montage – the repetition of that plastic rhythm in a series of three widening shots – that Eisenstein creates the meaning of sequence: the Teutonic knights are unstoppable. Or as the Russian soldier says in the very next shot, “Now a sword is powerless against them!” Repetition – intra-shot and inter-shot – is the visual activation of that idea.

A different use of repeated forms is found in a single, unfolding shot in Blowup. The disdain that the photographer Thomas (David Hemmings) has for women, particularly for the fashion models he works with, comes to light early in the film. As the photographer enters his studio to contemplate how he will execute the fashion shoot he faces, he looks up and sees the models he will work with that day in an upstairs room, obscured by a plastic window. In a sly comment on their spatial arrangement, he tells his assistant Reg (Reg Wilkins) to “get the birds down,” the first indication of his distaste for them. See Critical Commons, “Internal Rhythm: Blowup, Repeated Forms, Plastic Rhythm.”⁷¹ As he enters the white box studio where they will shoot, there are a number of tinted glass panels standing in the space, arranged as a kind of “maze,” that will be used for props. These panels break the space into a number of overlapping “planes of density”: the more panels the camera looks through, the darker the space. Overlapping planes is a primary visual cue for human depth perception. But here, in the four-minute scene that follows, Antonioni will use the panels more as a playful element to ultimately flatten the composition in the scene to the point where the women’s bodies read almost like cut out “paper dolls.”

The opening shot has Thomas placed so that he is visible through an open slot between the “density planes.” He removes his shoes and walks through the maze of intersecting planes which render rectangular sections of his body into picture-like, graphic units of varying density, until he finally arrives at the same opening space where we can see half of his body unobstructed. The fashion shoot continues, and as Antonioni moves the camera through different set ups, the models, who are all dressed in weird, “mod” outfits, are either flattened or reflected by the dark glass. Thomas clearly loathes the process and the models. He barks orders, “No chewing gum! Get rid of it!” He treats the models as peons, and in the ultimate demonstration of unprofessionalism, he steps onto the set and places a model’s leg it where he wants it. A high angle pan shot shows the configuration of models in various stages of striking poses, and the muted palette of their outfits only adds to the mélange of rectangles and reflections flattened and spread across the white surface of the cove studio. Wide shots give some sense of the larger composition the photographer is trying to achieve: the models’ angular postures and monochromatic clothing are framed and reframed by the overlapping, angular grid of varying density glass.

The scene culminates in a tracking shot that reveals the models almost as colorful “bird specimens” laid out on glass slides for a microscope (Figure 8.16). Here, Antonioni organizes the repeated form of the tinted glass panels, and he carefully places the models so they are “cut” in half lengthwise by the panels’ edges, generating a controlled, inventive, plastic composition that is stunning and linked to the theme of the film. As Peter Brunette has pointed out, Blowup is about male artistic perception since virtually all of Antonioni’s films

Here Antonioni fragments the scene visually to underline photography’s ability to “flatten” and objectify its subjects, and in a larger sense, the power of plastic rhythm to energize a scene.

External Rhythm: Modification by Transitions

As we noted above, Herbert Zettl’s concept of tertiary motion (external rhythm or “sequence motion”) includes the length of shots and the rhythm induced by transition devices. Cuts are instantaneous and “invisible” changes that do not occupy screen time, and we looked at the simple acceleration of external rhythm by rapid cutting above in films like Mad Mad: Fury Road and Raging Bull. Other things being equal, the cutting rhythm of sequence, chiefly determined by how slowly or quickly cuts follow one another, can be modified by adding transition devices that have their own screen duration, such as dissolves, fades, wipes and irises. The general rule is clear: the longer the transition, the slower the external rhythm of a given sequence. And in contrast to the use of the cut as part of the “invisible” system of continuity editing, transitions like the wipe are overt and “style conscious.” They have their own screen duration and method of construction, which gives them their own unique screen presence. When a filmmaker uses a transition device like the wipe, the indexical relation of the camera to the profilmic material is tossed aside. “In such cases, the camera detaches itself from the object and projects its own technique onto the screen. Such efforts are the most specific subjective lyrical manifestations and the director, in identifying himself with them, can place a subtle personal emphasis on certain features in the film.”⁷³ In short, the cut is “concealed” because it is instantaneous; every other transition is, by contrast, “unconcealed” and hence, a potential factor in sequence motion.

Christian Metz, in his seminal article, “ ‘Trucage’⁷⁴ and the Film,” details the ways in which the image track is more than shots, since it normally includes text like credits, title cards, “The End,” etc. as well as

Unlike the cut, where discrete spatial/temporal fragments or “shots” are presented linearly, with one shot completely replacing the shot before, visible shot transitions represent a divergence from the normal photographic image. A wipe or a dissolve is suprasegmental, literally “above, on top of” the segment, or more specifically “they refer to an image with which it is simultaneous,”⁷⁶ as Metz puts it. We will look at how the use of the “extradiegetic” transitions alters the external rhythm of a sequence next.

But before moving forward, it is worth mentioning the contribution of Christian Metz to film theory. Metz admired Jean Mitry’s work as “a powerful and at times glorious final to the first epoch of film theory,”⁷⁷ but he argued that it was time to develop precise theories of film that focus on specific topics. Metz proposed that Mitry’s encyclopedic work could become the road map for more narrow theorizing that tests the topics outlined in Mitry’s work. This scientific attitude towards film theory drove Metz to write extensively on small-scale questions that would reveal the practicalities of cinema, rather than its overarching nature. Metz followed in the tradition of Ferdinand de De Saussure (1857–1913) who first proposed semiology as the study of meaning making, the study of processes by which signs and conceptual objects create meaningful communication. Applying the concepts of semiology to film, Metz tried to uncover how film uses cinematic signs – conceptual objects that consists of signifier (the name of sign) and signified (the mental concept it triggers, the idea created) – to codify meaning. In essence, Metz used the methods of linguistics to explore the ways in which films “speak,” the ways in which cinema is like (and not like) a verbal language. In the ‘trucage’ article we will examine here, Metz explores how fades, dissolves and wipes, etc. function as taxemes, a minimum feature of grammar.⁷⁸ Later in his life, Metz came to the conclusion that his methods focused solely on the cinematic text with little consideration of the audience, so he began to integrate concepts from psychoanalysis into his work, to show how films are similar to dreams or hallucinations. Metz took his own life in 1993 at the age of 61.

