First Scenes

As a metaphor for editing a structure, architecture is useful because it is easy to visualize. The size, shape, and order of rooms are analogous to events and the expectations they create. If you go through the front door of an office building and find yourself in a grand marbled foyer that it takes 30 paces to cross, you have a sense of the building, its rhythms, and the ways it will shape experience. If you open the front door of a brick house and find a small, cluttered living room with wood beams and a fireplace, a different expectation is created. If you open the front door of a house and find yourself in a bathroom, or a prison, or a portal into John Malkovich’s brain, expectations are confounded and you prepare yourself for a different kind of experience altogether.

Similarly, in shaping of a film’s event rhythm the editor sets up expectations and begins a pattern with their choice of opening shots and scenes. For example, James Bond films will invariably open onto explosions because the James Bond franchise is designed to meet expectations that are formed before even entering the cinema. The explosions in the opening sequence will “rhyme,” in a sense, with the explosions at the film’s climax. In this way, the structure is rhythmically, if predictably, fulfilled. Conversely, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013) sets us up with expectations of a sci-fi/action thriller with a high stakes opening sequence in space, spiced with light banter from well known Hollywood star George Clooney. We think that this will set the rhythm for the film, but expectations are subverted. Gravity uses the rhythmic conventions of an action movie in the first sequence as a cladding to cover what is at heart the introspective story of a single mother with regrets. The climactic sequence of Gravity (spoiler alert) when the character must rescue herself does rhyme with the disaster/action feeling of the first scenes, but not by repetition of the rhythm. Instead the film has aligned us intimately with the character’s breath and fear, so that although the ultimate rescue action is small scale compared to the opening, it feels bigger and higher stakes than the opening. The rhythm that opens the film has developed, modulated. and focused on the fate of one woman. As in all films the first scene or “room” of these films creates expectations, from there the editor, working with the writer and director, meets, develops, changes, exceeds, or subverts expectations with the rhythms and events that follow.

The important point for editors to consider, or rather to tune to, is the rhythmic pattern suggested by the first scene. Will its qualities of time and movement become a motif in the film? Will this motif form a rhythmic structure repeating and developing throughout the film? First scenes are surprisingly malleable and there are examples of first scenes being altered by editors

• to clarify stakes sooner and set up a pattern of tension and release more effectively;
• to alter the time structures of films and give them more complexity;
• to introduce characters differently and align audiences more clearly;
• or to set up visual style with shots that may have originally been intended to go elsewhere but which have the qualities the editor wants to use to paint the whole experience to come.

First scenes, as will be discussed in the two cases studies in this chapter, set up the event rhythms of films, create expectations, and set the pulses of audiences to synchronize with the movement of the story. But editing first scenes can be like writing introductions: sometimes best to write them after you know how the rest of the essay will unfold.

Dramatic Questions

A dramatic question is a question with something at stake and an action implied.

A film built around dramatic action often has a dramatic question being raised soon after the story-world is established. Once we know where we are and who we care about in the story, the plots will get us to ask: Will something in particular happen? Will someone get what they need? Will the problems resolve? Plots are then designed to complicate, escalate, and ultimately resolve these questions, and the editor’s job is to parse events out so that the plots do their job—they give us some resolution, but also keep us asking.

Dramatic questions raise tension by making us worry about the stakes and the actions they imply. The tension of these questions is the energy that propels the viewer’s interest forward. The editor can arrange or re-arrange events to create or heighten dramatic questions and thus shape the rise and fall of tension and release. One tool the editor uses for this is timing (in the sense of when she puts events in relation to each other). She can shift the timing of events around the sequence to shape the plot so that questions are posed by events and resolved in a satisfying flow.

Editors can also employ the tool of the ellipsis. Will someone do something? Cut out the bit of the scene where a character answers the question by saying “yes I will do it” and jump straight to the scene of them doing it. This creative ellipsis on the part of the editor activates the viewer’s mind in piecing together the cause-and-effect chain, and this activation has an energizing effect.

