Shifting the Discussion from Music to Movement

Editing is often compared with music making. Many people understand the use of the word “rhythm” in film to be a musical metaphor. The discussion of rhythm in, for example, the 2004 book about the editing craft, The Eye Is Quicker, opens with the following quote: “‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’—Walter Pater.”¹ Another example is filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s quote: “For me the editor is like a musician, and often a composer.”² And “Eisenstein … often makes implicit appeal to musical analogies.”³ Music can be a rich source of language and ideas for the talking about rhythm; but its terms don’t exactly match what editors do. This section looks at some of the comparisons of editing to music to see how they might or might not be useful.

Conducting

Conducting is perhaps the most apt musical metaphor because, like the conductor, the editor decides on the pacing, timing, and emphasis presented in the final composition. However, in music, conducting also suggests that a finished composition has already been submitted to the conductor and he interprets it, which is not really what happens in editing.

There is a nonmusical meaning to the word “conducting” that might be more useful for describing what an editor does. This is conducting in the sense of facilitating the flowthrough of rhythm like wires facilitate the flowthrough of electricity or, as filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky suggests, pipes facilitate the flowthrough of water:

Time, imprinted in the frame, dictates the particular editing principle; and the pieces that “won’t edit”—that can’t be properly joined—are those which record a radically different kind of time. One cannot, for instance, put actual time together with conceptual time, any more than one can join water pipes of different diameter. The consistency of the time that runs through the shot, its intensity or “sloppiness,” could be called time pressure: then editing can be seen as the assembly of the pieces on the basis of time pressure within them.⁶

Tarkovsky’s comparison of shots to water pipes shifts the conversation about rhythm away from music and toward the more visible movement of time “imprinted in the shots.” Although Eisenstein and Tarkovsky usually present oppositional ideas about the nature and purpose of the editing process, this shift from music to movement also has precedent in Eisenstein’s writing. Eisenstein writes “in rhythmic montage it is movement within the frame that impels the montage movement from frame to frame.”⁷ Rhythm is not categorically or completely defined by Eisenstein’s discussion of “rhythmic montage.” However, it does, for our purposes, firmly shift the focus of the discussion of rhythm from music to movement.

The next question, then, is: What can we say about the art of shaping movement that can inform an editor’s intuition? For insight into this, I turn to studies of the art of choreography, which, of course, is the art of shaping movement.

A team of Australian researchers, including psychologists, scientists, and choreographers, provides a useful starting point for looking at editing as a form of choreography. Their study, Choreographic Cognitions, talks about how dance is made and how it is perceived and understood by audiences. This cognition of dance is, I argue, similar to the cognition of rhythm in film.

The Choreographic Cognitions team explains that time is the artistic and expressive medium of contemporary dance. So, when we watch dance, we see movement, but we understand what movement means by how it expresses the otherwise invisible elements of time and energy dynamics. In the Choreographic Cognitions team’s words:

the artistry of movement is in trajectories, transitions, and in the temporal and spatial configurations in which moves, limbs, bodies, relate to one another … change to a single component can affect the entire interacting network of elements. In a dynamical system, time is not simply a dimension in which cognition and behavior occur but time, or more correctly dynamical changes in time, are the very basis of cognition.⁸

Like choreographers, editors shape the trajectories of movement across shots, scenes, and sequences. We also shape the transitions of movement between the shots. Choreographers and editors both work with the temporal and spatial dynamics of movement. We create a flow of moving images that carries meaning. And, just like choreographers, editors will often describe the way a “change to a single component can affect the entire interacting network of elements.”⁹

Editors less often describe rhythm and time as a basis of cognition. But in a sense, they are. Rhythm is part of the sensual experience of the film. It is an immediate and felt way for us to understand what we see and hear. So, the “dynamical changes in time”¹⁰ that are core to the choreographer’s art are also core to the editor’s art.

Figure 2.1 Jadzea Allen performing a phrase of movement from “…the dancer from the dance” (Karen Pearlman, 2014). [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Christophorus Verheyden]

The next section will look at the pulse, the smallest unit of movement shaped by choreographers and editors into rhythm, and the role of pulse in defining dynamical changes in time.

