Thematic Montage

“Montage” is the word the French use for editing; it would literally translate into English as “assemblage” or “assembly.” The implications of montage in French are both technical and creative. Technically, the editing is assemblage of pieces into a whole. Creatively, montage is assembling of images and sounds into relations that generate rhythms, ideas, and experiences of a whole.

My use of the word montage, however, is going to be slightly different from the French usage, which refers to the whole of editing operations. Instead I will draw on the common understanding of the term among English-speaking editors, who use “montage” to mean a particular kind of editing. We use it to mean bringing together images and sounds that are unrelated in time or space. In other words, we actually mean “thematic montage.” Images that are unrelated in time and space brought together to create an impression, an idea, or an effect.

Films such as Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982) and Baraka (Godfrey Reggio, 1992) are examples of thematic montage in this sense. They are constructed from a wide range of images collected at different times and from all over the world. When cut together in a thematic montage, they create ideas about cultures and civilizations. There is no narration that explicitly states the themes, but the power of thematic montage is such that the ideas arise vividly in our minds. We make connections between the images and derive a clear meaning from their overall composition.

It is quite unusual to have entire feature films constructed in this way; more typically, there will be thematic montage sequences within a feature film. Often thematic montage, or assembly of images unrelated in time and space, may be used in realist narrative feature films as a device for suggesting the inner, subjective mental state of a character who is hallucinating, dreaming, on drugs, or so overcome with emotion or sensation that he is outside of ordinary time and space.

This sense of montage as the close juxtaposition of disconnected images is a mainstay of advertisements, music videos, and title sequences that summarize and introduce the themes of the whole film. In these contexts, thematic montage is a technique that allows audiences to surmise a message through their very powerful experience of making associations—an experience that is carefully modulated and shaped by rhythm.

Continuity Cutting

Continuity cutting is the cutting up of something that could unfold in real time and space into shots that will be put back together to create the impression of the events they contain unfolding in real time and space. The important question about using continuity cutting is: Why would you do it? Why shoot something that could simply be done in one shot, in real time and space, and cut it into many shots that may have to be taken at many different times and in different configurations of the space, so that you can then put them back together to create the impression of one time and place?

One answer, of course, is rhythm. What the multiple shots provide an editor with is a much finer degree of control over the shaping of time, energy, and movement. Each shot and take of a scene that could have unfolded in real time and space will contain its own unique potential for contributing to rhythm. Performances will have different uses of time: faster or slower, shorter or longer. Shots will have different uses of space: close-ups, two-shots, wide shots, or other configurations. They will also each contain their own movement—movement of camera, characters, or composition, and the near-infinite range of energies with which these kinds of movement can be executed.

So, for the purposes of this discussion, thematic montage is the association of things unrelated in time and space, and continuity cutting is the cutting up of things that could have unfolded in a single continuous time and space. These two approaches are being placed at either end of a spectrum, and the style of an edit may fall at one end or the other of that spectrum, but may also fall in the area between the two edges of the spectrum.

Points Along the Spectrum from Thematic Montage to Continuity Cutting

Figure 9.3 Humphrey Bogart as Rick and Ingrid Bergman as Elsa in a romantic moment, one of many from a sequence of elided romantic moments in a flashback of Rick and Elsa’s early days together in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). [Photo credit: Warner Bros; The Kobal Collection]

One editing operation that is somewhere between thematic montage and continuity cutting is “temporal ellipsis.” Using temporal ellipses simply means cutting out bits of time, along the lines of the well-worn aphorism “drama is life with the boring bits cut out.” Although that does not really describe the whole of what drama is, it is useful to a writer or an editor, each of whom can cut out time between events to highlight special moments to sustain the tension of an open question or simply to make the story move along faster, more rhythmically, or without irrelevancies.