Figure 8.1 In this sequence from Episode 2, Season 3, of The West Wing (series creator Aaron Sorkin, 1999 to 2006), flashing lights, moving cameras, emotional tensions, competing points of focus, and multiple agendas crowd the frames of eleven shots (with only one setup repeating) as they race by in under 30 seconds. But there’s only one question that has been asked and answered: Will the President run for re-election? The series makers sustain our attention on that question while reminding us of all the stakes and keeping the question in motion, like a fast-moving soccer ball, around the array of stakeholders. The editor, Bill Johnson, A.C.E., organizes the motion of that ball in play, revealing the President in close-up only when he reveals his answer. As soon as the first question closes, a new one is launched. Yes, the President will run, but will he win? This question structures the events of the whole of Season 3. Using this kind of classical patterning, The West Wing sets up stakes and the effective action of individual characters on their journey. This is quintessentially American storytelling, with a quintessentially American subject. The question is clear, the answer is clear and the time taken in between question and answer escalates tension. [Photo credit: John Wells Productions, Warner Bros. Television]

Soviet film director and theorist Vsevolod Pudovkin articulated this principle as early as 1929. His notion of “transference of interest of the intent spectator” applies as the events in a film pulse between posing questions and answering them, between creating tension and releasing it:

Since 1929, the methods and rates of assimilation of information by audiences may have changed. Certainly, according to studies done by Barry Salt and by David Bordwell, the average shot lengths in films have been cut in half.² However, the practice of creating the question in the spectator’s mind and then simultaneously resolving that question and creating it anew is still salient to the creation of event rhythm.

Figure 8.2 The West Wing finished in 2006 and the American version of House of Cards (Beau Willimon, 2013–2015) began in 2013. Much changed in the intervening years, including the shift from free-to-air television (with its constraints on the structuring of events around ad breaks) to streaming services which allow for more complex rhythms to match the complexity of characters, storylines, and audience expectations. In watching House of Cards we seem to be able to hope the central character, played by Kevin Spacey, overcomes his obstacles and achieves his goals at the same time we fear he will. Getting audiences to like and hate him at the same time is no mean feat on the part of the writers, directors, and performers. The editor’s role in this complexity may come about when the order or emphasis on events has to be manipulated so that not too much of one quality overshadows the other. [Photo credit: Media Rights Capitol, Panic Pictures (II), Trigger Street Productions]

Structures as Event Patterns

Not all structures work by raising and resolving dramatic questions. Other kinds of questions may be at work in engaging an audience’s interest and getting them to stay with a film. For example, questions of how will something unfold, what is the nature of something, who is right or wrong, why are things so? These questions do not necessarily have anything at stake or imply an action, but they do create opportunities for fascinating films and event rhythms. Here are just a few examples of structures without dramatic questions, but with huge creative opportunities for editing:

Life: in the film Boyhood (2014) Richard Linklater structured a fiction film around the actual growing and a changing of real people over 12 years, returning each year to film another event. While this happens more often in documentary, it is a revelation in fiction to use a real life to show the actual inherent structure of a human experience. Here the editor Sandra Adair’s decisions were not about dramatic questions, but about emphasis and relationship of scenes over time.

Argument: films can be structured around points to be made. In argument structure the first question is: are we presenting both sides or just lining up the evidence to prove one point? In Michael Hanneke’s Caché (aka Hidden, 2005) an argument seems to be being made about the French involvement in colonization and repression of Algiers, but there is ambiguity in the unfolding of events that forces the viewer to leave with questions rather than answers. Conversely, in a Michael Moore documentary, there is no ambiguity about perspective: evidence is lined up so pointedly that there is no room for debate.

List: in this structure one thing follows another within a bounded category. The 2008 film Pockets, by James Lees, is a “list” film.³ It presents a series of people who tell us what they have in their pockets. In just under 3 minutes the juxtapositions of people’s words, tone, expressions, faces, and the contents of their pockets creates a compendium of experiences, a metaphor of human diversity and connectedness. The editor William Bridges’ decisions would have been about: order of characters; duration of shots to weave a dynamic fabric of these experiences; and making juxtapositions to give rise to reflections and metaphors.

