Editing Theory

Started by ono, January 07, 2004, 04:34:07 PM

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MacGuffin

Quote from: themodernage02mac, have you watched this thing yet?

Yes. It was onTV a while back:
http://xixax.com/viewtopic.php?t=7044
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

modage

oh sweet.  everyone watch this if you're interested in editing.  :yabbse-thumbup:
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

killafilm

Just thought I'd throw some stuff out there.

In the early days of film-making it was thought that women were also more attentive than men.  Thus you had "Script Girls" now the script supervisor, and many more female editors.  

Some editing theory(usage.. whatever) I really love is the jump cut.  Godard will say that he would use a jump cut because he had no other options, but it did/does leave an impression on the viewer.

I'm thinking along the beginning of Full Metal Jacket, Vanilla Sky and ect... more modern filmmakers have found many clever uses of jump cuts, freeze frames, and other editing techniques born out of the New Wave.

and I'll also single out Leslie Jones editing of PDL.  I can't really think of any other movie building up it's scenes in such a bizaar fashion.  The pacing of that movie is just... awesome.

soixante

Does anyone know who first figured out connecting one shot to another?  The very first films, I believe, were just very short, one continous shot.  Someone obviously realized one shot could be spliced to another, and then another.  But who was it?  Has any serious film scholar figured this out?
Music is your best entertainment value.

MacGuffin

Quote from: soixanteDoes anyone know who first figured out connecting one shot to another?  The very first films, I believe, were just very short, one continous shot.  Someone obviously realized one shot could be spliced to another, and then another.  But who was it?  Has any serious film scholar figured this out?

Can't remember his name, but, if I remember correctly, whoever it was is mentioned in the Cutting Edge doc mod and I discussed at the top of the page.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Ghostboy

To the extent of my knowledge, although he wasn't the very first to employ juxtaposition, Edwin Porter (director of The Great Train Robbery usually gets the credit.

EDIT: consulting my dictionary of film, I see that G.A Smith and J. A Williamson and others from The Brighton School in England were the real innovators. They also apparently invented the close up.

The Perineum Falcon

Georges Melies discovered the use of editing for special effects by mistake!

Fascinating.
We often went to the cinema, the screen would light up and we would tremble, but also, increasingly often, Madeleine and I were disappointed. The images had dated, they jittered, and Marilyn Monroe had gotten terribly old. We were sad, this wasn't the film we had dreamed of, this wasn't the total film that we all carried around inside us, this film that we would have wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we would have wanted to live.

Just Withnail

What's interesting is before films got a real sense of continuity, the consisted of the same action from different points of view. Jean Mirty in Psychology and aestethics of the cinema mentions early films where you'd see a speeding car go down a hill and run into a house. Then you'd see the interior of the house, still fine and untouched, only to have the car ram into it in that scene as well. Porter is mentioned quite a bit in the editing section of the book, at least in the history part.

Ravi

Quote from: Just WithnailWhat's interesting is before films got a real sense of continuity, the consisted of the same action from different points of view. Jean Mirty in Psychology and aestethics of the cinema mentions early films where you'd see a speeding car go down a hill and run into a house. Then you'd see the interior of the house, still fine and untouched, only to have the car ram into it in that scene as well. Porter is mentioned quite a bit in the editing section of the book, at least in the history part.

Didn't Battleship Potemkin have a sequence where a sailor is shown breaking a plate several different times, or was he breaking different plates?

Just Withnail

Don't remember those shots, but the technique I mentioned was long out of practice by the time of Potemkin.

Bethie

Quote from: Ravi
Quote from: Just WithnailWhat's interesting is before films got a real sense of continuity, the consisted of the same action from different points of view. Jean Mirty in Psychology and aestethics of the cinema mentions early films where you'd see a speeding car go down a hill and run into a house. Then you'd see the interior of the house, still fine and untouched, only to have the car ram into it in that scene as well. Porter is mentioned quite a bit in the editing section of the book, at least in the history part.

Didn't Battleship Potemkin have a sequence where a sailor is shown breaking a plate several different times, or was he breaking different plates?

yo kid. its one.



I just scanned that from a book I own. If anyone wants to edit this and make it smaller or whatev, feel free.

I also scanned another page that explains all the boxes. want?

oh here http://www.worldisround.com/articles/193035/index.html thats where i put the scanned pages. go there and you can click enlarge. too bad you couldnt do that in real life, eh? haha
who likes movies anyway

pete



Jackie Chan the editor.
Really awful English though.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

socketlevel

Quote from: killafilm on July 15, 2005, 12:53:30 AM

In the early days of film-making it was thought that women were also more attentive than men.  Thus you had "Script Girls" now the script supervisor, and many more female editors.  


i know this is a really old post but it's dead wrong, and overly optimistic.  it's a much colder reality.  it's not a business model that producers and studios had preconceived notions of what each sex was good and used it to their advantage.  the truth is that script girls and editors were considered mundane jobs.  the editor was seen the same way as a tailor, someone that would cut and paste the film (literally) based on the director/producers intent. so women had these jobs because men were pig headed and didn't think women were creative... these positions were filled due to lack of interest from men, giving women undesirable tasks that was beneath what the men wanted to do.  sad but true. 

the editor wasn't considered a "creative" position to the studios until the late 50s early 60s, when the value of editing and how it influenced the rhetoric was finally considered integral to film.  this is why you see more male editors emerge then, and inversely it is why women have held a strong hold on editing to this day.
the one last hit that spent you...

ono


WorldForgot

This thread iz mad interesting and I'll revive it so some of the concepts can be reconsidered. Are there words to articulate the (possibly hundreds?) modes of editing?

Quote from: (kelvin) on January 08, 2004, 10:23:01 AM

My proposals for differenciation:

dialectical editing: editing that builds up a climax. It is dialectical: it carries the film and opposes antagonistic features that converge into a higher, purer, or let's say a more stable harmony. example: Battleship Potemkin

conservative editing: editing that forms harmony within the process of editing. There is no converging to a higher level. Harmony is given, harmony must be preserved. example: Triumph of the Will

expressive editing: there is no harmony that must be preserved or created. It often expresses the director's/editor's standpoint. example: A bout the souffle

narrative editing: The editing follows the film. This is the most "classical" approach. example: lots of them, so to say.

Feel free to criticize. :)

Harmony vs Propulsive is interesting, I'd say that is a better phrasing conceptually than Narrative v Dialectical only because it highlights a tug-of-war within where your edit "goes". 

I'm not trying to tangle myself up too much with notions of auteurship or external influence much which is why I'm keeping my head in cases where either the filmmaker is known to get their way in tandem with the editor (David Lynch and Linklater are two that i can think of where they've used more than one grammar in their career, lynch possibly with the same editor). And sure not all 'construction' was the edit - a film from one characters perspective vs an ensemble then that's a structure that's not beholden to editorial decisions but that pieces design. So it gets tricky because film is all editing, in a sense each grammar would describe foundations for branching off totalities.

https://twitter.com/Karaszewski/status/1435625404711129097

What Milos mentions here as "the paradox of movie time" I find incredibly interesting. As GhostBoy phrased it earlier in this thread, some cuts are questions, others statements. I get this feeling that there's an entire range in there.

There are differences in the way time feels in IV vs The Long Goodbye, although formally they harken toward a similar aesthetic their grammar is different. And the same can be said about The Master - IV - Phantom Thread, I believe. Aesthetically Paul has an arena of "style", but the grammars within are distinct and each film its own.