A classic example of a sequence that relies on temporal ellipses to tell the story of a whole relationship in just a few minutes is the thematic montage sequence in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), which tells the back-story of the two main characters when they were young and in love, in Paris at the start of the war. There are images of Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Elsa (Ingrid Bergman) laughing and walking in the streets of Paris, on a boat on the Seine, in a restaurant, and so on. These images are not exactly unrelated in time and space; in theory they could have been shot continuously, but then this section of the film would have been several days long and jam-packed with irrelevancies. So there is strong reference to continuous time and space, pushing this sequence away from the pure end of the spectrum that we are calling thematic montage. However, although they could have been shot continuously and then cut up, they do not actually present continuous time and space. The ellipses are there precisely for the purpose of showing time elapsing and to give rise to the impression of love deepening over time. This impression is something we surmise from the association of images. Therefore, it is also not pure continuity cutting. The temporal ellipses within this sequence fall somewhere on the spectrum between thematic montage and continuity cutting. The choice to make the sequence a somewhat discontinuous association of images and to make it also refer strongly to a continuous unfolding of time and space is a style choice.

Temporal ellipsis between scenes is another point on the spectrum between thematic montage and continuity cutting. There are very few examples of feature films, documentaries, or television series in which the duration of the film is the same as the duration of the story. So almost every film has a montage of distinct times and spaces. A film may have scenes within it that are absolutely continuous in time and space; for example, Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 film Stranger Than Paradise, in which every scene is covered in one long shot. But these completely continuous scenes nonetheless form a montage when they are cut together into the whole time and space of the story. Most films are less extreme than this example and use continuity cutting inside of scenes and then cut these scenes together into a montage in which we surmise the connection between the scenes and the passage of time in the story. The cuts between the scenes can be more or less extreme: they may be cuts between leaving the house and arriving at the office as in Mad Men (Matthew Weiner, 2007–2015). Or they may be cuts that collapse nearly 15 years into 1/24 of a second, as in Citizen Kane, when the edit between Thatcher wishing Kane a “Merry Christmas” at the age of 10 jumps to a shot of him saying “and a Happy New Year” on Kane’s 25th birthday. These two examples illustrate the use of the same technique—temporal ellipses between scenes—with radically different styles, Mad Men using a style much closer on the spectrum to continuity cutting, whereas the Citizen Kane example would have to be placed closer to thematic montage.

What is the purpose of distinguishing between thematic montage and continuity cutting? We can use this knowledge, that the editing of a film will sit somewhere on the spectrum from the association of images that are completely unrelated in time and space to the shaping of images to give the impression of continuous time and space, to discuss style. We can ask: What is this project’s approach to time and space? Is it different from one scene to the next? Is there a thematic montage sequence within it, and is that thematic montage a wild hallucination or simply a way of running quickly through a series of events? Do the transitions between scenes just cut out the boring bits? Or are they extreme statements about the passage of time?

But the range of choices from thematic montage to continuity cutting is just one style guide or spectrum. The other style spectrum concerns flow of images and could be described as the range from collision to linkage. We’ll look at the spectrum from collision to linkage next, before examining how the two sets of ideas come together to describe editing style and the rhythms in stylistic choices.

Collision

Collision is a term borrowed from the great Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, whose ideas and films have had inestimable influence over the development of cinema and in shifting editing from being a means of stitching things together to being an art.

One aspect of Eisenstein’s use of the word “collision” is neatly summed up by Louis Giannetti in his book Understanding Movies:

The dialectical ideology behind this notion of collision has, for better or worse, not really survived into the twenty-first century as common parlance among editors and filmmakers. In Eisenstein’s terms, collision made the world go round. Change was the result of two opposing forces colliding together, and the energy and explosion of their clash propelled the world’s metamorphosis from one system to the next. This idea extends into editing and film form for Eisenstein. He puts together remarkable collisions of various forces within his shots and films to propel ideas and emotions forward.