External Rhythm: Dissolves

Because the magic lantern slide show was an influential screen practice that used dissolves as a transition device and guided the development of early motion pictures, the dissolve emerged very early as nearly an identical mechanism in the new medium of film. A dissolve is basically a “mix transition” where the gradual fading out of one shot and the simultaneous fading in of another produce a momentary overlap between the two images. Barry Salt has chronicled how the French film pioneer Georges Méliès used dissolves exclusively, “As soon as he began regularly making multi-shot films in 1899, he started putting a dissolve between every shot in his films, regardless of the temporal relation between the adjoining shots. And he continued to do this to the end of his filmmaking career.”⁷⁹ Salt points out that while later exhibitors frequently cut these dissolves out of Méliès prints to make them more consistent as editing conventions standardized, many prints retain traces of the dissolves that were not completely removed. The single dissolve remained a staple convention in the Hollywood feature, typically used (along the fade and the wipe) to indicate “ellipsis between shots, usually the end of one scene in the beginning of the next. The Hollywood rule was that a dissolve indicates a brief time lapse and a fade indicates a much longer one.”⁸⁰ Dmytryk adds that while “fades are now rarely used, except at the start and finish of the film. . . [and] if the story breaks down into markedly disassociated episodes, fades can still be useful, giving the viewer a brief pause to catch his breath and gather his senses for the incoming section.⁸¹ For example, in the film Effie Briest (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974) this strategy of segmentation is fully mined, as tightly confined vignettes are further separated by harsh fades to white.

A recent study by Cutting, Brunick and Delong analyzed 150 films to study the use of dissolves from 1935 to 2005. The quantitative study looked at transitions of all types including cuts, dissolves, fade ins, fade outs, wipes, and other transitions such as iris outs and ins, frame flips, opening doors, morphs. The study found that of the 170,000 transitions examined,

Sideways (Payne, 2008) is a good example of this slight uptick in the use of the dissolve, because it is a notable stylistic motif throughout. The film tells the adventures of Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti), a struggling writer and Jack Cole (Thomas Haden Church), an aging actor, who take a bachelor’s road trip to Santa Barbara wine country before Jack’s impending wedding. In this film, cluster dissolves are used throughout, part of a trend “at least partly attributable to digital (nonlinear) editing, [for] the Hollywood montage to re-establish itself as an important storytelling device.”⁸³ Undoubtedly, digital editing makes it much faster and cheaper to experiment with how images “mix” against each other than was possible when editing film, which required the film lab to create the effect in an optical printer.

Sideways’ use of serial dissolves conforms with a few of the uses that are identified by Cutting et al. to depict: “(a) travel; (b) large and small scale temporal transition; (c) the early setup of a film; (d) altered mental states; and (e) celebrations of various kinds.”⁸⁴ The authors argue that (a) and (b) are more likely to be found in earlier classical works, but that the remaining three are found in more often in contemporary work since “setups, altered states, and celebrations present collages of images that, by running together across a series of dissolves, create mood and atmosphere in a way that cannot be achieved through simple juxtaposition of shots through cuts.”⁸⁵ In Sideways, there are sequences of dissolving California landscapes where the duo’s car is shown travelling through rolling vineyards. These interludes are used to characterize the area as idyllic and romantic, as well as a space for voice over dialogue to advance the narrative.

In an early scene at a restaurant, Miles and Jack take two available women – Maya Randal (Virginia Madsen) and Stephanie (Sandra Oh) – on a double date. Jack is hoping for one last fling before he gets married but claims the dinner is to celebrate the publication of Miles’ new book (which, in fact, he has yet to receive a contract for). See Critical Commons, “External Rhythm: Sideways, Cluster or Serial Dissolves.”⁸⁶ In this two minute sequence, Payne uses over 25 relatively long dissolves (interspersed with a few cuts) to create a “soft focus,” romantic “wash” of one image over the next. Here the dissolves lend a slow, dreamy visual pattern to the warm table conversation, which centers on expensive wines, each of which is given its close up during the montage. Many of these dissolves blend close shots of the reflective surfaces of wine glasses or wine bottles with close ups of the four diners in warm, rose colored lighting. The initial effect is leisurely, tender and amorous, which sets up a shift later in the sequence for Miles, the insecure writer, to start obsessing about his ex-wife’s recent marriage. As Miles begins to get tipsy, glances and slight gestures indicate that his dinner companions are worried about him. An incessant telephone ringing sneaks in under the dreamy jazz instrumental, and the sequence abandons the slow dissolves for short, flash-forward cuts to Miles dialing a payphone. The shift in tertiary rhythm is blunt, as the quick cuts move the sequence from romantic to anxious. Miles cannot live in the moment and connect with the woman he is with; instead, he has to leave the table to call his ex-wife and confront her about her new husband.

Later in the film, two scenes using dissolves provide a contrasting thematic use of external rhythm. See Critical Commons, “External Rhythm: Sideways, Two Dissolves.”⁸⁷ The first scene is set in an emergency room waiting area, a place where time seems to naturally slow to a crawl. Jack has been beaten up by Stephanie for not disclosing that he is getting married, and as Miles waits for his friend, he calls Maya to clear up an argument they have had. It is an emotional low point in the film for Miles, as he admits to Maya in a voice mail that his book will not be published, and that “I am not much of a writer, I am not much of anything.” Here a “held dissolve” lasts:20 seconds, as a close shot of Miles on the phone is mixed with a wider shot of the same action – then held as a superimposition – before dissolving through to the wide shot (Figure 8.17). The external rhythm here literally slows to a crawl, to emphasize Miles’ moment of listless despair. Much like a sectional analytical montage, Payne temporarily arrests the progression of events with the “held dissolve” to carefully point out the significance of this moment. But rather than cutting to a series of successive shots to crystallize the moment, here the editor chooses the simultaneous presentation of the same event in shots of different scope, an unusual, but effective choice. The sequence ends with a long dissolve that returns Miles to the hospital waiting room, back to the place where time is still suspended, and Jack emerges in the distance with new stitches.

A second voice mail – this time left by Maya for Miles – sets up the film’s ending. Miles returns to his apartment from another day of teaching to find a message from Maya. She is conciliatory telling him sweetly that she loved his book manuscript. As the camera pushes slowly in, Miles sits down to take it all in. Maya says, “Who cares if it’s not getting published? There are so many beautiful and painful things about it.” As the wide shot slowly dissolves in closer – a reversal of the earlier pay phone sequence – she asks a pointed question about whether or not the father in the novel committed suicide, a reference to the fact Miles considered suicide. As Miles contemplates this, his close up begins a long dissolve to windshield wipers and a subjective shot of a car rolling down the highway. Here, the transition is a:04 second dissolve, so the external rhythm of the transition is slow, but not suspended as in the “held dissolve.” Yet the internal rhythm of the incoming shot is much more active, given the subjective forward motion from the car and the wiper blades visually marking an andante or “walking tempo” – of roughly 75 beats per minute. The slow transition creates a moment of curious dissonance: where is the film going? As the transition resolves into a rain-washed highway, Maya (still in “voice mail”) shifts the talk to onset of winter, offers to meet him if he gets up to wine country again, and tells him not to give up writing. The film closes with three poignant shots: Miles climbs the stairs to Maya’s apartment in a long shot, his hand knocks on her door in close up, and after a beat, the film cuts to black, the final dramatic thread neatly tied off.

