Tension and Release

Tension and Release in Events

Acclaimed film director John Sayles writes that movies depend on tension and release for their impact. “The audience is made to expect something, the event draws nearer and tension builds, then the thing happens and the tension is released.”¹

Figure 4.1 The physical movement in this image from John Sayles’s film Matewan (1987) poses a question that creates tension, which is: Will the character catch up with the train? James Earl Jones’s performance helps the story to create stakes—we empathize with the movement of his face and body and hope he will get on board, and fear he won’t, and worry about what is at stake if he doesn’t. The shaping of the rhythm of this sequence in editing would involve shaping the duration for which we are held in suspense about those questions and the timing, pacing, and energy of the way the answers unfold. [Photo credit: Red Dog/Cinecom; The Kobal Collection]

The story plants a question or expectation of some event happening and then makes the audience wait for it, anticipating the event—will it happen or won’t it?—with rising tension. When the event happens (something the editor might have shaped to occur after a long time or a short time, a lot of energy or minimal energy) there is release of the tension. A short film may only have one of these events within it, a feature film (fiction or documentary) may have dozens. An episodic series may not only have dozens within a given episode, it may have an expectation or question about what will happen planted at the end of an episode so that the audience anticipates the next episode with growing tension (or downloads it straight away to relieve their tension!). Chapter 8 looks in detail at strategies for shaping cognitive questions and event rhythms.

Tension and Release in Image and Sound

Finally, there are cycles of tension and release in image and sound, and an editor shapes these into patterns, too. An audience is not consciously aware of these cycles, because they are constantly occurring, and sometimes very rapidly. For example if a punch is thrown in one shot a ‘micro’ tension is raised about whether and how it will connect. This tension is released in the next shot, so there is no time to think about whether it will connect, only to feel it. In other words this cycle occurs on a pre-cognitive level.

Rhythm’s physical effect on the spectator is basically also an experience of emotional affect. Because “feelings,” in the sense of emotions, are physical, too. Torben Kragh Grodal talks about this in his book Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition. Grodal reminds us that story gives us cues about how to feel, but the strength of feeling relies on how the images, sounds, and movement are shaped to impact on us physically. He says an important part of the experience of emotions relates to involuntary body reactions:

These involuntary reactions are controlled by the autonomic nervous and endocrine systems, which regulate the viscera, the heart, stomach, lungs, liver and skin, and which play a major role in the constitution of emotions. The connection between “viscera states” and emotions has been known for centuries, because everybody experiences strong changes in the viscera when excited: tears, salivation, change of respiration, butterflies in the stomach, a pounding heart, blushing, sweating.³

In other words, emotions are, at least in part, physical experiences of movement in the body through rises and falls of intensity of activity. Grodal continues, “When a viewer chooses to watch a film, he thereby chooses to be cued into having constant fluctuations [my emphasis] of heartbeat, perspiration, adrenalin-secretion and so on.”⁴ Physical rhythm and its fluctuations in image and sound are looked at more closely in Chapter 6.

The editor is trying to create an appropriately felt rhythm of these fluctuations in the audience. The questions are: How long to keep the heart racing at one rate? When, how, and with what to slow it down? It is not just a matter of finding the right amount of time to build tension or hold off release of story information, it’s a carving of the qualities of that time, also, through timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing. A film’s significance is not just “this happened and then that happened.” A film’s impact is in the way that this, then that, happened, including how fast or slow or bumpily or smoothly or forcefully or limply. As Theo van Leeuwen says:

rhythm plays a crucial role … in the way the story is told, in the game of revealing and withholding story information from the viewers to maximize both their active involvement in anticipating the events and their passive abandon to the story’s events.⁵

So, whereas events, characters and images trigger specific emotions, expectations, and ideas, the rhythms of these modulate the rise and fall of the tension—the “resonance of bodily reactions”⁶—with which we follow them.

