Editing: Essence of Filmic Narration

özge / advance interactive narrations / 6 nov 2006

Tom Gunning’s

D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film

D. W. Griffith: master of the syntax of film narration

• New elements Griffith introduces:• The full shot• The medium shot• The close-up• The pan shot• The moving camera• The spot-iris• The mask• The fade• +Soviet films on Montage

Discovery of paper prints.

They are for copyrights.

• development of narrative form in relation to film history

• limitations of the study 1908-1909

From “cinema of attractions” to a narrative form

magic ---------------------> dramatic expression

Melies Griffith

• comics (split screens) has more impact on film in comparison to theater.

• impact of vaudeville Winsor McCay

• “essential nature of film have often focused on editing” (p.21)

• Who has more agency on the film director or editor?

Kubrick’s Shining Trailer

Tagline: A Masterpiece Of Modern Horror

The original trailer:

• http://www.movie-list.net/classics/shining.mov

A remake of it:

• http://www.ps260.com/molly/SHINING%20FINAL.mov

Editing: Coordination of one shot with the next.

Dimensions of Film Editing

• Graphic Relations

• Rhythmic

• Spatial

• Temporal

• Dissolve

• Fade out

• Fade in

• Wipe

• Cut

• Graphic Match

Dissolve: superimposes end of shot A and beginning of shot B

What are the implications of dissolve?

• Fade out: gradually darkens the end of a shot to the black

• What does fade out effect imply if it is fading to white? SFU

• to black?

• Fade in: lightens a shot from black

• Wipe: shot B replaces shot A by means of a boundary line moving across the screen

• Graphic Match: linking the shots by graphic similarities.

• Smooth continuity

• Abrupt contrast

• Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey

• Caro’s Alien 4 Resurrection

• Continuity Editing: Editing for invisible narration.

[Continuity Editing contains a very narrow set of editing possibilities.]

• Jump Cut: When two shots of two subject are cut together but are not sufficiently different in camera distance and angle, then there will be a noticeable jump on the screen.

• Godard’s Breathless

• Allen’s Deconstructing Harry

Terror, Iraq, Weapons

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUaEtf1s23w

Continuity Editing• Aim: Using editing for

invisible narration• 180 degree rule• Avoiding Continuity

Mistakes. (Costume, cigarettes, position of objects etc…)

• Cut with Movement

Intellectual Montage• Aim: Using editing as

a tool for making meaning.

• Jump Cuts• Non-diegetic inserts• Collage like quality• Rhythmic-Fast

180 degree rule for continuity editing:

• Discontinuity can also be created by the non-diegetic insert

• Kuleshov Effect:

• Kuleshov Effect:Kuleshov edited a short film in which shots of the face of a man are alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl, a child's coffin).

Intellectual-Visible Montage

• The montage experiments carried out by Kuleshov in the late 1910s and early 1920s formed the theoretical basis of Soviet montage cinema,

• Sergei Eisenstein, • Vsevolod Pudovkin• Dziga Vertov,

• Battleship Potemkin, October, Mother, The End of St Petersburg, and The Man with a Movie Camera.

Editing -Time

• Parallel Editing: The shots of the sequences which are given parallel belong to the same slice of time.

• Events actions happening in these different spaces are simultaneous.

• Silence of the Lambs

Temporal Discontinuity

• Flashback

• Flashforward

• Ellipsis: Psychological closure, difference between story-plot times

1. How long is the duration subtracted by ellipsis?

2. Whether that ellipsis is filled or not?

3. Is it obvious; does the director want us to notice it or not

4. If it is filled later, what is the function of it?