Finally, as Cutting et al. note, the dissolve is often used to show altered mental states. In Grand Prix (Frankenheimer, 1966) the mental fog of Scott Stoddard (Brian Bedford), brought on by his use of painkillers, is shown in a series of long dissolves that depict the driver in his cockpit with other racecars swirling around his car. As the sequence progresses, repeated shots of racecars in a variety of scales following a variety of motion vectors creates a swirling plastic rhythm that visualizes the driver’s mental agitation. Rather than the warm romance of a wine dinner in Sideways, the dissolve here creates visual chaos, the sensation that “bees are buzzing” in the head of the Scott Stoddard as he struggles to keep his car under control on the racecourse. The sequence ends with a contrasting series of hard, graphic matches of racecars to bring the viewer back to the reality of the dangers of the racecourse. See Critical Commons, “Graphic Edits: Grand Prix, Super and Cut on Form.”⁸⁸

External Rhythm: Fades

Like the dissolve, the fade has a long history tied to magic lantern shows and emerged early in motion picture history. Early cameramen would create fades manually, in-camera, by stopping down the iris while they continued to hand-crank the film at a more or less continuous speed. The fade is a “mix transition” using black as one source: it produces the gradual appearance of an image from black or disappearance of an image to black. Not surprisingly, the fade-in marks beginnings, and the fade-out marks endings, like the raising and lowering of the curtain in theatre. In that way, a fade is more an indicator of duration, rather than a true transition from one shot (or spatio-temporal fragment) to another shot (spatio-temporal fragment). In that way, it is a unique and useful tool for narrative clarity where the filmmaker wants to clearly delineate one sequence from the next. As Christian Metz argues, the fade out is like a title card in the silent film because in both cases, the image track offers no photographic image. With title cards, the image track offers only written text, and in the fade out, even less:

An abiding interest in the dramatic use of the fade is found in work of the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski. His early documentary, I Was a Soldier (1970) ended each of seven interviews with blind soldiers from World War II with a fade to white, but concluded the film with a fade to black to emphasize their disability. Other films like The Double Life of Veronique (Kieślowski, 1990), Three Colours: White (Kieślowski, 1994) also employ the fade as a way to segment or suspend the film’s forward motion. In Three Colours:Blue (Kieślowski, 1993), the first part of a trilogy inspired by the ideals of the French revolution, the fade is used as a sustained motif to help portray “a protagonist typical of art cinema: alienated, sensitive, with psychological problems and observed during an existential crisis. Like other great art cinema auteurs, Kieślowski is preoccupied with the exploration of the protagonist mind.”⁹⁰ In the film, Julie (Juliette Binoche) recovers physically and mentally from a car wreck in which her husband, a composer, and her daughter were killed. She isolates herself in grief, and tries to cope with memories of her husband. The surprising discovery that her husband was having an affair, brings acceptance and an upward turn in her recovery.

As Julie negotiates her new life, Kieślowski fashions an inspired use of the fade to visualize how her husband’s death is moving her towards spiritual transformation. At four points in the film, Kieślowski stops the scene to replay audio of a dramatic, unfinished concerto that her husband was composing when he died. The last occurrence of this interruption – when Julie learns from her friend Oliver (Benoît Régent) about her husband’s mistress – is worth examining in detail. See Critical Commons, “External Rhythm: Three Colors: Blue, Fade out/in Suspends the Narrative.”⁹¹

In a mundane conversation with Oliver, Julie learns that her deceased husband had been having an affair for several years with a woman who lives near Montparnasse. When Oliver asks her what she wants to do about it, her husband’s concerto (once again) unexpectedly resounds in track as Julie opens her eyes, as if the attack of the music startles her awake. “The music of her husband suddenly returns in the moments when it is least expected. The recurring motif is not accidental. It is the word ‘love’ transformed into a few musical strains.”⁹² Two seconds later, the picture begins a slow fade out, and Kieślowski arrests any forward movement of the dialogue, with a hold in black for:11 seconds, roughly the duration needed for the motif to be played again by a single oboe. The music and blackout suspend us in the moment, and hold us there for what feels like a very long span of empty, black screen. At the same time, Oliver’s question hangs in the air, suspended as spiritual confusion rushes over her: “What does she want to do?” As the music trails off, the shot fades back in, resuming just where it left off. Her repressed grief is past, but it is transformative: Julie turns decisively to answer directly, “Meet her.” The scene holds a couple of beats, then cuts to Julie running up some stairs, now energized as she begins to move beyond uncertainty. Here, the external, tertiary rhythm – including the non-diegetic music – overrides the limited primary motion of their ordinary conversation completely, and we feel the power of Julie’s loss to suspend their interaction, and ultimately to alter her negative, downward trajectory of grief and isolation. The fade here “conveys the living from the outside world into the world of the dead. The effect is stunning in its spiritual uncertainty, especially given that these fade outs disrupt mundane scenes. . . [These everyday scenes] become significant only as these fragments of reality which lead to the reconsideration of such issues as memory, death, love and compassion.”⁹³ By the end of the film, these powerful, suspended moments lead Julie to a new perspective based on love.

Wayne’s World spoofs the conventional use of the fade out to finalize the ending of film when Wayne and Garth, sitting in their basement studio, reappear near the completion of the final credit roll. See Critical Commons, “External Rhythm: Wayne’s World, Spoof the Fade Out.”⁹⁴ They leaf through magazines as if in a waiting room, and Garth says, “I don’t think anyone is going to tell us when to leave.” Wayne replies, “Yeah, good call Garth. I guess we’re going to just sit here until they fade to black.” When the film finally fades out, Wayne says, “I told ya.” This comedic use of the fade is part of a tradition that uses fades, irises, etc. in classic Hollywood comedy. We will turn next to this comedic tradition in the Laurel and Hardy film, Thicker Than Water (James W. Horne, 1935) as a technique to “break the fourth wall”.