Figure 4.2 The ‘auto-ethnographic’ documentary Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012) is structured as an investigation. In it, the filmmaker, Sarah Polley is trying to find out the truth about her father. Editor Mike Munn creates tension and release with the placement of events – as information is slowly released, tension builds about whether she will find the truth. Emotional tension and release play out as the characters struggle with their own feelings and experience some catharsis when the truth is revealed. The images and sounds engage us in the story physically, viscerally, revealing the textures of the story-world, the relationships and the deception. [Photo credit: National Film Board of Canada]

Practical Exercise

Murderer in the Dark

Murderer in the Dark, sometimes called Murderer’s Wink, is a game for experiencing tension and release. Gather together six or eight people to play; a classroom of between twelve and twenty is also an excellent amount. Everyone stands in a circle and closes their eyes. The game moderator walks all the way around the circle and, while walking, taps one person on the shoulder. That person is the murderer, and no one except the moderator and the murderer knows who he is. The murderer’s objective is to “kill” everyone off without being discovered; his weapon is a wink. If the murderer catches the eye of another player and winks, that player has to count slowly to 5 while looking around the room and then “die”; the more theatrically, the better. To discover the murderer you have to see him wink at someone, but not at you.

The game is great fun to play, but the interesting part is the discussion afterward, which concerns time, the release of information, and tension. How much information do you have at the beginning of the game? You know there is a murderer but you don’t know who—you are asking yourself questions: Who is the murderer? Will I be killed? When will someone be killed? With each death there is a shift both of tension and of information—you experience, in rapid succession, shock or surprise depending on how theatrically the death has been performed, then relief that it is not you, then escalating tension as the number of possible victims diminishes. So you could be next, and the tension, fleetingly released, begins to build again.

In working with rhythm, the editor is working with these devices to create tension. How long can a question go unanswered before interest is lost? If the murderer in your game is not bold and no one gets killed, the interest diminishes very quickly, because the tension of the questions “who” and “when” is answered by “no one” and “never”!

The release of information is not just a matter of timing, but also of energy—if a victim just shrugs and says, “I’m dead,” there is very little impact. If he suddenly stands, shrieks, and falls writhing to the floor, there is, perhaps, overkill. Modulating the intensity or energy of a performance to release and rekindle tension is part of the editor’s job, too.

The tension is a combination of these three things—timing, energy, and release of information. Tension is in the unanswered question; rhythm is the time, energy, and movement that modulate its build and release.

Figure 4.3 A classic wink: Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour in Caught in the Draft (David Butler, 1941). [Photo credit: Paramount; The Kobal Collection]

By modulating tension and release, rhythm supports comprehension of a film. Rhythm refines the rides we take with a film—the rise and fall, the speed of the curves, the sense of balance or danger in the stability or suddenness of movement in the world of the film. It doesn’t matter if the film is a thriller or a romance, narrative or abstract; fact or fiction; the editor works with the “life of the object visibly recorded in the frame”⁷ to determine the timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing of its movement, and spectators’ bodies respond to this rhythm.

Figure 4.4 One of the reasons that the murder in the shower of Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho (1960) is so shocking is that it is so unexpected. Director Alfred Hitchcock, master of subverting our expectations, does not develop tension in the conventional ways, and so when the shower scene comes, our heart rates and other visceral responses jump very rapidly from a state of calm to a state of extreme activity. [Photo credit: Paramount; The Kobal Collection; Bud Fraker]

Synchronization

Riding the rise and fall of tension and release when watching a movie, the audience’s body rhythms and the rhythms of the film sync up. The “ride,” rhythmically speaking, is the movement of the film composed in such a way as to influence the viewer’s pulse, breath, and attention.

As discussed earlier, rhythm is part of our biology, and to survive we oscillate with the rhythms of our environment, our planet, and our solar system. Similarly, to survive socially, we coordinate our rhythms with those of other humans. For example, we meet the energy and pace of others in conversation, and we synchronize with them to have an effective transaction. If, at a gathering, everyone is talking in hushed tones and with terse gestures, we match these to understand and connect with the people. If those in the gathering are laughing uproariously and flinging their words and gestures freely, speaking in hushed tones and with terse gestures won’t coordinate and will either cause those in the gathering to change or cause you to be left out. “As we act together we synchronize. The rhythms of our actions become as finely attuned to each other as the parts of different instruments in a musical performance.”⁸

The implication of this social synchronization, for film spectatorship, is that the film becomes a rhythmical partner in a social exchange to which the spectator synchronizes. This physiological syncing function of rhythm in film is a significant source of affect. As philosopher Gilles Deleuze says in Cinema 2: The Time Image, “It is through the body … that cinema forms its alliance with the spirit, with thought.”⁹

Deleuze goes on to suggest that cinema forms this alliance by making the body pass through a sort of “ceremony.” This ceremony to which Deleuze refers is, I believe, a ceremony of synchronization. The film’s rhythm synchronizes the body, influencing the spectator’s physical and cognitive fluctuations to follow its own. My own description of this ceremony is of movies as a form of meditation for the unquiet mind.

