The essence of cinema is editing. David K. Irving explains how editors and directors shape emotion and keep the narrative through-line clear in the cut.
The essence of cinema is editing. It’s the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.
~Francis Ford Coppola
Each moment of a film is manufactured by the production company under the leadership of a director and then shaped by the editor who uses the raw material from the set. Film is visual storytelling, so ideally, a film should be able to be viewed silently and have the meaning still come through. However, sound, which includes dialogue, sound effects and music, is inextricably tied to the movie experience.
A director begins with either an assembly or rough cut. An assembly is the stringing together of all the master shots. A rough cut is the approximate editing of all the scenes and then cutting them together into a whole. In both the assembly and the rough cut, the story as a film begins to unfold to the viewers. It should be noted that very few people in the world know how to watch a rough cut. Almost every director feels depressed upon screening the film for the first time.
Walter Murch, in his book on editing titled In the Blink of an Eye, insists that continuity of action, clean matches and rhythm take a backseat to the overarching principle that the editor, like the screenwriter, actor, composer, and director, must do everything to follow the emotional arc of the story, even if it means sacrificing a clean cut for a highly charged, less clean one. He calls it being “true to the emotion of the moment.”
So while the editor works diligently to make each edit “invisible”, an edit that advances the emotional arc of the story takes precedence over continuity. This includes continuity of action, wardrobe, props, pace, lights, etc.
There are many types of edits an editor can employ to compliment the style and storytelling techniques dictated by the script. A smooth transition is called a match or butt cut. Shifting from a long shot to a close up is a smash cut. Making the transition from one shot to another within a scene calls for invisible editing.
Shifting from scene to scene calls for bolder editorial choices often suggesting passage of time. Fading in and out are traditional means by which one can make this transition. Long cross fades, called dissolves, ease the audience from one scene to another. Often the sound track from the next scene laid over the ending of the previous scene teases the viewer to engage in the shift from one scene to another. A wonderful exercise that demonstrates the power of editing is in one of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s books on the art of montage (editing)
in which he describes an experiment by his teacher, Lev Kuleshov. You see a close up of the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine. This is immediately followed by a shot of a dead baby. Back to Mosjoukine again, and you read compassion on his face. Then you take away the dead baby and you show a plate of soup, and now when you go back to Mosjoukine, he looks hungry. Yet, in both cases, they used the same shot of the actor; his face was exactly the same.
Or, in the words of Alfred Hitchcock, “It [Rear Window] was a possibility of doing a purely cinematic film. You have an immobilized man looking out. That’s one part of the film. The second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts. This is actually the purest expression of the cinematic idea.”
Hitchcock elaborates in an example from his film Sabotage, “I’m quite satisfied to let the pieces of film create the motion. For instance, in Sabotage, when the little boy is on the bus and he’s got the bomb at his side, I cut to that bomb from a different angle every time I showed it. I did that to give the bomb a vitality of its own, to animate it. If I’d shown it constantly from the same angle, the public would have become used to the package: ’Oh well, it’s only a package after all.’ But what I was saying was, Be careful! Watch out!”
Eventually the cut is done to the director’s satisfaction. This is referred to as a director’s cut. The cut should always be screened with a temporary soundtrack. The score will not have been written at this point, but the editor and/or the composer can transfer music that fits the mood of the sequence and lays it on so the audience will get the sensation they are watching a movie. To watch a cut without music is difficult. Music makes the film come alive. The producers or production company may approve the cut and move on to sound design, or insist on further editorial changes.
Once the picture is locked, the editor and the sound designers spend weeks preparing the sound tracks for the mix. Should the dialogue need to be replaced, the actors are taken to special ADR (automatic dialogue replacement) rooms, also know as looping stages. Here the actor repeats lines which, when recorded on set, were “dirty” or unusable. The other two sound tracks are music (score, songs and on screen music such as a band or orchestra) and effects, which are everything else, such as footsteps, doorbells, clinking glass, tire squeals and crickets.
The director facilitates the work of the sound editors and the composer by “spotting” the film. This is the process whereby the director identifies each sound and music cue to the frame, often speaking about the emotional qualities he or she is seeking from the sequence. A general rule when spotting sounds is: If you can see it, you should hear it.
The tracks are finally mixed together and balanced so that each line of dialogue can be heard no matter how loud the music and/or sound effects. Once the mix is complete, the timed film negative is printed and married to the track at the laboratory. Finally, a first print is made.
David K. Irving is a film director, writer, producer, and an Associate Professor in film production at New York University. He has written and directed dozens of documentaries, and his feature directing credits include Night of the Cyclone, C.H.U.D. II, The Emperor’s New Clothes, Sleeping Beauty and Rumpelstiltskin.
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- The power of sound in film
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