I often ask my students, by comparison, “What makes the world go round?” and, as I usually teach in developed, democratic, capitalist countries, the students consistently, invariably, and without exception reply, “Money.” What they mean is that money is the agent of change, money is the force that can influence the turn of events. It is not, therefore, surprising that collision as a force in editing has been assimilated into editing style as just one way of cutting. It is used to suit the subject matter, and the rhythm of the production at hand. Collision is part of style, not a means of inciting revolution, because the purpose of most productions made in these countries is not to incite revolution but to engage, enlighten, uplift, inform, or entertain a target market.

Eisenstein’s aesthetic development of the notion of collision has nonetheless exerted great influence over the development of editing possibilities, and his explanations remain valid and useful ways of describing a way of cutting at one end of the spectrum of stylistic choices available to an editor. Eisenstein’s idea of montage is collision of independent shots. And “the degree of incongruence determines the intensity of the impression and determines that tension which becomes the real element of authentic rhythm.”²

But what does collision or incongruity actually mean for us in terms of how images and sounds are joined? Eisenstein identifies every aspect of image and sound, including light, movement, shape, direction, tone, shot size, focal length, contrast, dimensions, durations, speeds, performances, symbols, and so on, as possible “attractions” to the eye. Each of these is something that might draw our attention in a shot. So a collision is the juxtaposition of differences between these elements rather than, as we shall see in linkage, a juxtaposition of their similarities.

A collision might therefore be a cut that juxtaposes light and dark, close-up and wide shot, movement left to right with right to left, stillness with activity, religion with politics, and so on. Each of these is a little shock, a little challenge to smoothness. Even now, when these juxtapositions are so common in our world, it still takes the eye and the mind a bit of time or effort to connect and make sense of things that conflict in these ways. Making this effort engages the audience more actively in putting together the images and surmising the ideas of the film. It is harder work to make these associations connect; it requires a more active viewer. By energizing the audience, collision energizes the film. Sequences or films that use collision as a style may therefore feel more energetic, vibrant, angular, or aggressive.

Collisions of these kinds are routinely used in action scenes, fight scenes, chase scenes, music videos, and ads in which the energy of the production needs to be upbeat and active, even aggressive, to convey its meanings. It is tempting to say that any scene driven by physical rhythm relies on this kind of cutting, and scenes driven by emotional rhythm do not, but this is not the case. Dance scenes, for example, frequently make use of smooth, “uncollided” cutting, whereas conversations may use surprising juxtapositions of frame size, performance, character movement, or other collided elements to make a point or an emotional impact.

It is also tempting to say that collision is the same as thematic montage, but as we shall see in the examples below, this is not the case. Thematic montage, in my definition, may be the bringing together of things that are unrelated in time and space, but it is not always a bringing together by collision; sometimes it is a comparison of similarities that gives a thematic montage its driving force.

Collision, then, is about difference, and difference is, according to Eisenstein, what allows us to perceive rhythm in events, in images, in music or sound. If all was the same there would be no rhythm, just a continuous hum in a custard-colored world. Eisenstein’s emphasis on collision shifts editing from being a job of connecting shots to being an art of making ideas out of juxtapositions and creating rhythms out of contrasting images.

Linkage

Eisenstein’s less well known but deeply influential contemporary, filmmaker and theorist Vsevolod Pudovkin, put forward a different idea about the function of editing. His notion of linkage is, I propose, less well known because it has, in fact, been more widely assimilated. It has seeped into the culture of editing and filmmaking to such an extent that it is normalized. I have often heard students call smoothly linked editing “normal” cutting or explain that they are going to shoot “normal” shots to make a smoothly linked film. But linkage, like any technique of artistic construction, is, of course, not normal or natural. It has behind it an ideology and an aesthetic purpose, which define its usage and its usefulness.