External Rhythm: Wipe

The wipe is a transition where the incoming shot moves across the screen to replace the outgoing shot, an overtly graphic transition that acknowledges the film image’s two-dimensional representation of space. The transition appears early in film history, at least as early as the pioneering comedic trick film, “Mary Jane’s Mishap” (George Albert Smith, 1903). In classical Hollywood films, wipes replace the more mundane dissolve with a graphic, visually imaginative way for an editor to transition between two different times and places. Or if the aim of a scene is to present action in a traditional split screen – left half, shot A, right half, shot B – the wipe can transition the film into and out of the split screen, regardless of how long we want to remain in the split screen between those two points. In that way it becomes a “held wipe,” like the “held dissolve” discussed above. Given its overtness, the wipe is a technique used less frequently than the dissolve or fade: as we noted above, for transitions that are not cuts only 5% are wipes.

Like the spoof of the fade from Wayne’s World, Thicker Than Water (Horne, 1935) a Laurel and Hardy comedy uses the wipe as a technique to “break the fourth wall” by bringing attention to the filmic conventions that ordinarily require the audience to suspend their disbelief. See Critical Commons, “External Rhythm: Thicker Than Water, Humorous Wipe Sequence.”⁹⁵ At three points in the story, Laurel and Hardy interact with the borders of the film frame in Thicker Than Water, literally “dragging” the wipe border and incoming shot across the frame in order to change the scene or bring on the closing credits. This is graphication in Zettl’s terminology, where “the three-dimensional lens generated screen image is deliberately rendered in a two-dimensional graphic, picture like format.”⁹⁶ In contemporary television, graphication appears as superimposed titles, or “picture in picture” as two interviewees are shown adjacent to each other in what Zettl calls “second order space.” In this instance, the graphication of the incoming shot is made more apparent because the incoming shot appears almost like a large photograph being dragged across the profilmic space. Clearly, a cut would be a faster transition and a dissolve a more traditional one, but here the timing of the wipe is driven by the primary motion of the scene: in the two scenes where Oliver Hardy drags the wipe through the scene (Figure 8.18), the pace is leisurely and the joke dawns over the duration of his walk while Stan Laurel’s is more frantic as he rushes Hardy to the hospital. Here, breaking this fourth wall is a funny, technical, visual gag, and it is part of a longstanding Hollywood strategy, particularly in animation and special effects films, to keep cinema a “perpetual novelty.”

Notice too that wipes are often used in intertextual films where the source material is a graphic form like the comic book or illustrated fairytale. Used this way, the wipe mimics design elements that are extradigetic in the source material – the page turn of a fairy tale book, the page composition of comic book that uses a split panel or overlapping images. A typical use of a wipe in an intertextual film is found in the Columbia Pictures serial Superman (Carr, 1948). In “Man of Steel,” episode four, Lois Lane (Noel Darleen Neill) is captured and taken blindfolded to the headquarters of Spider Lady “mysterious queen of the underworld.” See Critical Commons, “Superman Wipe.”⁹⁷ Lois is a reporter who knows too much, Spider Lady has her henchmen place her, still blindfolded, next to the magnetic/ electric cobweb. As Lois begins to fry in the web, the film wipes in the manner of a “clock hand tick ing” to the next shot of Clark Kent (Kirk Alyn) and cub reporter Jimmy Olsen (Tommy Bond) driving in a car unaware of the danger that Lois is in. This round wipe is more apparent because its circular movement maps the graphic shape of the Spider Lady’s web, a dynamic representation of time passing that energizes the transition much more than a straight cut would. Harry Benshoff argues that the wipe, like the dissolve, signifies a change of time and place, but that

The wipe, despite its value as a transition for graphication or intertexuality, remains relatively rare: in the Cutting et al. study, the dissolve was used almost 14 times as often as the wipe. And yet, some directors have come to relish the wipe. Akira Kurosawa, the famous Japanese filmmaker, routinely used the wipe throughout his career, even as it was becoming an anachronistic transition. Beginning with his first script for Bravo, Isshin Tasuke! – directed in 1945 by Kiyoshi Saeki – Kurosawa indicated a sequence of comic stances linked by wipes to introduce a character in the film. Sanshiro Sugata (Kurosawa, 1943), his directorial debut uses “Rapid but unemphatic wipes, in both horizontal and vertical directions, [which] either link actions within the scene or relate successive events.”⁹⁹ In later films like the highly acclaimed Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950) – a film that brought international awareness to Japanese cinema as the unexpected winner of the 1951 Venice Film Festival – the director “freely uses the wipe cut, a visual device common in many traditions of silent film but generally suppressed within the classical sound cinema and its codes of realism.”¹⁰⁰ An examination of Kurosawa’s uses of the wipe in Rashomon will reveal its impact on tertiary rhythm.

Rashomon is a mobile narrative that tells the story of a rape and murder in the woods from four points of view: a woodcutter, a bandit, a samurai’s wife and the ghost of the samurai who has been murdered. To complement the film’s sweeping, kinetic camera style, there are five standard wipes in Rashomon: four created by a vertical border moving from screen left to screen right and one moving in the other direction. See Critical Commons, “External Rhythm: Rashomon, The Wipe.”¹⁰¹ Two of these wipes are used as transitions for shots of a character running, and they clearly increase external rhythm. Early in the film when the woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) finds the dead body, he flees in horror. Kurosawa cuts to three rapid pan shots taken with a long lens, framing each tighter as the woodcutter runs through the underbrush. The three pan shots are all roughly:03 seconds long. The series ends with a wipe that continues the motion vector (left to right) of the woodcutter’s scramble through the brush, before resolving into a fixed medium shot of the woodcutter testifying as he kneels to face his inquisitor in a prison yard (Figure 8.19).

In Noël Burch’s scheme, this is a “Temporal Ellipsis, Spatially Discontinuous Radical” change that, if made with a cut, would be unexceptional. But in this instance, the wipe edge follows behind the runner leading to the incoming shot, matching the primary motion in direction and speed. Similarly, when the bandit (Toshiro Mifune) later lures the samurai (Masayuki Mori) into the woods and ties him up, Kurosawa uses the left to right wipe to overtake the runner as the bandit pulls up from his run to turn and laugh at the samurai he is leaving behind. In both instances, since the primary motion is a rapid, energetic run of the character from left to right as the camera pans to keep them framed, the wipe as a transition becomes a kind of “force magnifier” – like a lever is a force magnifier – to increase the tertiary motion beyond what a simple cut could achieve. Accenting a running character with a wipe is part of the kinetic style Kurosawa brings to forest settings in Rashomon, drawing on a wide range of camera positions and camera movements, extreme fluctuations in shot scales, and impressionistic elements like shots of sunlight slashing through the tree branches.