Braids (in Multi-Strand Narratives): The braid structure is just one of many available for integrating multiple narratives in a single story. The braid structure involves juxtaposing the elements of three different story or idea lines so that as each one unfolds it reveals further, or comments on something about the others. In “…the dancer from the dance” (Pearlman, 2014) three documentary stories are braided together in order to reveal a diversity of ideas, practices, and experiences of life lived in dance. Complex narrative television has created a renaissance of multi-strand narratives and a full dissection of their diverse structures is probably its own complete book, waiting to be written.

Musical or mathematical: This kind of structure foregrounds pattern and may even explicitly name the film for the pattern, e.g., 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (Francois Girard, 1993) Unlike a simple list, however, the pattern of repetition of motifs, emphases, durations is an intrinsic part of the structure and may create an experience which is non-narrative, abstract, and direct address to the senses rather than the cognitive processes. The editing of music videos will often overtly reveal their musical structure or patterning around chorus and verse.

Portrait: a person may be the structuring principle of a film. A fictional or documentary portrait will reveal a person’s themes and perspective, their empathies, metaphors, memories, and plans in such a way that does not necessarily take an audience on a journey through the experience but rather places these expressions of a life in such a way as to reveal the person or community. Sally Potter’s 1992 adaptation of Virginia Wolff’s Orlando functions in this way, as does the underlying text. Erroll Morris’ The Fog of War: 11 Lessons from the Life of Robert S. Mcnamara (2003) is just one example of many portraits that can be found in documentary. In each of these films a character is juxtaposed with events, times, and places and each juxtaposition creates a new understanding of the character and of the culture.

There are as many other types of structure as there may be organizing principles. The key to differentiating a structure from “just anything, anytime” is the notion of organizing. Structure requires boundaries for its foundations—what will be included and excluded—and it requires support beams—the rhythmic revelation of plots, images, emotions or ideas to create a coherent experience of events over time.

Figure 8.3 Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012) is a series of seemingly discreet events. Each event or “act” is preceded by a ride in a car and a change of clothes by the character Oscar (Denis Lavant) as he goes on his way to carry out the work of his next “appointment.” This structure could be compared to a string of different shaped beads interspersed with square stones. There is alternation between the beads and stones, the beads themselves are each distinctive. The pattern is dynamic and holds interest while continually subverting or changing expectations. [Photo credit: Pierre Grise Productions, Théo Films, Pandora Filmproduktion, Arte France Cinéma, WDR / Arte]

Energy, Pace, and Timing

The flow of energy in one scene or sequence can be “thrown” to the next one so that events feel as though they are in response to one another, and the chain of the whole holds together. If events are given too much emphasis by being too long or over accentuated they may feel disproportionate to the events that follow them. Similarly, if they whip by too quickly, they may not have the impact needed to make what follows them feel related. The useful question for an editor here is: What is this scene, sequence, or event about? This may at first seem obvious, but the answer is not always so obvious and needs to be considered not just in relation to itself, but in relation to events that preceded and that follow. A scene may appear to be about a car crash, for example, but really be about rebuilding trust between two characters. If the event is cut only for the text and not for the subtext, then events later on, where the trust is at stake, will lose their links in the cause-and-effect chain.

Sometimes scripts are overwritten because things that are in black-and-white print don’t have the same energy, impact, or information that is present in sound and moving image. One of my first editing teachers, Sara Bennett, tells a story that neatly sums this up. She had a job where there were ten pages of script setting up a character’s social and economic status. There were scenes in his office, scenes at a restaurant, scenes at home, none of which contained events that really mattered to the plot, they were just there to set up the character’s status. Onscreen, the ten pages were cut down to one shot of the character in his suit slamming the door of his Mercedes and walking into his beautiful suburban home. One shot said it all.

Directors may easily have the same thing happen when shaping a performance. When the performance is in little bits being shot over hours, days, or weeks, it may be hard to tell when an emotional moment has been stated. Once the editor starts shaping these moments into sequences, though, she can see when an emotional event has already occurred. Leaving in moments in the unfolding of an event that are emotional repeats will dull the impact and break the momentum of the audience attention or interest in what happens next.