Pudovkin saw editing as a means by which the filmmaker could “see through the confusion of history and psychology and create a smooth train of images which would lead toward an overall event.”³ For him, the aim of a smooth linkage was to create a clear and comprehensible image of the world, one that cuts out irrelevancies and focuses the viewer on the significant moments, exchanges, and events. Linkage, to paraphrase Pudovkin, guides the spectator psychologically. Pudovkin’s intention, it could be said, was not so much to incite or ignite the audience as to immerse, influence, and convince it. To achieve this, he put forward ideas about film being built up, constructed, brick by brick. Any brick that stands out, draws attention to itself, is of an excessively irregular shape, size, or movement disrupts the flow of the construction and therefore disrupts the audience’s immersion in the film.

This view of editing is normalized in the Hollywood continuity system (which began being used even before Pudovkin’s articulation of the ideology of linkage). In classical continuity editing, shots are often designed and juxtaposed with the ideal of smoothness of transition, the least possible disruption of the viewer’s sense of the flow of time in continuous space.

But not always. It is possible to have continuity cutting with collision. Linkage is not the same as continuity cutting. Linkage is often used with continuity cutting, but, as we shall see in the examples below, the spectrum from collision to linkage is different from the spectrum between thematic montage and continuity cutting, and some continuity cutting employs collision very effectively.

So continuity cutting is a technique, and I am using the term “linkage” to describe a style within that technique. It might be more appropriate to use smoothness than linkage, because linkage could describe something that is abruptly linked, but I have chosen to use the word linkage for this aspect of style to remind us of the purpose behind the style: to create a smooth train of images. With linkage, we are at no time shocked out of the world of the story or characters; we are smoothly guided by the film’s construction to empathy with characters and easy agreement with ideas it contains.

Smooth linkage of shots involves the opposite approach to collision. Rather than colliding light and dark together, lighting values from shot to shot are similar. The same is true for shot sizes that don’t jump from wide to close, but link smoothly from wide to mid to close. Movements right to left link smoothly with other movements right to left, rather than colliding with movements left to right. Match cutting, or matching on action, is a key operation in making smooth linkages of shots. An unmatched cut from one part of a movement to another is a jump, or distortion of a movement’s continuousness in time or space, and therefore a little shock or collision. This aspect of smoothly linking movement shape and direction is the cornerstone of an “invisible” editing style in which movement flow appears to be smooth and continuous. However, as discussed in Chapter 5, editing, even editing style that emphasizes linkage, is not invisible. What we see is movement flow, smooth or collided, shaped by editing.

Points Along the Spectrum from Collision to Linkage

Is difference or similarity emphasized by a cut? Is the intention to engage the viewers energetically with a series of little shocks or to guide them seamlessly into empathy and understanding with a series of linkages? These are choices along the spectrum from collision to linkage. This spectrum offers a range, a playing space, for the shaping of each of the elements of rhythm: time, energy, and movement.

Time can be collided or linked in shots. Speed of movement can be connected with similar or different speed. Duration of shot can be connected with similar or different duration. Collisions can be created even when connecting similar uses of time by choosing to cut before the peak of a movement arc. Cutting quickly, before a spectator can assimilate the full content curve of an image, creates a collision somewhere on the spectrum between pure collision and pure linkage. It unsettles the viewer and activates tension about what is unseen in a shot that has flashed by.

Energy qualities can also be collided or linked. Energy qualities, which are visible or audible in movement, color, light, tone, intentions, proximities, and so on, can be collided with their opposite, or matched with their like, from cut to cut or in patterns across any number of cuts.

Movement, as discussed above, can also be collided or linked. Shaping patterns of colliding or linking movement is one way of shaping the moment-to-moment rhythm and the overall rhythm of a film.

Style Case Studies

As noted above, it is tempting to associate thematic montage with collision and linkage with continuity cutting, because it would seem that thematic montage is a tendency to collide together things unrelated in time and space, and continuity cutting has as its goal the smooth creation of the impression of continuous time and space.

Figure 9.4

But in fact it is only when we separate and articulate these two ranges of possibilities for cutting that we can describe a full range of cutting style choices.