The remaining three wipes in Rashomon are simple transitions from static shot to static shot, although one of the shots tilts down to the samurai’s wife (Machiko Kyō) after the wipe is complete. Unlike the running shots that seem to naturally suggest the use of the left to right wipe, the use of the wipe in these static shots seems a less intuitive transition, more an anachronistic device. Kurosawa acknowledged his connection to silent films when he said, “I like silent pictures and I always have. They are often so much more beautiful than sound pictures are. Perhaps they had to be. At any rate, I wanted to restore some of this beauty [in Rashomon].”¹⁰² Donald Richie goes further, suggesting “The [wipe] is relatively uncommon in modern cinema and yet is so consistently used by Kurosawa that it seems to have a definite meaning for him. Perhaps it is its finality that appeals, this single stroke canceling all that went before, questioning it, at the same time bringing in the new.”¹⁰³ Richie’s reading of the wipe’s significance is a better fit with the testimony in the prison yard: as one witness concludes, the “page is turned,” ceding a “clean slate” to the next witness.

A mere two years later in Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952), Kurosawa again deploys the wipe in a humorous sequence where a group of women hoping to drain a cesspool in their neighborhood are given the runaround by bureaucrat, after bureaucrat, after bureaucrat. Here, a series of 16 wipes function as a humorous “accented narrative connective to designate ongoing events.”¹⁰⁴ Kurosawa is more ruthless with the shot length in the opening of the sequence, and the ability of the wipe to augment the tertiary motion in the sequence is initially more apparent. Later, as the dialogue dominates, the wipes seem to be used more as a matter of humorous consistency within the sequence, which ends as the complaint rises up the bureaucratic ladder to the Ward Representative, the Deputy Mayor, and then back down to newly established Department of Public Affairs. See Critical Commons, “External Rhythm: Ikiru, Humorous Wipe Sequence.”¹⁰⁵

As we have seen, wipes are often used as graphic transitions that draw on visual elements from within the outgoing shot to transition to the next shot in ways that map the incoming shot onto the outgoing shot. In the Laurel and Hardy movie above, that transition can be somewhat broadly executed – the incoming shot is dragged across the screen. In more contemporary films, that “mapping” can become very precise, adding creative complexity to the spatio-temporal relationship from outgoing to incoming shot. Highlander (Mulcahy, 1986) brought the MTV aesthetic of the 1980s to the “sword and sorcery” genre, and launched a franchise that produced five sequels and a television series. The film tells the story of a climactic battle between timeless warriors, and knits present day action and battles in the sixteenth-century Scottish highlands by following the character Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert). MacLeod, one of a group of immortal swordsmen, is living now as an antiques dealer in New York City under the alias Russell Nash. After a sword battle in a parking garage, Nash returns to his apartment. He looks at a book by Brenda Wyatt (Roxanne Hart), one of the detectives investigating the attack in the garage. He thinks back to the Scottish highlands, many centuries earlier, when his mentor Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez (Sean Connery) first taught him to fight with a sword. See Critical Commons, “External Rhythm: Highlander, Spatially Integrated Wipe.”¹⁰⁶ The camera moves past Nash, sharpening one of his blades, as he recalls one of Ramírez’s adages: “Sometimes, MacLeod, the sharpest blade is not enough.” As the camera tightens and tilts upward to an aquarium located behind him, a rippling edge of water maps the incoming shot onto the aquarium in an “spatially integrated wipe.” As a result, the camera appears to rise from present day apartment/aquarium space into an ancient Scottish loch (Figure 8.20), where we find Ramírez training MacLeod to balance by standing in a boat. It’s a flashy transition, and the rhythm of the wave line passing across the screen enlivens the moment with its own energy, capitalizing on the matched camera moves in each shot in a way that the “lazy tranquility” of a simple dissolve could not. The overt quality of the wipe is nowhere more apparent than here, because the wave line – the line of the wipe itself – coupled with contrasting colors – the warm, yellow “underwater” of the aquarium and the cold blue surface of the loch – creates a moment of cognitive dissonance with its spatial ambiguity. In the outgoing space, the viewer is “outside” the aquarium looking in, and when the incoming space “resolves,” we are on the surface of a loch, but for the duration that the wipe crosses the screen, we are simultaneously in both spaces: outside the aquarium and rising up from underwater at the loch.

External Rhythm: The Iris

Around 1913, the “iris-in,” a new kind of transition first appeared in motion pictures. The “iris-in” masks the outgoing shot off into a circle (typically, though diamonds, triangles and rectangles are possible) that decreases in size until the entire frame is black. If the incoming shot reverses the process to bring the incoming image from black to full screen, the transition is called “iris-in/iris-out.” Between 1914 and 1919, D. W. Griffith used the technique extensively, and given his stature as a director at the time, is credited with popularizing the technique throughout the industry. Barry Salt notes that, throughout this period, Griffith’s cameraman, Billy Bitzer, continued to use a Pathé camera, which did not have a shutter capable of in-camera fades, and so the in-camera, iris-in/iris-out remained a common method for their transitions between scenes.¹⁰⁷ The iris transition typically moved to or from the center of the frame, but came to be used as a way to focus the viewer’s attention on an area of the screen at the beginning or end of the effect, by positioning the iris mechanism so that the circle would move to or from the point of interest before the camera. So, for example, the iris might close in on the principal actor’s face, and hold there for a beat before closing the rest of the way to black. By modifying the composition in a single shot, the “isolation effect” of this type of iris-in is similar to a zoom in, except without the magnification of the image.

The Artist (Hazanavicius, 2011) is a French film that mimics the style of silent films with a range of aesthetic choices including the use of title cards, vignettes, black and white cinematography, wipes and iris transitions. The film tells the story of an aging silent film star, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) who struggles to make the transition to the new era of talkies, while watching the rise of a new, young female lead Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo). The film was nominated for 10 Academy awards and won five, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Dujardin. Hazanavicius uses the iris eight times as a stylistic device to create a range of effects in the film. See Critical Commons, “External Rhythm: The Artist, Iris Transition and Circular Motif.”¹⁰⁸

After a title card announces “1923,” the opening iris-out not only launches the narrative, it also functions as a match on form, match on position to George Valentin’s mouth, screaming in melodramatic agony as he is strapped in a chair and tortured by arcing, electrical current striking his head. Here, the device serves as an early stylistic flourish, a poetic embellishment to launch the silent film aesthetic that will permeate the film.

Later, as Valentin leaves his dressing room on the studio lot with his dog, the camera tilts down to a photograph of the screen idols that Valentin has autographed with “Woof!” and a dog print (Figure 8.21). The iris-in that closes the scene slows the external rhythm as the scene draws to close: the closing black circle imparts its leisurely duration as the shot deliberately resolves into black. It also lends a timeless, romantic quality to this vintage 1920s icon of stardom. The incoming shot continues that notion by fading in on “the sky,” which a pan reveals to be a piece of painted scenery on the studio lot, a further suggestion that the Hollywood “dream factory” is more about surface than substance.