Shaping event rhythm relies on knowing when and how audiences know enough about one event and are ready for the next. If a film engages the interest of a particular audience, but that audience stops caring “what happens next,” then the event rhythm has been misjudged. The editor, in this case, can ask herself: Is there a problem with energy, timing or pace of a particular event? It may not always be the point at which the audience loses interest that has to be changed. In fact it is often something before that point, something that has given too much away, gone on for too long, dragged too much in its energy, been a distraction, or in some other way stolen the impact of the later event.

Creating Structure and Rhythm Simultaneously

Before digital editing systems, editors were taught to cut “structure first, then rhythm.” Editors working on actual celluloid strips of film had to take care not to mangle the work print by excessive handling. So they would make assemblies of all of the good takes laid end to end, then, choices would be made about which take to use. The selected takes would be roughly cut into a structure so that the editor and director would then be able to view the structure and the order of the shots that would convey them. Later, in the transition from the rough-cut to the fine-cut stage the rhythm of emotional exchanges would be refined, images and sounds would be trimmed to flow well. Because cutting on celluloid required a linear progression from rough structure to refined cutting the idea of structure became separated from the idea of rhythm.

But editors don’t have to worry about mangling celluloid any more. So we start thinking about structure and rhythm at the same time, and these two things have been re-integrated. We can manipulate the precise timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing of shots and cuts right from the start of a process, so structures have rhythms right from the start, and these rhythms are how we experience the movement of story.

This has changed the expectations that directors and producers bring to the first screening of a cut. If we go back to the architectural metaphor, we can say that in the pre-digital era producers and directors might expect to see bare foundations first with pillars and beams exposed. Their eyes were trained to understand how a structure would evolve into an experience. But this training of the eye is rare now, so editors cut everything at once—structural foundations and support beams are rarely seen without the rhythms of emotional interchanges, images, and sounds being somewhat polished.

It is now very unusual to make an assembly and rough-cut of structure without an articulated rhythm. Instead, the first presentation of a structure will have been given some rhythmic consideration at the level of the individual cut, the scene, the sequence, and the whole. Then, the process is to refine, adjust, or completely change structure and the rhythm of the structure simultaneously. In the contemporary process, the shaping of rhythm is part of the shaping of structure. Throughout the cutting process, from the first cut forward, events are restructured and rhythms are refined simultaneously.

Real Events v. Fictional Events

Cutting documentary and cutting scripted drama diverge somewhat in their processes for shaping event rhythm.

Using the architectural metaphor for structure and applying it to documentary we can say that an editor is often a documentary’s architect. The foundations may have been planned through a written treatment, but in documentary the foundations of a structure are more malleable than in fiction. Life gives plans a battering when shooting many kinds of documentary. This doesn’t mean documentaries don’t have foundational structure that guide decisions about approach to shooting, and what is included and excluded, what characters get followed, events get observed, questions get asked. But the characters, events, and questions may not behave as expected and the foundational structure of documentary is often, therefore, determined in editing. The editor watches material and decides what its support beams are—what characters and events will be emphasized and what relationship they will be placed in within the structure. In this way, the placement of support beams—the characters and events—into relationships with different frequency and emphasis determines the foundations and the rhythm of the structure simultaneously.

Working with scripted fiction, on the other hand, it might be most useful for editors to think of themselves as creative engineers rather than architects. An editor’s function in scripted fiction is not to design the structure, but to make it work, which may mean making adjustment to its design, and may just mean making its scenes strong and arranging them in an order that sustains interest and reveals ideas.

In fiction, foundational structures are usually set in scripting and if the shooting follows the script, a radical change to these foundations is tricky to accomplish. It can be done. Mullholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) apparently started out as a TV series and was structurally redesigned from foundation upward when the funding fell through. Another example, as editor Ralph Rosenblum writes in his memoir When the Shooting Stops, is Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977). Apparently Annie Hall didn’t really have a foundational structure. It was a series of events without a plan that Rosenblum turned into a poignant and culturally resonant love story by giving it structure. In these cases the editor shaped the foundations and then gave that shape a rhythm through decisions about where to place the support beams of events.