Each of the following four case studies pairs up a different combination of approaches, and the result is four distinctive styles.

Psycho—Continuity Cutting and Collision

One of the best known scenes in editing history, the shower scene in which Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) stabs Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) to death in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), is an example at the extreme edge of both spectra (Fig. 9.5). The scene could have been shot continuously in one take. The action could simply have unfolded in real time and space, but it was cut up into (many!) individual shots for the purpose of controlling rhythm and affect very precisely.

Figure 9.5

Figure 9.6 Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates collides with his victim in the continuity cutting of the shower scene in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). [Photo credit: Paramount; The Kobal Collection]

The scene is also a very strong example of collision. The shots are designed to collide in as many aspects as is possible, especially screen direction and symbolic value. The butcher knife is sharp and dark, the skin of the victim is soft and white. The water pours from the shower head in dramatically angular directions, emphasized by tight close-ups. Janet Leigh’s movements by contrast are soft and circular, often masked by the filter of the shower curtain that diffuses light and form. And of course there is the music, by Bernard Herrmann, with its abrupt bursts of screaming strings, sharply staccato against the quiet that fills the space before and after the deed is done.

There are dozens of camera setups in this scene, and each of these is specifically designed to create a collision, a change, a difference from one to the next. By covering the scene in this way, Hitchcock gives the scene an energy of rapid, violent change, which does away with the need for explicit images. We never see the knife actually pierce the body; instead, we feel the tearing, stabbing qualities as we experience the extremes of collision between shots, their content, durations, shapes, sizes, angles, and symbols.

Apocalypse Now—Thematic Montage and Linkage

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is well known to have had a chaotic shoot riddled with problems ranging from a coup d’état in the country where they were shooting to the lead suffering a heart attack, an uncooperative star in a small but key role, the monsoons of the jungle, and simply scope and ambition beyond its budget. Once shooting had finally finished and cutting was in full swing, the editors found they did not have a satisfactory opening for the film. So they created one.

The opening sequence of Apocalypse Now is a smoothly linked thematic montage (Fig. 9.7). It blends together long shots of a jungle, which at first appears peaceful and untroubled and then is slowly enveloped in the distinctive yellow smoke of napalm, with the close-up of a face (Martin Sheen as Captain Willard), upside down on the screen, eyes wandering restlessly (Fig. 9.8). It links the sounds of helicopter blades whirring with the image of a ceiling fan spinning, with the upside-down face, a gun, a domestic snapshot, a whiskey bottle, and the war machines flying over the jungle.

Figure 9.7

Figure 9.8 The thematic montage at the opening of Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) links Captain Willard’s (Martin Sheen) mind with the machines of war. [Photo credit: Zoetrope/United Artists]

Linking all of these diverse images together and smoothly associating, even blending them into a single idea, is done by use of music and dissolves. The music, “The End” by The Doors, is much more than a quilt backing holding all of the pieces together. Its long continuous organ tones provide linkage, through tonal similarity, from one image to the next. And the lyrics, also a low-pitched dirge-like drone, tell an aspect of the story in their words and their delivery. “This is the end,” warns lead singer, Jim Morrison, both a peaceful oblivion to be longed for and a moment filled with dread. The music is part of the thematic montage. It was built into the edit as images were being associated. It associates America, rock-and-roll, and hedonism with the jungles and war of Southeast Asia, connecting them via smooth linkage with the central image of Willard’s head.

The connection of all images, sounds, and music through the mind of Willard is made visible through dissolves. A dissolve blends images together, softening their differences and linking their similarities. The longer it goes on, the softer it is, and these dissolves are very long. By dissolving together the image of Willard’s head (upside down and therefore already somewhat out of kilter with the world) with the images and sounds of battle and home, these things are smoothly, seamlessly linked to give rise to the impression that the man’s mind is whirring, spinning in circles with images of peace and war. The opening of Apocalypse Now sets up the character, his inner problems and his environmental problems, by using both linkage and thematic montage to create an overlapping image of a chaotically integrated internal and external world.