Valentin refuses to admit that the silent era is ending, and risks his entire fortune on one last silent picture that he will direct and star in. When the picture is complete, he chooses October 25 for the film’s premier, only to discover that Peppy Miller’s new talking picture will debut the same day. Here, a soft-edged circular vignette is held as the camera tilts up to the date on the poster, emphasizing Valentin’s feeling of dread when he discovers the same release date on Peppy’s film poster. The circular form mimics a kind of “tunnel vision” that represents Valentin’s acute visual focus on their impending box office showdown. A similar soft-edge vignette is used as Peppy, who has come to the hospital to nurse the despondent Valentin back to health, looks back nostalgically on a reel of film from an early dance number they performed together. A circular wipe ends the iris/circular motif in the film, as Peppy heads off to work shooting a new picture at the studio, while Valentin recuperates in bed, trapped in the monotonous luxury of her Hollywood mansion.

Like the fade, Metz argues that the iris-in has a dual nature:

In other words, the iris-in is a “circle becoming smaller,” a transition that introduces a “black halo,” while at the same time creating a moment of black in the image track that is a nonphotographic marker distinguishing one scene from another. The iris-in The Artist does all this and more. It serves as a “black halo” that slows external rhythm as the film transitions between scenes. Like the fade, it marks a non-photographic break between scenes. And stylistically, it openly “quotes” from silent films as part of a larger strategy to ingrain a distinctive period feeling within the piece.

Graphic Relations in Editing

As noted earlier, one of the most basic aspects of continuity cutting is that shots made in color have to match in overall exposure level and color balance, otherwise they cannot intercut seamlessly. Anyone who has struggled to edit the footage of beginning cinematographers learns how frequently this foundational principle is ignored. Or to think of it another way, one of the primary responsibilities of the cinematographer is maintaining consistency within a scene: shots that will be cut together have to be in a range of brightness and color values so that they can – with the help of color correction at the end of the editing process – be seamlessly cut together. So, for example, when the cinematographer brings large scale lighting to an outdoor setting – 24k HMI fixtures with tremendous daylight balanced output – one goal is to ensure that there is consistency in brightness and color balance available to create footage that has consistent “daylight,” as the sun’s direction and intensity changes over the course of a day’s shooting. As Bordwell and Thompson put it, “The director will usually strive to keep the main point of interest roughly constant across the cut, to maintain the overall lighting level, and to avoid strong color clashes from shot to shot.”¹⁰⁹ Graphic concerns, as we noted above, will always remain in a continuity editing system where spatial and temporal concerns tend to dominate our notion of the “match cut.”

Beyond the concern for technical consistency, Bordwell and Thompson point out that the formal elements of any shot offer an immense range of possibilities to emphasize the graphic relations between shots:

Further, they note that the primary possibilities for editors to take advantage of are “graphic matches” and “graphic clashes.” See Critical Commons, “Graphic Edit: The Birds, Graphic Contrast.”¹¹¹ In their very useful analysis of the scene from The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963) where Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) sees a gas pump explode, Bordwell and Thompson give complete explication of how the graphic clashes are created from shot-to-shot by contrasting Melanie’s static index vector with the dynamic motion vector of the flames spreading across the gasoline flowing down the street.¹¹² We will focus more on graphic matches¹¹³ here, since they activate some of the most memorable and justifiably famous cuts in the history of film.

First, we should note that the word “match” is used in many different ways in reference to editing, but the concept of “graphic match” carries two notions: “cut-on-form” and “cut-on-position.” A cut-on-form matches the shape or shapes prominent in the outgoing shot with those of the incoming shot. Notice that, at some level, all match cuts are cuts-on-form, since when we cut from a wide shot of someone pointing a gun to closer shot of that action, the form of the gun repeats in both shots. However, the term “cut-on-form’ is usually used in reference to cuts that stand out as exceptional for a higher degree of equivalence (and frequently, metaphoric expressivity) than the garden variety “match cut.” Often, these exceptional graphic matches also “cut-on-position.” To cut-on-position means to map the location of a point of visual interest in the outgoing shot (i.e., that point’s x,y coordinates if we consider the screen in Cartesian terms) to that same location on the incoming shot. To describe the effect of a cut-on-position on the viewer, we commonly use the term “eye-trace” or “eye-guiding,” since the edit leads the viewer to look in a particular place across a cut or other transition.

The ingenious film pioneer Buster Keaton used the graphic match to great effect in his film comedy Sherlock Jr. (Keaton, 1924). See Critical Commons, “Graphic Edits: Sherlock Jr., Cut on Form and Position.”¹¹⁴ In the film, Keaton falls asleep at his job as a projectionist and dreams he “enters” a film playing in the auditorium below. Once he is “inside” the filmic space projected on the screen, he moves through a number of scenes that change suddenly, creating gags where he nearly falls off a cliff, dives in to a snow bank, etc. Through careful cinematography and staging, Keaton is photographed so that he is in the same position on the last frame of the outgoing shot and the first frame of the incoming shot; thus, while his foreground action is closely matched, a new camera set up ensures that the background scenery changes completely. In essence, the footage was staged and shot to allow seamless cutting of the foreground only: a “cut-on-form” – that is, Keaton’s body, performing the same action at the same image scale in the footage – and “cut-on-position” – that is, Keaton arranged in exactly the same place in the frame – for each different scene. As the shot changes, the viewer reads Keaton’s foreground action as continuous – matched action so cleverly done that it is “invisible” – while the background is discontinuous, changing instantaneously as if by magic. It is as if time and space in the foreground is unhooked from the changing background. In The figure in film, N. Roy Clifton identifies this edit as the cinematic equivalent of anadiplosis, a rhetorical figure in which the last word of a line is carried over in the next line, as in these lines from Richard III: “My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain.” Clifton calls this cinematic figure of style the carry over dissolve (though in Keaton’s film, it is a cut).¹¹⁵ In Sherlock Jr., Keaton painstakingly creates an inventive sequence of pratfalls that “plays with” the film medium itself by constructing what must be one of the purest examples of graphic editing in film.