Meditation is a practice that, through concentration, frequently on some rhythmically repetitive phrase or chant or breathing pattern, stills the fluctuations of the mind. The various objectives of this practice, from inner peace to complete enlightenment, are not what make it comparable with movies. What is comparable is the syncing or bonding that occurs through rhythmic connectivity in meditation. This aspect of meditation is imitated by the functioning of rhythm in film.

By shifting the spectator’s physiological rhythms into sync with its own rhythms, film organizes the body’s fluctuations into a single, focused, undistracted attention. The objectives of meditation can only be realized when “the fluctuations of the mind cease.”¹⁰ The objectives of rhythm in film are realized when the fluctuations of mind are subsumed into the fluctuations of tension and release in the film. Some of this work is done by story, structure, and performance, but some of it is done by shaping movement and energy over time to create the cycles of tension and release to which the spectator’s mind and body synchronize.

Case Study in Tension, Release, and Synchronization: Broadcast News

There are hundreds of sequences that could be chosen to illustrate the movement of tension and release in films. I have chosen this sequence from Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987), not just because it works so well, but because it is a scene about the rhythm of the editing process. In it, there is a brief moment in which the synchronization that happens between the director and the uncut material is dramatized, revealing and illustrating the activation of mirror neurons and kinaesthetic empathy. The other especially useful aspect of this sequence for talking about shaping movement into cycles of tension and release is its overtly physical expressions of emotion and events. The director, James L. Brooks, takes delight in shaping the physical expressions of rhythm to draw us, physically and psychologically, into the tensions of the situation.

The plot of Broadcast News is about the shift in the culture of television news coverage from serious journalism to entertainment. It is told through the stories of three central characters: Jane Craig (Holly Hunter), a producer who believes passionately in journalistic integrity; Tom Grunick (William Hurt), a handsome, airheaded news anchor who performs well but doesn’t really understand what he’s saying; and Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), an intellectual reporter who is too earnest and can’t compete with the smooth, self-confident Tom, even though he’s a better reporter.

Figure 4.5 Richard Marks, editor of Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987), cuts to this scene in the middle of Jane Craig’s (Holly Hunter) phone conversation and edit. She is multitasking, talking rapidly into the phone, watching the rushes, and barking orders at the online editor (Christian Clemenson) all at once, which immediately establishes the base pulse and energy of the scene—this is as calm as things are going to get. [Photo credit: Americent Films, American Entertainment Partners L:P, Gracie Films]

At the beginning of an early sequence in the film, there is a tight cut to Jane Craig, the producer, in the edit suite, working to a deadline, commanding her online editor, Bobby (Christian Clemenson), to run the story they are editing one more time (Fig. 4.5). He protests mildly and she overruns him with overlapping dialog and a much more forceful tone. Immediately, with the timing of these first cuts and the energy of the exchange, a tension is created. Most particularly it is Holly Hunter’s portrayal of Jane’s physical tension that is driving the scene. Her tone, speed, and attack express a furious will to keep control, overlaid on an edge of panic. The editor of Broadcast News, the extraordinary Richard Marks, cuts between Jane and Bobby in such a way as to highlight, extend, and physically impress this tension upon us as we experience the flow of the story. Marks cuts back to Jane as she grabs her water bottle and drinks abruptly, and to Bobby as he stabs the keys of his console with a rapid-fire staccato. Even though they are both just doing their jobs and nothing too dramatic is happening, we experience these punctuations and emphasis points as a rhythmic volley that lifts the energy and attention.

Figure 4.6 In (a) Holly Hunter is speaking the same line as the character in the news story she is cutting (b; character on the left). She imitates his cadence and says the words with him, essentially singing along with him to immerse herself fully in his intent and the rhythm that expresses it. She has raised her pen in a gesture like a conductor’s and waves it sharply at Bobby, the online editor, to indicate where she wants him to cut in to the shot.