Breaker Morant—Continuity Cutting and Linkage

The continuity cutting and linkage in Breaker Morant (Bruce Beresford, 1979) does precisely what this smooth, unobtrusive style is designed to do: uses editing to subtly shape and modulate the story, cutting for dramatic purposes, emotional emphasis, and clarity rather than shock or association (Fig. 9.9).

The film is a flashback narrative, with the story in the present unfolding in a military court in South Africa during the Boer War and the flashbacks showing the stories the various witnesses and defendants are recounting. As it is a flashback narrative, there are substantial and very effective jumps in spatial and temporal continuity between scenes. But within the scenes, the continuity cutting is seamless and supports the story subtly, with well-judged cuts heightening tension by shaping time and emphasis.

Figure 9.9

The coverage is spare in this beautifully directed, designed, and shot film, and this contributes to the sense of linkage. By repeating setups, similarity is enhanced and difference lessened. During the interrogation of the first witness, a repetitive pattern of shots is established. Each new setup is only one gradation of shot size up or down from the previous, and each is used at least twice before the introduction of a new shot. Until the first bombshell in the witness’s testimony is dropped. Suddenly, the pattern of cutting changes and three new setups are seen in rapid succession. The moment settles down, and the editor (William Anderson) returns to a back-and-forth pattern of repeating shots until the next new damning revelation in the testimony, and again the pattern of repeating setups is broken and new angles are revealed.

All cuts, needless to say, are beautifully aligned to the principles of cutting emotional rhythm as described in Chapter 7, with the characters throwing the energy of their glances, sighs, questions, or lies from one to the other, motivating the cuts to show us reactions and actions in a revealing rhythm and steadily increasing pace. The linkage and continuity cutting function in seamless unity to create the impression of a continuous time and space with all ten people in the room intently focused on the same thing. The cutting lets us be swayed, just as the defendants and judges are, by the body language of the witness. It clearly reveals attitudes of all by cutting to reaction shots that are as responsive to subtext as they are to text (Fig. 9.10).

The coup de grâce is the timing. The British in the room hold themselves as though they are the very poles holding up the empire, and the edits on them are as clipped and neat as their moustaches. The Australians exchange uneasy glances and muttered comments framed and cut to reveal messy relationships and tensions. Their lawyer (Jack Thompson) makes a substantial piece of business out of shuffling papers noisily, and the editor extends the duration of each shot on him to include the maximum arc of each bumbling action so that

Figure 9.10 Edward Woodward and Jack Thompson play two Australians involved in a British court martial in Breaker Morant (Bruce Beresford, 1979). This courtroom scene links images of the soldiers and officers, and their different cultures, under pressure in the continuous time and space of the interrogation. [Photo credit: S. Australia Film Corp/Australian Film Commission; The Kobal Collection]

when he finally does score a point, the contrast of the quick short shot on him in victory underlines the change.

Most importantly, two moments, each after a sharply targeted question and before the damning answer, are extended to create suspense. These moments are extended by a series of short close shots. At these two moments it is as though the whole courtroom has held its breath. Although the cuts are quick, nobody moves. The stillness minimizes collision and maximizes the tension.

Requiem for a Dream—Thematic Montage and Collision

Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000) makes use of thematic montage and collision to convey the themes of the film in a visceral way (Fig. 9.11). The style synchronizes our physical experience of movement and energy with the protagonists’ and sucks us down into the vortices of their stories.

