Introduction to Film Studies
Montage
Editing Devices
• Cheat Cut - in the continuity editing systyem, a cut
which presents continuous time from shot to shot
but which mismatches the position of figures or
objects
• The lady on the phone, the wall and the people at
dinner table, Meet me in St. Louis
Editing Devices
• Establishing shots are for identifying the context
for a scene by showing the relationship between
important figures and their surrounding.
Generally they are filmed in long or extreme-long
shot at the beginning of a scene. Vertigo
Editing Devices
• Establishing shot not only introduces the viewer a
location, but also determines the spatial
relationship in it, very importantly, the axis of
action for the 180° rule (system) Vertigo
Editing Devices
• Cross-cutting or Inter-cutting (shots of two or more,
usually concurrent actions, are interwoven.)
• A classic example: D.W. Griffith’s Lonedale
Operator In its ending the telegraph woman sends
for help and ward off the robbers and in the
meanwhile help is arriving in a train.
Editing Devices
• Cross-cutting – editing that alternates the shots of
two or more lines of action taking place in different
places but simultaneously. Multiple actions are
linked and multiple characters from different shots
are associated. Godfather
Editing Devices
• Jump Cut – editing device in which two sequential
shots of the same subject are taken from (slightly
or just slightly) different camera positions.
Through this editing, an action can jump forwards
in time by eliminating part of it. It manipulates the
duration of the action. How to make a jump cut
Editing Devices
• Cut-in: The change of
framing from distant
to closer view. In
Dancer in the Dark
Selma and Bill are
having a conversation
in his car. An extreme
long shot of Bill’s car
cut in to the medium
long shot of Bill and
Selma. Cut-in
Editing Devices
• Cut-away – the interruption of a continuous action
by inserting a view of something else. The cutaway shot is followed, though not always, by a cut
back to the previous action.
• The Odessa Steps montage Sergei Eisenstein’s
Battleship Potemkin
Editing Devices
• More jagged jump cut, in which an action is cut
abruptly before it completes and an action starts
abruptly in the middle of it, fractures the duration
of time forward. Violation of classical continuity
editing.
Editing Devices
• Jagged jump cuts are frequently and extensively
used in contemporary artistic films such as those
in Dogme 95
• Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark
Duration of Time in Editing
• Temporal ellipsis – jumping forward in story time
by not showing what may have happened between
the last action and the next.
• In Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, events over a
night is eliminated by the shot of the old parents
waiting for a train cut to the shot of a railway
station in the morning and their son in his office.
Duration of Time in Editing
• The passage of days is eliminated by using a
series of unmatched shots of holiday-makers
arriving at the beach town and indicating a
holiday season is approaching.
• Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws Holidaymakers
Duration of Time in Editing
• One of the boldest graphic matches in cinema
history and one of the largest temporal ellipsis.
Between the shot of a bone spinning in the air
and that of a space station orbiting the earth, two
million years has passed in Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: Space Odyssey
Duration of Time in Editing
• Story time (the length of time passes in the story)
can be prolonged as discourse time (the length of
time spent to tell the story) by adding extra shots
in the process of editing.
• In Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, a fight is
greatly extended by including extra shots.
Duration of Time in Editing
• Another bold ellipsis of time in which not only a
considerable length of time is omitted but also it
jumps a considerable geographical space from
Cairo to the Arabian Desert in Lawrence of Arabia.
Editing Devices
• Double (multiple) exposure – the superimposition
of two or more exposure to create a single image.
It has been used in Francis Ford Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now opening
Editing Devices
• The footage shot by multiple cameras can be
edited together so that the scene gain dynamism as
frequently used in sports broadcasting.
Editing Devices
• The final battle scene of Seven Samurai by Akira
Kurosawa was shot with eight cameras and the
footage was skillfully edited and mixed with
enhanced sound effects.
Editing Devices
• Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millinaire was shot with
26 portable digital video cameras at most. excerpt