At this point in the scene, Holly Hunter’s character, Jane, actually enacts the synchronization that takes place between the material and the people working on it in the editing suite. As the voice in the videotape she is editing says a line, Jane says the line, too, aloud, mimicking the videotaped character’s intonation and intent (Fig. 4.6a). Holly Hunter perfectly plays out the way that Jane, as the person cutting the film, would mirror the video image, embodying it physically, as a quick and direct way of giving herself the physical feeling of the uncut material. This physical imitation of the material is like blinking or breathing with it, or as will be discussed later, “singing” with it. As the timing, pacing, and energy of the material inhabit the body of the person cutting the film, she has a direct physical feeling of where to cut. She knows what the phrasing should be because she can feel it, in her body. This moment gives a succinct insight into the action that directors and editors do over and over again in shaping the rhythm of a film; whether they are shaping it at their leisure or under the bone-crushing pressure of a broadcast news production, they physically imbibe the rhythms they see and hear, and shape them to feel right in response to the feelings they have for them in their own bodies.

Figure 4.7 Holly Hunter and Joan Cusack play their characters’ relationships and intentions, the subtext of the scene, physically. Holly Hunter is shutting her eyes to try to shut out Joan Cusack’s manic intrusion, with the realities of time, on her vision for the piece, while Cusack thrusts her energy and anxiety forward at Hunter with every muscle and intonation.

As the scene in Broadcast News progresses, more characters enter the tiny cutting suite, each bringing with them a contributing rhythm. First is Tom Grunick, who, as played by William Hurt, is a placid, accommodating presence. His rhythmic function is as a “rest.” Shots of him, bemused and observing quietly, are dropped in between shots of other characters to give us breath, a contrast, and a bit of distance from the escalating tension. The entrance of Blair Litton, played by the inimitable Joan Cusack, brings with it the question at the heart of the tension of the sequence. Everything that happens for the rest of this sequence, both rhythmically and narratively, refers back to this question. Blair says, or rather insists, urgently, “We don’t have enough time!” (Fig. 4.7), thus planting the most classic, oft-used, and reliable tension creator in motion pictures: the time pressure. Will they make it on time? It is important to note that time pressure is not just a narrative device; it is, of course, a rhythmic device, because time is a key element of rhythm. The time pressure almost acts as another character or voice in the rhythmic composition being constructed here, because each character’s rhythm is played against it. Jane’s tight, terse gestures get tighter and terser, for example. And when Bobby makes a little mistake, it triggers a major movement into another gear.

Figure 4.8 (a) When Bobby says “whoops,” all of the characters assembled in the edit suite in Broadcast News reveal their panic about the time pressure they are under. They move into position (b) and start a rhythmic chant that has the function of probably driving poor Bobby, the online editor, crazy, and of raising the spectators’ heart rates and blood pressure as we get caught up in the rhythm the characters create.

By the time this little mistake occurs, much has happened: new narration has been recorded, new relationship tensions have been revealed, we’ve cut away and come back to the edit suite, and we’re down to 2 minutes before the story is due to air. Bobby fumbles (offscreen), says “whoops,” and everyone shifts (Figs. 4.8a and 4.8b). The actors move into position like a string quartet or a corps du ballet, and the director, James L. Brooks, begins to have some fun with the tensions and rhythms he has set up. Holly Hunter’s character, Jane, the producer, takes the lead—her voice is the strongest and she has the most to lose here. She starts chanting, “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby, Bobby,” at a rate and consistency designed to move our heart rates up a couple of notches. Her friend Aaron, the intellectual reporter who has come in to support her, plays the viola to her first violin. He punctuates her chant with low moans and a steady rocking. Jane’s adversary in this scene, the hysterical timekeeper played by Joan Cusack, takes up the counter-melody with a steady stream of high-pitched squeals or grunts as though she is under torture of some kind, and William Hurt’s character Tom, the cello in this quartet, grinds his teeth steadily, his eyebrows working contrapuntally to the hysteria around him. This is a staged bit of physically and aurally expressed rhythmic tension, and it gets me every time. I know it is coming, and yet when the rhythm begins, I still sync up to it. The rhythm acts on my body, and my conscious knowledge of its purpose, direction, and outcome is irrelevant to its physiological effect on me as a rhythm.

The moment ends abruptly with three shots: (cut) Bobby pops the tape out of the machine, (cut) hands it to Blair, and (cut) Tom says “GO!”