Figure 9.11

Early on in Requiem for a Dream there is a quick, splashy, and stylish collided thematic montage of cocaine use on the part of the protagonists (Harry Goldfarb, played by Jared Leto, and Marion Silver, played by Jennifer Connelly). The flashy and upbeat sound effects dance around the pristine framing of quirky shots of powder, money, pupils dilating, and bubbles splashing happily through the bloodstream. The sequence is so quick, the sound design such a funky music, that drug use looks fun and playful. It’s a bit alarming, but the collisions of these tangentially related images are more like percussion than concussion, and they have a rhythmic effect that is analogous to drugs themselves. Seeing and hearing these sequences is a bit of a buzz, a wake up, an aesthetic treat that makes you look forward to the next one.

Figure 9.12 Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, and Jennifer Connelly in a colliding thematic montage of each of their downward spirals in Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000). [Photo credit: Artisan Pictures; The Kobal Collection; John Baer]

And for a while these thematic montages keep coming, but they grow a bit more harrowing and a bit more manic each time, soon mixing in Harry’s mother’s (Ellen Burstyn) growing addiction to diet pills and her subsequent hallucinations with the happy bubbling of heroin. As the film continues, the viewer experiences a kind of longing to return to the vibrant, surprising, upbeat little collisions of the early drug use. But instead, like the characters, we find ourselves increasingly bogged down in drug-induced hallucinatory nightmares. We stop getting the fun of using and start to experience the consequences. Thematic montage images still collide, but they are longer, more loosely framed, and altogether messier, until the final sequence (Fig. 9.12) in which the worst horrors imaginable befall each of the characters. This last thematic montage sequence is neither quick nor pretty; it’s not percussive or seductive. Instead, there is a relentless collision of images of pornographic rape, amputation, and electric shock therapy, each shot a sharp and painful degradation, all cut together in an almost unbearable expression of the cumulative disintegration of life, human connection, and hope. This sequence mirrors the first sequence of drug use by being a collided thematic montage, but it takes our pleasure in that stylish rat-a-tat of images and sounds and twists it into despair, thus using form and style to create the meanings of the film itself.

Contemporary Style: After the New Wave

For this style rubric to have the flexibility needed to be useful in the long term, it must work when applied to contemporary cutting. It must therefore contend with some of the unique arrangements and derangements of time, energy, and movement in film editing, from Jean-Luc Goddard’s A bout de soufflé (Breathless) (1960) onward.

Flying in the face of strict Hollywood style continuity cutting Jean-Luc Goddard opened a floodgate of new editing possibilities with the jump cuts in A bout de soufflé. Goddard’s intentions, like those of his forbears, the Soviet montage theorists Eisenstein and Pudovkin, were political. Fed up with the hegemony of the Hollywood style and its messages about orderly social behavior, the jump cuts “warn viewers that they are watching a film and to beware of being manipulated.”⁴ The idea of reminding viewers of this fact was indeed revolutionary. It took the most effective form of propaganda available at the time and rendered it toothless. Unless audiences are allowed the luxury of slipping into the story unobstructed, they are unlikely to be convinced of its message.

But whether these jump cuts succeeded in their purpose of disconnecting viewers from their unreflective engagement with story or not is debatable. They may have at the time, but now they have become part of style, or as Ken Dancyger, author of The Technique of Film and Video Editing, says, “The jump cut has simply become another editing device accepted by the viewing audience.”⁵ Even Cecile Decugis, the editor of A bout de soufflé, reminds us that, “As Cocteau said, ‘all the revolutionary ideas in art become conformist after 20 years.’”⁶ Jump cuts can indeed appear in the most mainstream of Hollywood films now. When Goddard shoots an action in a continuous time and space and then cuts a chunk out of the middle so that a continuous action jumps out of ordinary time and space, he turns continuity cutting into thematic montage, or at least shoves the continuity cutting down toward the other end of the spectrum. The action was continuous in time and space when it was shot; in other words, it was covered as continuity cutting and then cut to be discontinuous montage. One could also say it was probably shot as linkage but then cut into collision. By dropping frames from within continuous shots, A bout de soufflé is broken into discontinuous pieces, and those pieces are then re-associated without continuous flow so as to give rise to a new idea or understanding. Breaking temporal and spatial continuity creates what could be thought of as a jagged edge to each bit of action, which collides with the next bit’s equally jagged, torn, continuity.