But these are exceptions. Usually in fiction a structure is designed before shooting, and the editor re-shapes it and realizes it by making decisions within the foundations that are set by the story-world. An editor can’t turn a marble foyer into a cosy cottage, but she can decide if you enter the marble foyer and cross it with 30 echoing footsteps first or if you enter the film by hearing a ping! and stepping straight into the elevator at the back of the foyer, and thus set completely different expectations for your film.

Reintegrating Rhythms

In most productions, physical, emotional, and event rhythms are all three at work, all the time, to create the movement and energy of the film. The physical moves emotions, the emotional moves events, and the events move visually and aurally. In this way, the rhythm of the film is experienced as a whole, greater than the sum of its parts.

Delineating distinctions between kinds of rhythm is useful as a method for understanding aspects of the whole. Separating physical, emotional, and event rhythms is a way of talking about strands of rhythm that may all be present in any two shots. One place where the distinctions can be useful is when an editor needs to know what dominates the movie she is cutting: What kind of movie is it? What kind of sequence or scene or cut? What are its priorities? The questions that each kind of rhythm poses can be asked of the raw material. The answers will point clearly to the film’s priorities. But the awareness that at any given point all three kinds of rhythm may be present will be helpful in making the cut that much more subtle and articulate in its rhythms.

A film is like a living body in that it has physical movement, emotional movement, and changes in circumstances or events all occurring, balancing and working in a cause-and-effect relationship with one another almost all of the time. The editor, who shapes the film’s rhythms by using knowledge of the rhythms of the world and the rhythms of her own body, knows that there is not much life in a film without all three rhythms counterpointing, energizing, and shaping each other. To shape rhythms with a balance of physical movement, emotions, and events, intuitive editors draw on their own internal balancing act of physical, emotional, and event rhythms.

The shaping of event rhythm takes into account physical and emotional rhythm and weaves them into an integrated, rhythmic structure. Accomplished storytellers will set up these rhythmic patterns from the outset. The openings of their films establish the rhythm to be developed, the feeling of the story that will unfold. The following case studies focus on the beginnings of two films and how they set up the films’ overall event rhythm. From the openings, we can tell that each film has a radically different rhythm even though they are both stories of Italian mobsters in America. Each one’s patterns of time, movement, and energy are established in the first minutes and then developed and woven over the whole of the structure to convey the story rhythmically.

Case Study: The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

The core rhythm of The Godfather is stated in the first shot, established in the first scene, developed in the first sequence, and consistently maintained as a storytelling element conveying the themes and attitudes of the film. There is another countering rhythm in the film that is set up in the second scene and appears at intervals throughout the film until, 2½ hours later, in one of the most famous scenes in editing history, the two rhythmic qualities are intercut to bring the film to a climactic and complete realization.

The first shot of the film is a 2½ minute pull back from the face of a middle-aged Italian man, Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto), telling a harrowing story of his daughter’s abuse at the hands of callous young American boys. The shot slowly reveals the silhouette of the Godfather (Marlon Brando), who is listening. The physical movement of time and energy in this shot starts out being concentrated in Bonasera’s face and eyes as he states his beliefs (beliefs that set up one of the central tensions of the film, the tension between the new life and ways of America and those of Sicily, the old country). But as the frame widens out and pulls away from Bonasera’s face, the darkness around him becomes more engulfing, his expressions less visible, his stature and energy diminishes, until the silhouette of the Godfather fills a third or more of the frame. The stillness creates physical tension by holding the question of who will disturb this physical space and energy with movement and how.

The emotional rhythm in this shot is in the tension between the movement of Bonasera’s voice, his cadence of outrage, counterpointed by the movement of the camera away from him, pulling back evenly, dispassionately. It is as though Bonasera is throwing his emotional energy into a growing void. This handling of emotion is also thematic for The Godfather. The shaping of the time, movement, and energy of emotion in this shot speaks directly to the spectator about how emotion is handled in this world: the outrages and blood feuds are kept at a distance, handled deliberately; they are “just business,” not personal (Fig. 8.4).