Pulse

Pulse is the smallest, the most constant, and perhaps the most ineffable unit of rhythm in film. It is ever present, just as it is in your body, and unnoticed, just as in your body. Pulse in film has a few other characteristics in common with a living body—it tends to stay within a certain range of speeds, it organizes the perception of fast and slow, and it keeps the film alive. Just as in a living body, if a film’s pulse stops, slows, or speeds too much, the results can be dire for the rhythm, the story, or the experience of the film.

Pulse defines and demarcates what Tarkovsky calls “the consistency of time” or the “time pressure”¹¹ within shots. A single pulsation is the extra effort placed on one part of a movement compared to the less energetic other parts of the movement. Just as in the beating of a heart, there is a continuous on/off of emphasis points. Accents on words, gestures, camera moves, colors, or any thing else that moves in a shot contribute to the film’s pulse. Pulses are shaped by the energy or intention behind movement, including speech. (Actors may sometimes develop a character by giving their performance a distinctive pulse.) Pulses make energy or intention something we can feel, hear, and see.

The film editor does not necessarily set the pulse of a shot—the director and actors do that mostly. But the editor has choices to make about the sustaining, changing, and coordinating of pulses. These choices are made through the selection of takes and the choice of cutting points. Pulse accents can also be emphasized or de-emphasized and even shifted by cuts.

Pulses in movement are shaped by choreographers into phrases. They are also shaped by editors into phrases, we just don’t usually call them phrases. We call them exchanges between characters or sequences of shots, but seeing them as pulses and phrases of movement is helpful to seeing how they can be shaped expressively. The next section of this chapter describes two choreographic methods for shaping phrases and compares them to two kinds of editing challenges.

Movement Phrases

A movement phrase in dance (and in film editing) is a rhythmically coherent sequence of moves or shots that convey some feeling or idea through their rhythm.

For example, imagine your film has a scene in it where a man comes home. You could make a series of different phrases from the sounds or images in different shots that you have, and each of these phrases would have a different rhythm. The rhythms, made through the juxtapositions of different movement energies, timings, and directions, would each express something different.

Start with a shot of the door closing behind him. What does the door sound like? Is it a slam because he is angry? A stealthy click as though he is trying not to disturb anyone? Does it stick in the doorframe as though the house is a bit rundown? Does it close behind him with an efficient click just as it closes everyday?

He walks in. What does the house sound like? Is it noisy with kids? Did he leave the TV on in the morning? Is there a fridge hum but all else is quiet? Is there a spooky supernatural atmosphere?

What is the first thing he does when he gets in the house? Does he open that humming fridge and grab a beer with a smooth, practiced gesture? Does he step on the dog’s tail and make it howl? Does he throw the mail and his keys down on the dining table? Does he drop, exhausted, on to the sofa?

If you chose the sound of a slamming door, screaming kids and a heavy sigh as he drops, exhausted, onto the sofa we would understand this story world and character as completely different than if you chose a stealthy click, a humming fridge, and the sound of a beer! If you are becoming adventurous with your juxtapositions you could try combining the stealthy click, humming fridge, and the drop, exhausted, onto the sofa or the stealthy click, humming fridge and step on the dog’s tail. Each of these last two options would begin the phrase of movement in the same way, and end it differently, creating a different phrasing of movement and a different meaning.

We are used to seeing costume express character—we ascribe different characteristics, moods, and contexts to people in business suits or gym clothes, however we are not so much in the habit of recognizing that movement expresses world and character. Thinking about phrasing is one way of broadening our perspective on how movement works expressively.

There are lots of approaches a choreographer might take to shaping movement phrases in dance. What follows is a description of just two approaches, chosen to illustrate what the art of choreography and the art of editing might have in common.

