Nonlinear Editing and Digital Technology I

Today we no longer speak of the coming technological revolution or how digital technology will transform sound, special effects, film and video editing. The revolution is here. Our concerns in this chapter are the issues of technological revolution in film and video and its potential for aesthetic evolution.

   THE TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

Film and video, the two most technology-dependent art forms of the twentieth century, have witnessed a profound acceleration in change, the shift from analog to digital-driven technology. The implications are enormous. In pre-production, computer software is available for pre-visualization of scenes. Color and design opportunities, in essence computer animation, deepens the predictability of the potential elements of an image. During production, nonlinear editing allows for rapid assemblies that provide feedback on the questions: Am I making the intended dramatic point in the scene? Digital cameras will replace film- and electronic-based videotape as the originating source of the image. The digitization process allows any part of the image to be withdrawn, an additional element to be added if necessary. In post-production, it is possible for the editor to consolidate in his role, sound editing, picture editing, sound mixing, special effects, and printing, at least if the release form is videotape. The editor could also write and input the music track using her nonlinear editing system! The degree of consolidation that is possible is probably not wise for one person to undertake, but the critical point is that the digital revolution makes it possible.

Digital opportunities include delivery systems (films simply will be beamed digitally over fiber optic lines to theatres, thus by-passing standard projection systems) and the interface between entertainment, education, and economics (they can meet on the Internet). Movies will be available on demand (satellite or phone line) and editing will occur between client and producer on the Internet rather than in an office in Los Angeles or New York. The means to produce quality visual stories will drop, democratizing the cost of production. Who will dominate this system, if anyone, remains to be seen. Web sites may become the Cannes Film Festival marketplaces of tomorrow. All this is possible because of the digital revolution.

   THE LIMITS OF TECHNOLOGY

The best place to begin is to state the obvious—that a computer-driven editing machine such as an Avid or Lightworks, no matter how sophisticated, cannot make the creative decision of where to cut and why. The decisions for continuity or dramatic emphasis are creative, if you wish aesthetic, choices. They are made by the editor or the editor or with the director or producer. The speed of computer-assisted editing will enable creative decisions to be arrived at more quickly than earlier editing technology, but it will not make the creative decisions. Here then lie a number of fallacies about nonlinear editing.

A second issue that devolves from the new technology is that it will yield new forms of storytelling, new levels of interactivity, and a more democratic relationship between storyteller (film- or videomaker) and audience. Although much progress has been made in video games, and on the compact disc entertainment and education fronts, for the most part that work to date has not been particularly interesting nor creative. It has been game-oriented and youth-oriented. This may change but the promise of interactivity has yet to be fulfilled.

On the other hand, just as the invention of the printing press did not necessarily lead to a proportional increase in writers, but rather to a spread in ancillary effects—secularization, rationality, democratization via communication, so the result of the digital revolution is the growth of the Internet and its impact on communication, democratization and, hopefully, rationality. These changes may or may not have an impact on storytelling.

On a more positive note, there is no question that nonlinear editing and digital technology will have positive impacts on the editing process and on the outcome of that process, the screen story. In technical terms, time is money and the speed of nonlinear systems should have a positive impact on post-production budgets. So too will the capacity for the editor to build up his own tracks and mix them down on his nonlinear systems. The capacity to work in a more complex way with sound and picture can only help the post-production process and budget. Digital technology also helps in the creation of special effects. The famous shots of Gary Sinise legless in the second half of Forrest Gump (1994) were produced in a digitized set of images reconstituted frame by frame to eliminate his legs from each frame. Equally possible today is the removal of any portion, small or large, of the image. This same technology can be used in film or sound restoration as well.

   THE AESTHETIC OPPORTUNITIES

To begin to understand the aesthetic opportunities of the nonlinear digital age, we should begin by stating that, to date, interactive technology has had a more profound impact on video games and on making available art and photographs for specific educational goals than upon mainstream film and video. Consequently, its impact has been relegated to special effects and animation. That is not to say that these special effects in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) or in Jurassic Park (1993) were not spectacular in aiding the dynamism and credibility of the story. What it does mean, however, is that those stories, Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park, remained conventional screen stories, neither challenging old forms nor old ideas. The special effects simply made the films more sensational for their audiences.

Are there aesthetic opportunities in the digital technologies? Yes and no. Certainly the capacity to tell stories whose scale or expanse was not previously possible could add to the range of filmic experience. Stories such as Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Coetzee's Foe might focus on the interior life of the characters, thereby bringing two wonderful psychological novels to film in the richest manner rather than as plotted narratives flattened by the current conventions of filmic narrative. There are far less aesthetic opportunities where linearity as a dramatic shaping device dominates. And since the linear story, the plot-driven story, today reigns supreme, the likelihood is that digital technology will be used in support of linear tales rather than to subvert or emend the narrative conventions of today.

