The Great Train Robbery (Edwin Porter, 1903)

This first case study of parallel action is not a study of true parallel action but of an innovation in film form that is an important precursor of parallel action.

In 1903, Elliot Porter made The Great Train Robbery, a film that was innovative in length, subject matter, and structure. It depicts the story of a robbery and the subsequent escape and capture of the thieves, mostly in a linear timeline: first the robbers enter the train station, knock out the station master, and tie him up so he can’t warn the train conductor; then they rob the train and escape. But as the robbers are escaping we see something that has not yet been seen in film in 1903: Porter cuts back to the train station, where we see the station master recovering and sounding the alarm. It looks as though Porter is saying, “The robbers are escaping, and meanwhile the station master is waking up.” In Film Editing, History, Theory and Practice⁴ Don Fairservice argues that this is not really a “meanwhile.” In fact, he claims that what Porter is doing is more complicated: he is taking us back to an earlier point in time and showing us the continuation of action that would have happened earlier in the story. However, whether it is a true parallel action or not, for our purposes it does something that sets a precedent for parallel action: it cuts from the experience of one time, place, and character action in progress to another, revealing to us, as an audience, something that none of the characters could know. We move ahead of the characters in the story, knowing more than they do and experiencing the tension of the questions: How will these two strands of action impact each other? And when?

To contemporary eyes it is a bit tricky to see this story as tension-filled, but this is not a fault of the plotting or the structure. Rather, it just takes too long, and it happens in long shots only, no close-ups. So the rhythm relies solely on performance and plot, the story showing is hampered, to our sensibility, by being out of sync with contemporary rhythms. However, it is a useful example of how much the contemporary audience experience of story relies on cinematic aspects of editing and shooting to create understanding and empathetic engagement. And it also reveals the impact the editor can have on story experience by modulating the rate and angle of convergence of the two parallel events.

Figure 10.1 The Great Train Robbery (Edwin Porter, 1903), at about 16 minutes, was roughly four times as long as almost any film up to then and told a tension-filled tale of the American frontier. [Photo credit: Edison; The Kobal Collection]

Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)

The opening sequence of Strangers on a Train⁵ is a close-range parallel action sequence. We see two pairs of feet, one with flashy two-toned shoes and one with sensible brown shoes and a tennis racquet, stepping out of taxis at a train station. The shoes’ owners are unaware of each other but, as the editor (William H. Zeigler) cuts back and forth between them, we are aware of both walking on what appears to be a direct collision course toward each other. We are, consciously or unconsciously, caught up in the question: How will these two characters, about whom we have already made a series of judgments based on their shoes, impact each other? And when?

Hitchcock, being a master filmmaker, knows that these are the questions he has created and chooses to make use of our expectations to create a twist. The two pairs of feet walk toward each other (apparently) at an accelerating pace; the cuts also accelerate, and the music by Dimitri Tiomkin emphasizes the connection and tension between the two images as they appear to come closer and closer, faster and faster. Just when we expect them to collide, Zeigler cuts to a wide shot of the turnstile at the train track entrance, and the two sets of shoes walk in, one at a time, without noticing each other. It turns out that “brown shoes” was farther away from the entrance than “flashy shoes,” but the tight framing and accelerating cutting played right into the expectations of the audience that they would crash into each other. Hitchcock uses his knowledge of the audience’s expectations to set up some underlying themes of the whole film, that things don’t unfold as you might expect, life takes unexpected pathways and can turn to the left or the right in an instant.

After the turnstile shot comes a dissolve to a shot of the train tracks diverging at a crossing. The train stays on the straight track until the last possible second and then moves onto the track that veers off in another direction, affording us another metaphor for the lives of the two key characters whose paths cross each other’s on this journey. Only then does the parallel action between the two pairs of shoes come back into play; the shoes walk along the corridor of the train, sit, cross their legs, bump each other, and that’s when faces are finally revealed: when the strangers meet.

In this example of parallel action we get some important information from the mise-en-scène: our judgments about the characters come from the style of shoes, our sense that they are going to crash comes from the screen direction and pace at which they apparently walk toward each other. But it is the cutting that creates the possibility for us to surmise the story. The cutting is what creates the impact of the sequence because it makes us think that these two events will impact each other, and soon. This is an excellent example of cutting creating the story. It allows us to surmise things that in fact are not part of the plot; it gets us to, in a sense, tell ourselves the story by giving us the opportunity to make a connection between two things. The cutting allows us to think we know more than the characters. We think we are moving ahead of them and feel tension about the impending collision. The cutting then reveals we are just like the characters, we only know what they know, except that we also know that things are not what they seem.

Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981)

Parallel action is frequently about time pressure. As discussed earlier, the tension is not only about whether two people or events will intersect, but when, and if it will be soon enough. The audience’s experience of how the time passes, how the pressure mounts on each side of the action creates their understanding of the story.

Peter Weir’s Gallipoli tells the story of Australian soldiers fighting in Turkey for the British Empire in World War I. This story occupies an interesting place in Australia’s national mythology, being a horrible defeat and terrible loss of lives and, at the same time, a moment when Australians asserted their ability to stand up for themselves and not just be minions of the British. So the ending had to convey both. It had to make us care about the soldiers and mourn their loss, but not see it as a simple, ignominious defeat.

The ending of the film is a parallel action sequence in which one soldier (Frank Dunne, played by Mel Gibson) runs toward the trenches to deliver a message that could save all of the men’s lives. The sequence starts 9 minutes before the climactic ending, but at first it doesn’t feel much like classical parallel action. Frank leaves the trenches with a note for the officer in charge and we go with him, following him as he talks, first to one officer, then another, and cutting only occasionally back to the trenches to see what is going on there. The emphasis of time is on Frank’s journey and his obstacles, actions, and emotions.