Figure 2.2 Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2014) In Birdman the phrasing is not created in the editing, rather it resides in the shots. The movement of the camera, the actors, the dialogue, and the sound are all coordinated in the rehearsal and shooting process to create the flow of time through very long takes. The editor joins these pieces of time like water pipes, selecting the takes that join together time, movement, and energy into a coherent phrasing of story, emotion, image, and sound. [Photo credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures]

One choreographic approach is for the choreographer to create a movement sequence with inherent timing, spatial organization, and emphasis, and then teach that phrase to the dancers. This approach to choreography has an affinity with Tarkovsky’s water pipes. If a film director works in this way, he provides the editor with material that has immutable, self-contained phrases of movement. So, the editor’s job is not to create the phrase’s rhythm, but to respect the phrase’s rhythm. This would be the equivalent of shooting the man coming into the house (in the example above) all in one shot, and with only one take. In this approach the editor’s choreographic input comes in extending these rhythms to the construction of the larger sequences. She does this by shaping the joins of phrases. So, she is still grappling with the shaping of movement “trajectories, transitions … and temporal and spatial configurations,”¹² but the smallest unit for transitioning or configuring is not the pulse or the single gesture or the movement fragment, but whole movement phrases.

A different approach a choreographer might take is to give her dancers “movement problems” to solve, such as, “Invent five gestures of frustration.” These five gestures are fragments, like a series of short shots. The choreographer connects the fragments into phrases and in doing so designs their temporal flow, spatial organization, and emphasis. In film, the connecting and shaping of fragments into phrases is done by the editor. This approach has more affinity with Eisenstein’s sense of montage than Tarkovsky’s. Tarkovsky’s approach to rhythm considers time to be present in the shot, and the editor’s job is to construct the film so that time flows effectively in spite of cuts. In Eisenstein’s view the course of time is created in the cutting. The editing process actively choreographs rhythms; i.e., editing connects bits of movement on film to create the passage of time.

Why Bother with Phrasing?

Choreographers often work with abstract or non-naturalistic movement, and editors often work with naturalistic movement of actors or subjects, so why bother with phrasing? Because the choreographic principles can still be applied. A movement phrase is not just a unit of rhythm in abstract movement. A naturalistic character’s movement in narrative drama is also shaped choreographically into phrases. To expand on the example above, assume that the action in the script calls for a character to enter the house. The director and actor have decided, in blocking, that he will enter, put his keys on the table, and get a beer, so all of the shots that you have are only of those three actions. There may still be a lot of different ways to phrase this sequence. There may, for example, be variations in the actor’s performance. Does he drop the keys on the table? Place them hesitantly? Toss them casually? Slam them down? There may be variations in how he opens the fridge. Does he pull it open distractedly? Pry it open deliberately? Yank it open? Sneak it open? Developing your eye to see the differences in these kinds of movement is a way of developing your intuition about rhythm. It makes it possible for you to shape rhythms that “feels right” for the emotional moment of the film, and express something in the phrasing of their movement without necessarily even consciously doing so. When you put together a series of expressive gestures into a sequence that “feels right” the phrasing of the movement’s rhythm will have impact and meaning.

Figure 2.3 In There is a Place (Katrina McPherson, Simon Fildes and Sang Jijia, 2010) shots are cut together to form phrases. McPherson & Fildes’ films make use of cutting as a form of movement, along with camera movement and performer movement. So each cut is a move to a different shot, a move of the spectator’s mind and eye, a move that contributes to the phrasing. In this approach, the editor takes fragments of movement and designs them into phrases. Rises and falls of emphasis, direction and speed changes, size, shape, and performance are all shaped into the dynamic flow that is the “cine-phrase’s” meaning. [Photo credit: Goat Media, Katrina McPherson, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DicA-jC1gS8]

Figure 2.4 Michael Sheen and Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon (Ron Howard, 2008). Frost/Nixon is just one example of hundreds that follow a ‘middle way’ between Tarkovsky’s and Eisenstein’s views, creating some of the phrasing in the shots and some through the cuts. Ron Howard’s films have a very silky smooth (some would say slick) feel to them, with every aspect of movement, including camera movements, performers’ movements, and movements between shots expertly gauged to propel the narrative and not to draw the eye away from story. Editors Daniel P. Hanely, Mike Hill, and Robert Komatsu tuck cuts almost imperceptibly between similarly composed shots, with the performance movement motivating the cut or used as punctuation at the beginning or end of phrases. [Photo credit: Universal Pictures, Imagine Entertainment, Working Title Films]

Once it is phrased, the movement becomes the emotional content in the context of the story. If the character comes home very late in a domestic drama and rushes in the door, the hesitation before dropping the keys might be a questioning, “Is everyone asleep?” or more melodramatically, “The house feels deserted, has my wife left me?” A “deliberate” opening of the fridge then becomes thoughtful, maybe even anxious, depending on the story context. The story context tells us the focus of the emotional content—what the questioning and the anxiety are directed toward—but it is the hesitation and the deliberateness that gives us the feeling of questioning and anxiety.