   THE NONLINEAR NARRATIVE

Nonlinear storytelling has been a factor at least since Luis Buñuel's Un Chien d'Andalou (1929). Although unusual and the exception to the rule, it is by no means unimportant, as a film such as Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) attests. However, to understand the notion of nonlinearity, it is important to first define the linear narrative.

One feature of the linear narrative is its reliance on plot and upon our involvement with the main character.

A second equally important feature of the linear narrative is its dramatic shape. Whether one describes that shape as restorative three-act structure¹ or as the marriage of goal-directed characters and resolution-oriented plotting, the outcome is the same, a linear narrative arc. This linearity transcends story form and links film and video narratives to the Aristotelian equivalents in theatre and in the novel.

The consequence of the linear narrative is the fulfillment of a particular style of experience for an audience. In spite of surprising twists and turns in the plot, the audience knows at the outset the kind of resolution to anticipate. It in essence expects and experiences a predetermined outcome that we associate with linear narrative. That is not to say that linear narrative is boring or blasé; often it is exciting and satisfying. But it is always satisfying within predictable parameters.

The nonlinear narrative may not have a resolution; it may not have a single character with whom to empathize and identify; it may not have characters who are goal-directed; and it may not have a dramatic shape driving towards resolution. Consequently, the nonlinear narrative is not predictable. And here lies its great aesthetic potential, because of that unpredictability, it may provide an audience with a new, unexpected experience. This is the potential aesthetic upshot of nonlinearity—new, unpredictable experiences. This will never happen, however, if nonlinearity remains a technological fact rather than a philosophical and aesthetic attitude.

   PAST RELIANCE ON LINEARITY

In the period where film and video narratives were popular cultural forms intended for the largest mass audiences on an international as well as national level, linearity as a narrative principle was critical. The codes of linear narrative—the goal-directed main character, the antagonist so superior in his counter-goal as to make a hero of the main character, the linear plot veering from point to counterpoint with an accelerating speed, and, of course, the inevitable resolution which justified all that had proceeded it—are portable, moving from one story to another, transported form one country to another, and from one medium to another. This is the system of storytelling is necessary in a period of mass audiences.

But what happens when the audience fractures? What happens when there are films and videos produced for particular age groups, particular interest groups, gender groups, educationally levelled groups, corporate culture groups, media-suspicious groups? In the digital age, with many channels (500-plus), the audience will fragment into a large number of specialty audiences. Under these circumstances, modes of storytelling also can be modified to take into account the pattern of desire, thought, and belief of these subgroups. In this new environment, the opportunity to move away form linear narrative, and to experiment with narrative styles is simply a fact of the digital age. If the makers don't experiment with new styles, they may find the audiences taking the means of production into their own hands. The accessibility of the means of production in the digital age will force filmmakers to reach out and to define those means with their audience. This very impulse lies at the heart of the success of Quentin Tarantino, Mary Harron, and Spike Lee. They have fashioned a style that helps them define and communicate with their audience.

Linearity served its purpose. It will not disappear, but nonlinearity will now assert itself more aggressively. The digital age demands new narrative styles for the new but fragmented audience of the age.

   A PHILOSOPHY OF NONLINEARITY

Perhaps the most useful way to suggest a philosophy on nonlinearity is to begin with an operating principle related to expectations. Just as nonlinear editing has been called random access editing, sourcing shots, scenes, and sounds on an as-needed basis, we can view the narrative style of the nonlinear narrative as having an equally random quality. A does not follow B; cause is not followed by effect. The result is an altered narrative shape sufficiently unpredictable as to create a spontaneity or artifice that alters meaning.

A second characteristic of nonlinearity is the use of opposites to propose the different narrative shape. Opposites, because of their nonfluid relationship to what had proceeded them, undermine expectations. The opposite may be used as a counterpoint, clearly related to its predecessor, or may in fact be more random.

A third characteristic of nonlinearity is the break away from character identification. This may be achieved through the use of an ironic character. It may be achieved through the focus on a place or event rather than the experience of the character. It may be achieved by overbuilding the secondary characters at the price of the main character.

A final characteristic is the replacement of linear plot by elevated incident, set pieces over developmental narrative, feeling-state scenes over expository scenes. This approach undermines the notion of plot and of main character-driven narrative.

The nonlinear narrative is intuitive rather than purposeful, random rather than developmental, and feeling over action. When added to a group of characters, the nonlinear narrative embraces politics over psychology and aesthetics over ethics. The experience of the nonlinear narrative os also less susceptible to the gestalt of Aristotelian dramatic principles.