The first scene of The Godfather is an event that will be repeated four more times in the first sequence: someone will come into the Godfather’s office and ask him for a favor, which, on this day of his daughter’s wedding, he cannot refuse. Each time the supplicant achieves his objective, but so does the Godfather, who makes a business of placing others under obligation to him. The rhythm of this first scene—stately, controlled, sustained, void of any physical or emotional violence—establishes one of the two initiating rhythms that work in counterpoint to each other to make the overall event rhythm of the film.

Figure 8.4 Amid somber colors and stately movements Bonasera whispers his request into the Godfather’s (Marlon Brando’s) ear. [Photo credit: Paramount; The Kobal Collection]

Figure 8.5 Al Martino and Talia Shire in the raucous movement of bright colors and sounds in the wedding party scene of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972). [Photo credit: Paramount; The Kobal Collection]

The other rhythmic quality of the film is established in the second scene, the scene of the Godfather’s daughter’s wedding party (Fig. 8.5). This buoyant party is filled with effusive gestures, bright colors, crowded, busy frames, and movement in all directions. The brightly jagged physical movement of people, voices, patterns of leaves and dresses, and songs are the meaning, just as, later in the film, the bright, jagged movement of extreme violence will carry the meaning of the physical energy that disrupts and punctuates the dispassionate rhythm of the other transactions.

The first and second scenes of The Godfather establish the pattern that the event rhythm of the film will have: grave deliberation occasionally jarred by energetic outbursts. In the climactic scene, known as the Baptism Scene, the two qualities are brought together. The stately, composed shots of a Catholic baptism in a cavernous church, a holy place of exalted worship, are intercut with the sudden, shocking brutal murders of five of the Godfather’s enemies. By pulling the sound of the liturgy and the church music across the shots of the murders, the editors William Reynolds, A.C.E., and Peter Zinner, A.C.E., impress the stately, sanctifying sounds of the family’s beliefs across the images of the horror they are committing. By timing the cuts to convey the clear culpability and knowledge the Godfather has of the violence he is perpetrating, and slicing through the peaceful baptism with countering thrusts of the ferocious energy of vengeance, the editors create a masterful dance back and forth that encapsulates the meaning of the film: the clash is what shapes the character of a man destined to be a powerful “Godfather.”

In The Godfather, as in all great films, physical, emotional, and event rhythms are integrated. Together they are the shape of time, movement, and energy that express the meaning of the film. In The Godfather the shaping of the rhythm creates our understanding, at an immediate, visceral level, of the grave and ceremonial world in which honor and family sanctify, contextualize, even justify the chaotic and jarring acts of extreme violence that both disrupt and fuel it.

Case Study: Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

The two driving forces that structure the events of the entire film Goodfellas are set up in the first scene: a murder and a lifelong desire. The first is the murder. A guy in a trunk is stabbed and shot. We don’t know who he is or why he is being killed so cold-bloodedly until an hour or so later, and we don’t know the consequences of that murder until yet another hour after that. By organizing the story events in this way, to play out at intervals over the whole film, the writers, Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese, and the editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, create a story arc that functions the way that pillars might function in a building, supporting the roof at regular intervals but not cluttering the space between them. They also start off the film with a blast of physical activity and an insight into the emotions of this story.

When the guy in the trunk is well and truly dead, having been stabbed nine times and then shot four times, the narrator and central character of the story, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), steps forward to close the trunk as his voice-over tells us, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” This introduces the film’s other through-line of events: the story of Henry Hill’s life and his rise and fall in the underworld. The voice-over is ironic. The killing is ignominious; there is nothing great or even courageous about it. Is this what young Henry, even from childhood, aspired to? Henry’s statement is punctuated by another irony: a freeze-frame on him looking detached but slightly dazed (Fig. 8.6). Freeze-frames are a convention often used in cheaply produced dramas. In soap operas they hang in the air, directing the audience to sustain the emotion and recognize the importance of an event. But in Goodfellas, the freeze-frames emphasize the ignominious.