But the release is minimal—the tension of the little rhythm ballet described above is capped off with the punctuating three cuts and the word “GO,” but the tension of the scene’s big question—Will they make it in time?—is not resolved; in fact it is rekindled with the force of Tom’s “GO!” And so ensues a beautifully cut madcap physical comedy sequence as Joan Cusack’s character, Blair, all flying hair, flopping limbs, and flinging exclamations, dashes from the cutting room to the newsroom (Fig. 4.10). Every possible visual and physical obstacle, encounter, and energy in this sequence is shaped by the editor, Richard Marks, to have maximum impact and inspire the gravest and funniest kinaesthetic empathy in the spectator. We feel every one of the great Joan Cusack’s galumphing moves in our own

Figure 4.9 Three shots in less than 2½ seconds conclude this part of the Broadcast News sequence. In (a) Bobby pulls the desperately needed tape from the machine; he passes it to Blair in (b), nearly knocking Tom out with it; and in (c) William Hurt, as Tom, uses his energy to throw the tape and Blair into a headlong hurtling trajectory toward the newsroom with one word: “GO!”

Figure 4.10 Broadcast News Editor Richard Marks cuts together three shots to make a dazzling trajectory of Joan Cusack’s move as she dodges a file cabinet drawer in her mad dash to the newsroom with the tape that is due to go straight to air in 15 seconds.

body, and although it feels as though it is happening to us, it isn’t; it is happening to her, and is therefore madly funny.

I find it interesting that my students consistently find this sequence both tension-filled and humorous, even watching it twice in a row. The first time I screen it, I just let them watch and laugh. The second time, I break it down into all of the points articulated above, but, piece by piece, they still find it funny, and they are still filled with tension. I attribute this phenomenon to the power of rhythm over information. As we mirror and empathize with the movement of images and sounds, emotions and events on the screen, our hearts, pulses, breaths, and bodies get caught up with these movements even though we cognitively know where they will lead. If the film’s movements are directed and cut so that we feel with them, then we synchronize to them, and their rhythms move us through cycles of tension and release.

Summary

The function of rhythm in film is to create cycles of tension and release, which the spectator “rides” physiologically, emotionally, and cognitively. The ride is felt as variations on the pulse of a temporal world that is created in the process of editing the rhythms of the film. By syncing the spectator’s rhythms to the film, rhythm functions in a way that is comparable to meditation; it provides a “restriction of the fluctuations of consciousness.”¹¹ This “meditation for the unquiet mind” is not a path to enlightenment, but it activates a physiological focusing effect similar to that of meditation to carry the spectator along on the ride of the rhythms of the film.

This chapter on tension, release, and synchronization also connects the findings of the first three chapters to propose specific ways that the editor’s various intuitions, processes, and tools shape the spectator’s experience. The ideas about mirror neurons and kinaesthetic empathy, about the choreographic shaping of pulses and phrases, and about the timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing of rhythm have been looked at in the light of their impact on the spectator’s experience of rhythm in film. The result of this discussion can be summarized in an aphorism frequently repeated by filmmakers: The editor is the film’s first audience. The movement that the editor shapes into rhythm must first affect the editor in order to become the cycles of tension and release and the synchronizing force that move the spectator.

The conclusion at the end of the first four chapters of this book is that rhythm in film editing is shaped by editors through an intuitive knowledge of the rhythms of the world and of their own bodies as informed by their kinaesthetic empathy and mirror neurons. The same physiological rhythm detectors are, of course, present in the spectators, who imbibe the edited/shaped rhythms of the film physiologically. The editor’s knowledge and experience of rhythm are gathered through participation in movement, so movement is the material that is choreographically manipulated to have the desired effects on the spectator. One could say that rhythm in film editing is this shaped movement or, more precisely:

Endnotes

1. Sayles, J., Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie “Matewan”, pp. 114–115.

2. For more on embodied simulation, see: Gallese, V. “Intentional attunement: A neurophysiological perspective on social cognition” and Gallese, V. and Guerra, M., “Embodying movies: Embodied simulation and film studies.”

3. Grodal, T.K., Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition, p. 42.

4. Ibid.

5. Van Leeuwen, T., Introducing Social Semiotics, p. 186.

6. Ibid.

7. Tarkovsky, A., Sculpting in Time, p. 119.

8. Van Leeuwen, T., Introducing Social Semiotics, p. 182.

9. Deleuze, G., Cinema 2: The Time Image, p. 189.

10. Gannon, S., and Life, D., Jivamukti Yoga, p. 26.

11. Feuerstein, G., The Yoga-Sutras of Pata ñ jali: A New Translation and Commentary, p. 26.