   THE ARTISTS OF NONLINEAR NARRATIVE

The contributions of Porter, Griffith, and Vidor to the history and practice of film editing is that they created a series of editing choices that underpinned linear narratives—the close-up to articulate clearly the goal of the main character, a cutaway to provide an analogy for what the character was thinking about, and pace to provide an emotional rhythm for the clash of the main character's goal with the barriers to that goal. All these choices, including extreme long shots, camera placement, and camera movement, provided the code for the linear narrative.

It was the work of the Russian Revolutionary filmmakers, particularly Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovshenko, who clarified the nonlinear possibilities. Images could be juxtaposed and, although random, the juxtaposition and sometimes the clash of images created new ideas and perceptions of narrative. The presence of nature—flowers, apples, cows—acts as a counterweight to the death of a patriarch in Dovshenko's Earth (1930); the playful camera/eye of the cinematographer as a character in Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera (1929); Eisenstein's stylized executions near the beginning of Alexander Nevsky (1938); and the casual introduction of the character Nevsky acts as a visual counterpoint to those executions. Each example illustrates how thinking in terms of juxtaposition opens up the story to new interpretations. The result is greater than the parts (shots) in each case.

Perhaps no filmmaker took this principle of nonlinearity as far as Luis Buñuel, who in his work with Salvador Dali, set as his primary goal to destroy linear narrative and the restorative resolution it implies. There is no peace of mind for the audience when they view Un Chien d'Andalou. There is only the unpredictable sense while watching the film, that anything can happen next. Whether Buñuel wishes to launch an attack on the Parisian bourgeoisie or to create an anarchy of experience, his images of sexuality, death, and horror are provocative and unforgettable. The totality of the experience of Un Chien d'Andalou is a true nonlinear experience. There had been vestiges of such an experience in Eisenstein's Strike (1924) and in Dovshenko's Earth, but no film experience was as devoted to a nonlinear experience as Buñuel's film. He was to continue this pattern of narrative experience through Belle de Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).

Other filmmakers have digressed from linear narrative: the Shakespeare performance sequence in Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), the closing sequence in Antonioni's L'Eclisse (The Eclipse) (1962), the introduction of a second but different story and genre in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). More often when the intention was a nonlinear narrative, filmmakers have found an orderly approach to the issue—the multiple narrators in Welles's Citizen Kane, and Kurosawa's Rashomon (1951)—or the overreliance on rituals and time in Davies's Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). In the evolution of nonlinear narrative, however, few filmmakers have been as bold as Humphrey Jennings.

In his documentary Listen to Britain (1942) (see Chapter 21), Jennings achieves a remarkable film that is notably nonlinear. A war documentary that emphasizes the survival capacity of the British Isles against the Axis threat, would, in a linear narrative, highlight the Battle of Britain, focus on a single character or place at a particular time, or use of a political figure such as Winston Churchill as the unifying voice. Jennings does none of these. Instead, he uses music—orchestral, dance hall, pianists, guitar-strumming soldiers—to unify the film. Music is not war-like, but it does create a counterpoint sound and idea in the light of the sights and sounds of war.

Jennings sidesteps the single character, but shows many characters at work, at leisure. Again, the counterpoint is to people at work for war and people at leisure from war. Jennings creates an attitude rather than an act, and the consequences are powerful and moving.

Another dimension of his nonlinear approach is that he moves geographically from place to place, from time to time, in a random fashion. There is no obvious cause and effect here. Instead the geography, whether urban or rural, is a unity rather than a specific place. Trafalgar Square is as important as a beach looking out to the English Channel and the North Sea. Time is managed rather than being viewed as a dramatic end game of fighting the war. The cause and effect relationship between time, place, and history is sidestepped, undermined, and thus Jennings can step away from the actual event and present an attitude that, in the end, will persevere and assure Great Britain's allies that she will triumph.

The result of Jennings nonlinear approach to the subject is a film as fresh and innovative today as it was in 1942.

The next figure that is critical in nonlinear narrative is Jean-Luc Godard. Although others in the New Wave were interested in genre subversion (François Truffaut in Shoot the Piano Player, 1962) and expansion of the interplay between the past and the present and how memory defines one and redefines the other (Alain Resnais in Last Year at Marienbad, 1961), no one was as radical about narrative as Jean-Luc Godard.

Whether using essay as a formal structure (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1966), or a polemic (La Chinoise, 1967), or a musical (Tout Va Bien, 1970), Godard would always subvert that narrative invention with another. The result was to move us away from character towards ideas. His overriding concern with the journey in Weekend (1967) is subverted by his shifts in time from one place to another, leading us to question meaning in Weekend. An early scene, the leave-taking on the journey, is a farce; a middle scene, the Leonard character, meditates on history, academia, and the future; in a late scene, a husband in the traditional family considered the breadwinner, is actually consumed by his wife. He is “bread” rather than the breadwinner. These radical shifts take us away from the literal meaning of content (so often the core of the linear narrative) toward a experimental, almost explosive, set of new narrative ideas. As with nonlinear narratives already highlighted, the key to this new perception is to undermine the relationship between the audience and the main character. The jump cut, the overuse of the long shot, and the long take underscore our distance from the character.