Figure 8.6 In Goodfellas the first introduction to the protagonist Henry Hill is as a slightly dazed man, buffeted by events, but also complicit in them, as he helps out with a routine murder and stays on track with his lifelong ambition to be a gangster. [Photo credit: Warner Bros.]

They place weight and significance by stilling the constant motion and creating an accent. But the accent is almost random, resting on off-key compositions, occurring mid-action rather than at the climax or resolution, offering us a chance to examine something in detail in such a way as to actually undercut its potential importance. They freeze emotion and action and let us look at it dispassionately, make our own judgments about the lives it is framing: Are they fast, fun, and sexy, or meaningless, immoral, and nasty? Or both?

The film’s first freeze-frame, accompanied by the raucous trumpet of an upbeat jazz song, plays with the conventional use of the freeze-frame, using its implication that this is a significant moment, to place emphasis on the ordinariness of Henry closing the trunk and the coolness of being a thug. It indicates that anything could be significant in this world, and the insignificant, the closing of the trunk, can be given as much weight and emphasis as murder.

The details of this scene are important because they set up the physical and emotional cadences that are repeated in macro by the rhythm of events throughout the film.

In Goodfellas murder is not more or less important than pasta. The film is not about the Godfather or the boss of a Mafia gang, who is the still center of the whirlwind of death and life around him. It is about the guys who do the boss’s bidding, the guys who are in the vortex, flailing, swinging, drinking, laughing, cooking, killing, and never ratting on their friends. These guys are in constant motion, and the weight and gravity of events in their lives are not measured by the same standards as the weight and seriousness of events in other people’s lives. This lack of moral compass is a central theme of the film, which is expressed (as it is in all great films) as much through the form of the telling as through the information being told.

The rhythm of Goodfellas is characterized by fluid and continuous motion and the ironic counterweighting of events in life with events of crime and death. Some of the most startling, momentous scenes of the film are of ordinary events, such as entering a club by the back door or telling a funny story around the dinner table. These events are accented in the unfolding of the film by the physical or emotional movement within them.

The scene in which Henry and his girlfriend (Lorraine Bracco) enter the Copacabana (a popular and exclusive nightclub in New York in the 1960s) through the back way is told entirely in one dizzying, sweeping glorious steadicam shot, which, through its intricately choreographed time, movement, and energy, synchronizes us with the girlfriend. We share her physical experience of being dazzled and swept up in the glamour of the back-alley life.

The scene in which Henry’s friend Tommy (Joe Pesci) tells a funny story and then lashes out at Henry for laughing is filled with an extraordinary tension and fear about Tommy’s paranoia and ability to turn on his friends. Nothing much happens in this scene; it turns out Tommy was just teasing Henry. But the emotional tension it creates colors the rest of Tommy’s story so that, later, when Tommy casually shoots a waiter and kills him, there is very little fuss—it’s just Tommy being Tommy.

The event rhythms in Goodfellas build to a cataclysmic sequence in which humor, motion, trivia, and passion bang into each other across hard cuts of stinging rock-and-roll music, perpetual cocaine-induced manic movement, and the basso continuo of paranoia, embodied in a helicopter buzzing overhead, following Henry through his harried day.

The sequence starts with a title card announcing the date and time: May 11, 1980, 6:55 AM. Rock-and-roll slides in under the title. There’s a cut to a close-up of cocaine being inhaled, guns being dropped into a paper bag, and on the next shot the lead guitar kicks in as Henry exits his quiet, brick-fronted suburban home, wiping the traces of coke from his nose. The combination of music, camera moves, and cuts that follow in the next four shots set up the whirlwind ride that’s coming over the next 10 minutes:

• close-up of paper bag full of guns thrown into the trunk, fast pan up to Henry’s squinting up at the sky;
• cut to helicopter flying between the trees;
• cut back to a quick pan past Henry, glimpse the bag, the trunk slams down;
• wide shot tracks in on Henry as he hurries into the car;
• jump cut, he’s driving and smoking.