A more modern, less rigorous use of graphic editing is found in “Love for Sale,” a Talking Heads music video embedded in their cult feature film, True Stories (Byrne, 1986). The song does not do much to advance the film’s loose narrative; rather, it is a contained segment within the film to simply parody the camera and editing styles of television advertising. In the film, Miss Rollings (Swoosie Kurtz), a character who never leaves her bed, flips the channel to find the Talking Heads video “Love for Sale” playing, and is immediately captivated by the band. The song, which pokes fun at how television advertising mixes ideas of romance, desire, arousal and commerce, is summed up by the verse “Push my button. . . The toast pops up, Love and money, Gettin’ all mixed up.”¹¹⁶

The video intercuts actual television ads with footage of the band that mimics the staging and cinematic style of the ads. Specifically, the video stages the band members in shots that foreground the use of abstract motion vectors, slow motion photography, high key lighting and the reflective glitz of food styling in television spots. The video is rich with graphic matches. For example, founding member and bass player Tina Weymouth, dressed entirely in bright red, is staged and photographed to graphically match two shots of an airliner moving right to left across the screen. The three-shot sequence shows a Pan Am jumbo jet entering frame right, which cut, on-form and (precisely) on-position to a full body shot of Weymouth standing erect but rotated 90° to match the plane’s movement, followed by a cut that is less precisely on-form and on-position to another airliner, a Purolator Courier plane with red lettering following the same motion vector. Later, an extreme close up of a lipstick, centered in frame and rotating as it extends from its case is followed by a shot of the red-clad Weymouth, centered in frame and rotating the same direction, a graphic match again carried by similarities in form, position and action.

Stylized, slow-motion food photography is parodied also in a sequence that uses two existing ad shots of cookies being slowly broken in half to feature their soft interiors. The existing shots are extreme close ups featuring fingers gripping and breaking the cookies apart. These shots are matched with animated hands holding the band members – lip syncing the song – as they are separated, with their animated movement matching the existing shots less on form than on-position and motion vector. More shots of round cookies dipped in milk and broken apart follow, and the video concludes with a slow-motion sequence where the band members mimic the languid descent of peanuts into a vat of milk chocolate. Throughout, the absurdity of the band’s antics mocks the way in which television ads use stylized cinematic techniques to create a surface of fabricated desire, without any real attempt to create significant, metaphorical linkages across the graphic edit. At under four minutes, it is a quirky, upbeat, visual exposé of the genre, laying bare the methods by which television ads try to arouse and satiate the viewer. Made for the feature, the video was later recut and distributed on MTV without intercutting to Rollings lying in bed.

A more subtle use of graphic matching is found in Kurosawa’s adaptation of King Lear, the Shakespearean tragedy: Ran (Kurosawa, 1985). The film opens with a boar hunting expedition in ancient Japan, and Kurosawa establishes the Lear character – Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai) – as an aging warlord who has unified a large territory and fathered three sons. A critical part of the mise-en-scène is the triadic color scheme of the sons’ hitatare. Their vibrant red, blue and yellow hitatares are evenly spaced apart on the color wheel, conveying their distinctive personalities, while the father’s hitatare of white – the mixture of all colors – suggests the idea that he is the unifying source of the spectrum he has fathered. Throughout these opening scenes, the aging Ichimonji, with his white hair and robe, will be associated with pointed cuts to images of clouds. See Critical Commons, “Graphic Edits: Ran, Cut on Form and Position.”¹¹⁷

After killing a boar, the Lord and his guests enjoy a picnic, and Ichimonji drifts off to sleep in front of his three sons and his hunting guests, leaving them to withdraw so that he can nap. Ichimonji sleeps seated, slumped towards the left of the frame in a stable, centered triangular composition.

Kurosawa holds the shot for roughly:04 seconds (Figure 8.22), and then cuts to a shot of a towering white cumulus cloud for roughly the same duration (Figure 8.23). The incoming shot is a cut-on-form, since the cloud is roughly triangular, and arcs slightly to the left, mimicking the Lord’s slump. It is also a cut-on-position, since both are roughly centered and stably placed at the bottom of the frame. But within a mise-en-scène that has carefully articulated the color relationships between father and son, the connection of the two shots by use of the color white is what makes the graphic connection “read.” Kurosawa’s initial visual metaphor resonates: the sleeping king is both a towering eminence and an ominous sign of a potential storm brewing. Once established, this king/cloud metaphor works in subsequent iterations, even though those are not as “matched” as this combination is graphically.

A short time later, Ichimonji springs from his nap to find the hunting party. He recounts a disturbing dream he has had of walking in a desolate land, unable to find another soul. His three sons are concerned by his unusual behavior, and worry that he is either mad or becoming senile. Ichimonji orders the entire hunting party to assemble for an announcement he has to make. Kurosawa cuts again to the towering cumulus cloud, centered and roughly triangular, this time rising rapidly in the frame through time lapse, making a further graphic connection to the white clad Lord. Perhaps a storm is indeed brewing.

Ichimonji announces to the assembled hunters that he will cede his throne to his eldest son, and the fault lines among his sons and vassals erupt immediately. He becomes so enraged that he banishes his son and one of his advisers from his kingdom, and the scene ends as he turns his back on the group. With everyone facing away from the camera, Kurosawa again holds the shot – this time for:10 seconds – before cutting to a darker, rounded cloud centered at the bottom of the frame with rays of light emanating from it. Here, the centered, stable position of the cloud matches the centered stance of Ichimonji, while its form echoes the shape of the group, their backs flattened into a graphic mass by the telephoto lens. The triple iteration of King/cloud is graphic matching at its best: a visual metaphor that is evocative of the emotional arc of the scene.

Later in the film, Kurosawa creates another striking graphic match as Ichimonji searches the castle of his son Jíro (Jinpachi Nezu) for Lady Sué, (Yoshiko Miyazaki) a devout Buddhist and the most spiritual figure in the film. When the king opens the door to her residence, Kurosawa axially cuts into a close shot of a golden image of the Buddha hanging on her wall, and then to Sué nearby, standing on the castle wall chanting to the Buddha. The graphic match here is very strong, carried by the form, position and strong color match of the two images. Lady Sué is steadfast in her faith, even after Lord Ichimonji tells her, “Buddha is gone from this miserable world.”

While Kurosawa’s use of the graphic match often centers on color scheme, in more traditional Hollywood films, the graphic match is often more overt. In All that Jazz (Fosse, 1979) a series of cuts connects action, form and position to create a short burst of energy within an extended audition sequence that appears early in the film. Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), a Broadway producer, is under stress about a new show he is trying to open, and after his morning hit of eye drops and speed, he goes to an audition to whittle down a massive group of aspiring singer/dancers that show up in order to cast the show. This rhythmic scene, cut to jazz guitarist George Benson’s version of On Broadway, opens with high angle long shots showing long rows of dancers crammed onto a stage that will gradually empty as the scene progresses over the next 4:30. The shot selection in the scene is extensive and highly kinetic, and the editing of the scene modulates between dynamic dance movements and quieter moments where Gideon dismisses dancers who do not make the cut. See Critical Commons, “Graphic Edits: All that Jazz, Cut on Form, Position and Motion.”¹¹⁸

The scene begins to build as the cast is pared down to the most talented dancers who go through the dance routine with increasing precision. Groups of dancers leap through the frame in unified formations, followed by single dancers somersaulting high in the air or leaping into a mid-air split.