In Great Britain, Lindsay Anderson (O Lucky Man!, 1973) was the greatest proponent of a nonlinear style. His use of music interludes as well as outrageous set pieces moving away from the narrative action line highlighted an anarchistic style that was in part nonlinear. In Germany, Wim Wenders (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, 1971, and Alice in the Cities, 1974) best exemplify the nonlinear impulse. In the former Yugoslavia, Dusan Makavejev fuses documentary and drama, psychology and politics in WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), creating a disorderly portrayal of the life and ideas of Wilhelm Reich. Here too the nonlinear overwhelms the linear.

But in order to see the nonlinear aesthetic fully flower, we have to move beyond the experiments and flirtations of Arthur Penn (Little Big Man, 1970), Peter Brook (Marat/Sade, 1966), and Nicholas Roeg (Don't Look Now, 1973). When we approach the recent work of Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, 1994), Milcho Manchevski (Before the Rain, 1994), and François Girard (Thirty-two Short Films About Glen Gould, 1993), we see the nonlinear aesthetic in full bloom. Single character–driven stories are abandoned in both Pulp Fiction and Before the Rain. Although Pulp Fiction has a series of main characters who are criminals wrestling with an ethical question or problem, the affiliation of main characters in Manchevski's film are much looser. All are Macedonian and all are in love, but there the similarity ends. Age, education, geography all differentiate the characters from one another. In both cases, the multiple characters undermine the opportunity for identification. Although Thirty-two Short Films About Glen Gould clearly has a single main character, that character is posing in each film in such a way as to preclude identification. He distances himself from us and so no ongoing identification is possible.

A second dimension of these films is that the dramatic shape is subverted. In Pulp Fiction, we expect the gangster story to proceed according to tradition—crime, rise, fall—this doesn't happen. The crime section is undermined by a debate between the two main characters—Travolta and Jackson. The extent of the discussion/debate, its philosophical nature, undermines any developing sense of anxiety related to what these men are going to do—kill people. Similarly, the dramatic arc of each story in Before the Rain—tales of intrareligious conflict—is undermined by a love story or the aftermath of a love relationship. This introjection of a relationship into a tense and probably violent conflict between Muslims and Christians is a counterpoint that actually makes more powerful the final outcome of each of the stories.

A third dimension of these films is that each scrupulously avoids a cause and effect relationship in their stories. In both Pulp Fiction and Before the Rain, the time line is violated. In Pulp Fiction, we join the story in midstream and return to the same point later in the narrative. In Before the Rain, we begin in one story only to rejoin the late phase of that story at the end of the third narrative. In both cases, we did not know this until a visual cue, or repetition presents the return to the earlier time to us.

In Thirty-two Short Films About Glen Gould, we loosely follow a standard linear chronology of Gould's life, but the prologue and the epilogue may be a vision of Gould in a kind of Arctic heaven, speaking to himself and, in his fashion, to us, or it may be a metaphor for his status as visionary vis-à-vis the rest of us. In either case, these scenes frame the film in a way that subverts the chronological line of his life and of the organization of the films about his life. This nonlinear approach is deepened by using documentary films, abstract films, and dramatized narratives. The mix of styles further subverts the time line and any remaining linearity. Radical shifts in tone between the absurd and the studied or formal also act as a counterpoint to our impulse to organize the material so we can understand it in a linear fashion.

This latter brings us to the final dimension of nonlinearity—feeling over exposition. In these very abbreviated insights into Glen Gould, the filmmaker goes with a feeling—his perfectionism in the playing of a record in his hotel room in Germany, his eccentricity in the film about the Truck Stop. What Gould hears illustrates the extent he tuned out of the kind of observation we associate with such a casual experience (eating breakfast at a diner). When the most obvious becomes surprising, when a recording session isn't about the recording but rather the sense of ecstacy of the artist, we, the viewers, face a different kind of experience. This is the true possibility of the nonlinear revolution, the opportunity to give us a new, surprising experience. Godard, Tarantino, Manchevski understand that to do so means not only creative risk, but the subversion of the linear expectation of the audience.

But just as the more media-experienced audiences grow, the opportunity of accessing specialty audiences via satellite and multi-channel television will encourage filmmakers to continue to experiment with new narrative styles to reach them. Here lies the true potential for a nonlinear aesthetic. The future is here. The technology is available. Filmmakers need only take the risk.

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