Then in comes the relatively laconic voice-over, counterpointing the wildly erratic movement of the cuts, and adding a layer of irony. “I was going to be busy all day …” Henry explains he has to sell guns, pick up his brother, deal drugs, and cook the pasta sauce.

The time of day appears on the screen at irregular points in the recount of Henry’s day; it has an objective, distanced quality, as though labeling the evidence as in a police report, but so erratically it would mock any jury’s desire for an orderly, clear, evidentiary report of the events leading to Henry’s arrest. And what exactly is relevant as Henry hurtles toward his demise?

8:05 AM: Gun sale unsuccessful, Henry hatches a new plan and narrowly avoids a car accident. The series of preposterously repeating cuts from his foot on the brakes to his face as he screeches to a halt is entirely in subjective time—this is what it feels like to Henry, not necessarily the facts of what really happened.

8:45 AM: He picks up his brother, gets forced into having a checkup, the doctor is jovial, but Henry is sweating. He pops a calming Valium but the rock-and-roll is screaming. Voice-over: “Now my plan was …”

11:30 AM: Henry has yet another new plan; he’s creating dinner and a sense of order, but at least one of these isn’t going so well.

About 4 minutes into the sequence, 12:30, 1:30, and 3:30 all appear in 30 seconds of screen time, highlighting the sense that time is erratic, careening past wildly and then sticking on a detail. Music cuts in and out suddenly but exultantly, emphasizing the energy and anarchy of the movement through the day. The hard-driving rock-and-roll gives flow, direction, and energy to an action and then deserts it abruptly, only to slam in at another moment, another screech of tires or hit of cocaine.

Two minutes later, it’s 6:30 and Henry is running out of the house again. “I told my brother to keep an eye on the stove. All day long the poor guy’s been watching helicopters and tomato sauce. See, I had to get over to Sandy’s, mix the stuff once, and then get back to the gravy.” The “stuff,” of course, is the cocaine, not the sauce, but even though one can get you arrested and thrown in jail for life and the other cannot, they both have to be stirred.

Fifteen seconds later, it’s 8:30 PM, more coke, a complicated love affair, and back in time for dinner, which, suddenly (at 10:45 PM, the onscreen time tells us) is ending. Henry doesn’t look happy; nothing’s amounted to much, the family is annoying to be with, and he has to get on the road to get rid of the coke. Leaving the house, Henry is arrested.

This climactic sequence, as with the baptism scene in The Godfather, brings together the rhythms of the whole film and their meanings to create a sense that Henry’s destiny is defined by the way he lives, and the rhythms of his life have spun out of his control. These rhythms have sucked us in, too, so we feel with them how fun it is to be constantly in motion, fleeting, dodging, ducking, and sliding over precipices to land on our feet. We’re with Henry on his wild ride, exulting in the spin and whirl as long as it stays in motion, reflecting only when we’re forced to see the consequences, the debris left in the dust by the tornado of this kind of life.

Summary

Physical rhythm creates tension by posing the question of win or lose, catch or escape, or, at an even more subliminal level, by creating a pattern that the spectator participates in and wants to see fulfilled. Emotional rhythm creates tension or questions at the level of every cut. Each throw of a character’s emotional energy, each emotional maneuver he tries, is a question being asked: What will be the response or the emotional effect of this action? Event rhythm is working at the level of the scene, the sequence, or the whole film. Each scene is a question in a drama: Will the character achieve his objective or be thwarted? It is actually impossible to separate the experience of event rhythm from the experiences of physical and emotional rhythm because the three kinds of rhythm are cumulative. Event rhythm is the flow of both the physical and the emotional through scenes, sequences, and structures that release information in a way that supports and conveys the sensations and emotions of the film.

Endnotes

1. Pudovkin, V., “Film technique,” reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, p. 87.

2. See Bordwell, D., “Intensified continuity: Visual style in contemporary American film—Critical essay,” Film Quarterly, p. 16.

3. Available at https://vimeo.com/14216866.