This is important because we don’t go through a conscious process in our thoughts to understand the feeling we are seeing. We feel with it, we use our mirror neurons and our capacity for kinaesthetic empathy to grasp the pulsation of the movement directly. When a movement phrase is well “choreographed” by an editor, it gives us the kinaesthetic information the story requires. It does so without confusing us or making us stop feeling and start asking questions about what we’re supposed to be feeling, and it does so immediately—it lets us feel and move on to what happens next.

Phrasing Considerations

One reason to compare editing to choreography is to use knowledge about the craft of choreography to extend ideas about the crafting of rhythm in editing. Some of the questions choreographers grapple with may be useful questions an editor can ask herself in the process of shaping a film’s rhythm.

The following ideas about crafting dance are presented as questions editors can ask themselves for two reasons: First, because they are not rules. Second, because they are not meant to be prescriptive. Since they are lateral ways of looking at the flow of movement, they’re most likely to be useful when the more standard questions of story construction are failing the editor in her effort to make a film feel right.

American dancer and choreographer Doris Humphrey wrote about the craft of choreography in her book The Art of Making Dances. The following topics are Humphrey’s chapter subheadings; the questions they raise are mine and represent just a sampling of the line of questioning raised by taking a choreographic approach to rhythm in film editing.¹³

Symmetry and Asymmetry

The tension between symmetry and asymmetry can be manipulated by an editor to create or disrupt style. A smooth, classical style will tend to emphasize symmetry in the composition of frames and the evenness of pulse. Disruption of symmetry then becomes an important dramatic break. For the editor, the questions of the overall film may be: Should the rhythm, and its movement phrasing, emphasize balance or imbalance? Even or uneven patterns? Measured or manic paces? These questions can also be applied to a specific break in a rhythmic pattern, as in the question of when to switch from even to uneven or from measured to manic.

Figure 2.5 The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014) gets its tonal character in part from relentlessly flat and symmetrical framing that David Bordwell calls “planimetric” framing (www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/03/26/the-grand-budapest-hotel-wes-anderson-takes-the-43-challenge/). Bordwell describes the cutting between shots that are framed this way as ‘compass point edits’, which move 180 degrees to make shot–reverse shot configurations. This jump from flat and centered to flat and centered has a comically disruptive effect, lessening the sense that this is an actual interchange between people and heightening the absurdity of the characters. [Photo credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures]

Figure 2.6 The fractured lives of the characters in Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2010) free fall through asymmetrical compositions that express the imbalance of powerful forces. Cutting these together across jagged shifts of time period creates a series of disorienting ‘shocks’ and aligns us with the characters and their emotional lives in a visceral cinematic way. [Photo credit: micro_scope]

One and More Bodies

Figure 2.7 Movement is scattered and diffuse in this image of a community mourning the deaths they feel sure are coming in Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2002). [Photo credit: New Zealand Film Comm.; The Kobal Collection]

Figure 2.8 But the individual movements of Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2002) are, in contrast, focused and directed as she saves the whales and reunites the community. [Photo credit: New Zealand Film Comm.; The Kobal Collection]

For an editor, the question of one and more bodies is concerned with the choice of shots and the concentration of movement they contain. In the shaping of an expressive moment an editor may, for example, have choices between tightly framed individuals or looser frames of groups. Or she may have choices about the concentration of movement within different takes. Her questions about a given moment or an overall film might be: Is the concentration of movement high or low, scattered or unified, moving toward chaos or order? To shape these variations into an affective flow, the editor may consider the distribution of movement at a given moment and whether to amplify movement or personalize it by emphasizing a group or an individual.