Fosse then launches into a quick cut sequence that fuses 11 rapid cuts of dancers executing jazz pirouettes, spotting directly towards the camera so that their eyes are fixed forward. The cuts are very short: the longest shot is 15 frames, where a dancer pirouettes through two revolutions, and the shortest shot is only eight frames, with an average shot length of just eleven frames. All the cuts maintain the spin of the body from shot to shot. If we imagine looking down at the camera set up from above, as if the dancer is at the center of a clock face, and the camera is at 6 o’clock, most of the cut points fall there – six in total – where the “spot” towards the camera is ending and the dancer’s head is beginning to turn (Figures 8.24 and 8.25). Three other cuts are made when the dancer is turned away from the camera at 12 o’clock, and two are made with the dancer spinning at the 3 o’clock position. The camera is not locked down, which suggests that perhaps this edit was not planned at the shooting stage, but only emerged in the edit. At any rate, because all the cuts are matched action, cut-on-form, cut-on-position, the effect is as if the dancers are fused into a single “spinning top,” a precise but anonymous “dancing machine” that electrifies the space before the camera. A similar effect is created in Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954) when Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), feeling insulted by the villagers who hide in their homes when the samurai arrive, sounds the alarm that the village is under attack, creating a panic. The other six samurai rush to protect the center of the village, and Kurosawa cuts together six, tightly framed telephoto pan shots of the samurai running from left to right atop a ridge. The shots are all under:01 second, with the longest 22 frames and the shortest 12 frames for an average shot length of 15 frames. The samurai lean into their runs, and the shots are highly kinetic, since the pan is swift and the grass rushing by in the foreground of each shot creates a soft focus blur. The rapid primary motion and short length of the six shots, rather than precise cuts-on-position, fuses the shots together much like the sequence from All that Jazz, suggesting both their bravery and their emergence into a unified fighting force. See Critical Commons, “Graphic Edits: Seven Samurai, Cut on Form and Position.”¹¹⁹

Overtly metaphorical uses of the graphic match have become some of the most famous edits in film history, well known exemplars of imaginative cutting to create meaning. Like Eisenstein’s juxtaposition of shots of Alexander Kerensky with shots of a mechanical peacock that mock his vanity (see Chapter 5, p. 158), these graphic edits carry clear metaphorical meaning through juxtaposition. But what is different in these metaphorical, graphic edits is that the interaction of the two shots juxtaposed centers around their pictorial qualities. For example, the famous shower sequence from Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) ends with a push in on the water rushing down the drain that dissolves to an extreme close up of the eye of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a woman running from a crime she committed by stealing money from her boss. See Critical Commons, “Graphic Edits: Psycho, Dissolve-on-form, Dissolve-on-position.”¹²⁰ Here, the dissolve suggests time is passing, the shower is still running, but more importantly that death has suspended time. The circular form of the drain is carefully centered over Marion’s eye so that the form and position matches are nearly perfect, and the darkest part of the drain shot lines up closely to Marion’s iris. In fact, to match the size of her eye more closely to the drain shot, a single frame of film was enlarged in the optical printer to create a closer match. In addition, this freeze frame is rotated in the printer so that the incoming shot is not a “kinetically dead” freeze, but has a bit of motion to it. The vortex in the drain rotates in one direction and her eye the opposite, as the optical move begins to “zoom out.” Beyond the metaphor of Marion’s life force draining from her, other writers claim larger issues at work. The dissolve to her eye signifies death, “an emblem of final hopelessness and corruption. . . Marion’s blood swirling into the black void of the tub drain ends the descent into darkness that began when she decided to make off with [another’s] cash.”¹²¹

Perhaps the most famous graphic cut of all is found in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968). The first 20 minutes of the film opens, without dialogue, on the African veldt millions of years ago, as a tribe of primitive ape/men interacts with a strange black monolith and discovers how to use bone tools. During a confrontation at a watering hole, the dominant ape/man, identified as “Moonwatcher” (Daniel Richter) in the credits, kills an ape/man from another tribe with a long femur bone. See Critical Commons, “Graphic Edits: 2001, Cut on Form and Position.”¹²² Kubrick cuts to a slow motion shot of Moonwatcher as he tosses his weapon high in the air. As the bone leaves the frame, Kubrick follows with two short, slow-motion close ups: one in which the bone continues its rise in the air, exiting the top of the frame, and a second shot in which the camera tilts up, following the bone (now spinning in the opposite direction) to the apex of its flight, and back again as it begins to fall back to earth. The famous cut that follows is to a futuristic space ship, “falling” though space in almost the same trajectory. At one level, this graphic cut is jarring pictorially, as the value of the background changes from light to dark, from the outgoing shot of the bone against blue sky to the incoming shot of the ship against the black, star-strewn void of space. Likewise, both the cut-on-action and the cut-on-position are imprecise matches: the bone rotates in the outgoing shot, the spaceship does not in the incoming shot, and the position of the two intersects only at the left tip of each (Figure 8.26).

Kubrick scholar Michel Ciment writes that “The bone cast into the air by the ape (now become a man) is transformed at the other extreme of civilization, by one of those abrupt ellipses characteristic of the director, into a spacecraft on its way to the moon.”¹²³. By the end of the film, Kubrick has continued this technological progression across millennia, culminating in the HAL 9000, a computer with a desire to serve humans, and ultimately to dominate them. This progression – launched by a remarkable edit – shows “the series of equations by which Kubrick makes ape equal to man, and man to machine, the better to undermine the complacency of his audience.”¹²⁴

Conclusion

Continuity editing is the “default mode” of editing, a system of cutting that renders the time and space taken from disparate shots as “continuous.” While spatial and temporal clarity tend to dominate in continuity editing, the change in rhythmic and graphic parameters form shot to shot will always remain potential areas for creative expression. Filmmakers who exploit filmic rhythm by shaping internal and external rhythm, who take advantage of the capacity of the latent graphic relations between shots, can move beyond spatial/temporal representation to transform their “aesthetic canvas” into a full expression of their underlying theme. This is a broad goal, but Karen Pearlman has specifically addressed the application of rhythm in editing in very practical terms:

The graphic potentials of editing are perhaps more elusive for the editor to uncover, unless they have been carefully crafted during production. But they are some of the most memorable, effective edits available because of their opportunity to challenge the viewer to visually connect two shots in ways that would have been missed had they not been juxtaposed.