The question then is, stylistically speaking, why do such a thing? What is the purpose of discontinuous continuity and jaggedly collided linkage in a contemporary film (given that it is not the same as Goddard’s original purpose)? I propose two possible answers: first, it’s cool. It is cool to put in jump cuts in the same way that all harmless rule breaking is cool. Cool is defined in reaction to the establishment, though. Therefore, it is cool to put in jump cuts if they fly in the face of the rules of continuity cutting, but only until such time as jump cutting has been assimilated into those rules, which I believe it has been.

The other reason to use a jump cut style is to present a state of extreme subjectivity. As with thematic montage, a jump cut signifies that the perspective of the character has deviated far enough from normal or from that of the other characters around her so as to disrupt her sense of ordinary time or space.

In the very mainstream film Erin Brokovich (Steven Soderbergh, 2000), when Erin (Julia Roberts) gets bad news on the telephone, there is a series of jump cuts that convey her emotional distress at what she is hearing and, although all of the shots are objective, it is possible to understand from the jump cutting that her subjective experience is intense enough to have disrupted her ordinary feeling for time and space.

A far more extreme, revolutionary version of this intensified subjectivity occurs in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), in which Woody Harrelson and Juliet Lewis play characters who live so far outside of the rules of civilization that they are unstuck in time and space. Their subjectivities rule the construction of their worlds, which blink rapidly, almost compulsively, through colors, textures, framings, and media. There is, to quote Dr. Jane Mills, film scholar, “visual anarchy”.⁷ Point of view and perspective bounce from the inner realities to the objective actualities of the central characters, and everyone they encounter, so swiftly and colorfully that the two soon blur and take on a new, mixed, version of reality. The continuity of time and space is creative and variegated in its contraction and expansion.

Natural Born Killers remains a watershed in the “in your face” editing style. It paved the way for sequences and films such as 21 Grams (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, 2003) that come completely unstuck in continuous time and space even though they portray events that could be depicted in the Hollywood continuity style.

But the style rubric of the intersecting spectra of thematic montage to continuity cutting and collision to linkage remains useful for describing these “new” editing approaches, because their newness is in fact a variation on the old styles and develops in reaction to the concerns of the more traditional forms. To experience these editing styles as revolutionary, we have to experience them in relation to the traditions they disrupt, traditions that, of course, were at one point quite revolutionary themselves. Perhaps Oliver Stone and the editors of Natural Born Killers, Brian Berdan and Hank Corwin, see a smooth linkage as a wasted opportunity, just as Eisenstein did, but take it to farther extremes.

Figure 9.13 Woody Harrelson as the radically subjective Mickey living in his own perception of time and space in Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994). [Photo credit: Warner Bros; The Kobal Collection; Sydney Baldwin]

Summary

If we say that style is the result of a set of choices and define those choices as sitting within a range from thematic montage to continuity cutting and from collision to linkage, then it is possible to say that style choices are choices about the shaping of a film’s time, space, and energy, three things by now familiar to the reader as core components of rhythm. In films from the 1920s to the present, style choices and their consequent editing rhythms shape the movement of images, events, and emotions to give rise to ideas and distinctive perceptual experiences in film.

Endnotes

1. Giannetti, L., Understanding Movies, p. 133.

2. Eisenstein, S., Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, p. 50.

3. Pudovkin, V. I., On Film Technique and Film Acting, p. 31.

4. Dancyger, K., The Technique of Film and Video Editing, Theory and Practice, p. 132.

5. Ibid.

6. Cecile Decugis as quoted in McGrath, D., Screencraft: Editing & Post-Production, p. 75.

7. Cited from a conversation about the film in class at University of Technology, Sydney in 2008.