The Stage Space

In this section of The Art of Making Dances, Humphrey asks choreographers to consider the use of space as an affective tool. The same questions apply for an editor faced with the frame and working to determine rhythm through the use of various shots. Of course the director and cinematographer have already given in-depth consideration to the frame and movement in the frame by the time the material reaches the editor. So, the editor’s concern is with the choreographic composition of the joins of frames and the impact the material has when seen in a flow rather than as individual shots. The questions are: Are shots put together to progress smoothly from wide to close, jump from close to wide, or jump around in size? Does movement flow in a consistent direction, in alternate directions, collide from all screen directions, or are there different patterns at different times? What about angles? What kind of effect are they having and is it to be used sparingly or relentlessly?

Humphrey’s ideas about the art of making dances are helpful to me in demonstrating the principles at work in rhythm, and they may be helpful to an editor if she is stuck. But, as we have seen in Chapter 1, these questions don’t necessarily have to be consciously articulated to be the ones you are grappling with. There are other ways to solve problems than to articulate them. If an editor is working with the movement of time and energy in a film, she is working with these principles of movement distribution, concentration, phrasing, and spatial organization whether she knows it or not. Where these questions may be useful is if the editor knows she is working with movement to create rhythm and wants to know how to engage with choreographic principles of composition.

Figure 2.9 Bill Butler, the editor of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972), cuts extremes of shot sizes hard together at certain moments, creating a jarring, destabilizing rhythm. [Photo credit: Warner Bros., The Kobal Collection]

A choreographer will build up phrases of dance movements, vary them, juxtapose them, interpolate them, and otherwise manipulate them, shaping them within themselves and in relation to one another to make an overall experience of time, energy, and movement called a dance. In film editing, an editor is rarely simply making an experience of time, energy, and movement; she is also shaping story, character relationships, and other kinds of information. Furthermore, film editors rarely work exclusively with human movement. However, in shaping the rhythm of the film, time, energy, and movement are the salient factors. They shape the qualitative experience of the story and information. The movement through time and energy of all of the filmed images is shaped into phrases of related movements and grouped emphasis points. These phrases are then varied, juxtaposed, interpolated, and shaped within themselves and in relation to each other to make the overall experience of time, energy, and movement in a film that is known as rhythm.

Summary

In this chapter the metaphor for editing rhythms has been shifted from music to movement, and we have compared the art of editing to the art of choreography. Choreographers talk about movement pulses and movement phrases and these two words have been applied to editing to see how they may be useful. In editing, sometimes the movement phrase is within the shot and sometimes it is created by juxtaposing shots. Either way, its rhythmic coherence carries the expressive qualities of time and energy. The movement of a steady, inexorable press of a stranger through a bedroom door expresses one kind of time. Sharp flashes of knife points, blood, water, and shower curtain create another. Movement is how we see time and energy. Editing phrases the movement into an expressive rhythm.

The next chapter will examine the specific tools an editor has for the shaping of rhythm in film.

Endnotes

1. Pepperman, R.D., The Eye is Quicker, Film Editing: Making a Good Film Better, p. 207.

2. Scorsese, M., as quoted in Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter, www.editorsguild.com/newsletter/specialjun97/directors.html.

3. Stam, R., Film Theory: An Introduction, p. 43.

4. Eisenstein also uses “orchestration” in a discussion of the relationships of sound and images. This is a more accurate use of orchestration in the sense of distribution of parts—the sound plays one part in creating affect, the images another, and Eisenstein et al. exhort us to use the parts contrapuntally, not redundantly. See “A statement on the sound-film by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov,” in Eisenstein, S., Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, pp. 257–260.

5. Van Leeuwen, T., “Rhythmic structure of the film text,” in Discourse and Communication, p. 218.

6. Tarkovsky, A., Sculpting in Time, p. 117.

7. Eisenstein, S., Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, p. 75.

8. Stevens, K., et al., “Choreographic cognition: composing time and space,” in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition, p. 4.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Tarkovsky, A., Sculpting in Time, p. 117.

12. Van Leeuwen, T., “Rhythmic structure of the film text,” in Discourse and Communication, p. 218.

13. See Humphrey, D., The Art of Making Dances, p. 11.