Figure 10.2 Mel Gibson as Frank Dunne, running, pressured by time and responsibilities, in Gallipoli (Peter Wier, 1981). The other side of the parallel action in this sequence shows us what he is responsible for and increases our anxiety about his run. [Photo credit: Associated R & R Films/Paramount; The Kobal Collection]

The questions are: Will he get killed on the way? Will the snobbish British officer defeat his initiative? Will the Australian superior officer do the right thing and stand up for his men? And, as Frank stands in the tent of the Australian general, holding his breath on a knife’s edge of anticipation (a beautifully cut moment), we hold our breath too and silently wish for the general to make up his mind, be decisive, give the order in time!

But just as Frank gets the all-important message to delay the attack, the sergeant back in the trenches gets the opposite message by telephone, and now the emphasis of the cutting shifts.

Frank begins his run back up the hill, through the other soldiers, under enemy fire, and against the clock. But, although his journey is action packed and filled with tension, there are only seven short shots of it between this point and when the film ends 4½ minutes later. The rest of the time is spent in the trenches, mostly in intimate, lyrical shots of the young men whose lives will be lost if Frank doesn’t make it in time. The very sensitive and clever editor, William Anderson, understands that this is no longer just Frank’s story. He has shown us how hard and important Frank’s struggle is, but now the emphasis is shifted from Frank’s journey to what is at stake. In other words, the emphasis has shifted from action to emotion. The editor makes a very well-judged choice to spend the balance of his time on investing our emotions and making us care, so that the ending is not just “oh, too bad, he didn’t make it,” it is a devastating experience of loss for the audience.

The lesson to take away from this sequence (once you get over its overwhelming impact) is that in a parallel action sequence it is often possible to identify one side of the sequence as “action” and the other as “emotion.” In other words, one side might be under time pressure or pursuing a goal or moving events along in some way, whereas the other side is what’s at stake. In this case the men in the trenches are at stake, and the editing is structured in such a way as to immerse us deeply in feeling for and with them. It favors emotion over action and consequently, when they are gunned down, we feel loss.

So the question an editor can ask herself when cutting parallel action is: Where is action and where is emotion? And what is the balance I need to achieve between them?

The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

I return now to The Godfather, which was also discussed in Chapter 8, to look in more detail at the baptism sequence and the parallel action between Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), a young man on the cusp of becoming the Godfather of the New York underworld, and a series of murders his henchmen are executing around the city.

In this famous sequence Michael is in church taking on the role of being a spiritually responsible godfather to his sister’s newborn baby. But this baptism is a metaphor; the baby is not the only one being baptized, Michael is too. The baby’s baptism is ceremonial, sonorous, and richly decorated in lace and ritual, but the new Godfather’s baptism is in blood.

This parallel action sequence has been very carefully planned, and its efficacy relies a great deal on the composition of the shots and the action to draw the metaphor between the two baptisms. The editors, William Reynolds and Peter Zinner, cut from the priest’s action of preparing the baby for baptism to a hitman preparing his gun, from the priest anointing the baby’s chin with a holy ointment to a barber anointing a hitman’s chin with shaving cream. These are physical indicators of the metaphor, images and movements from which the audience can draw a metaphoric connection between the two sides of the action. The emotional connection between the two sides of the parallel action comes from two things: 1. the sounds of the service, which are artfully cut across from the grand church to the sordid sites

Figure 10.3 The comparison of the similarities of these two figures having their chins anointed in the baptism/murder sequence of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) highlights the irony of their differences. [Photo credit: Paramount Pictures, Alfran Productions]

of violence, and 2. the precise timing of image cuts to cue the audience that Michael Corleone knows what is going on and condones it.

The music imbues the whole sequence with the association of the holy, the sanctified, and the just, which of course is ironic because only half of the action is sanctified by God; the other half is a series of brutal, sudden, and alarming murders. The sound of the baby crying is heard only over shots of hitmen getting ready to kill. In shots inside the church the baby is sleepy and peaceful. The sound of the dialog is drawn over shots in disparate locations. When the priest asks Michael if he accepts God, we see Michael reply affirmatively. But the priest presses the point, in accordance with the ritual, asking Michael if he believes in Jesus and if he believes in the Holy Spirit. When Michael replies to these questions, we hear his affirmation, but we see something different: images of his thugs going about their work. Later, when Michael is asked repeatedly if he renounces the devil and his work, the questions are heard over images of someone being gunned down; their terror and spurting blood are then juxtaposed immediately with a close-up of Michael, looking down and inward, affirming that he does renounce the devil.

A very important part of making this ironic and metaphoric cutting work is the editors’ timing of cuts on Al Pacino’s performance. It is the precise timing that allows us to surmise that Michael is fully aware of the violent action taking place, knows it is taking place at his behest, and both regrets and sanctions it.

The first close-up of Michael in the sequence is a slightly high-angle shot looking at Michael from roughly the perspective of the priest, who is standing a step above Michael on the altar. At the beginning of this shot Michael is looking down and appears to be listening to the priest, gazing at the baby (Fig. 10.4a). He then looks up toward the priest (Fig. 10.4b), then his eyes shift to the middle distance and glaze over slightly, as he looks into his own thoughts (Fig. 10.4c). Once his inward gaze is established, there is another shot of the baby, but

Figure 10.4 Just before the killings start in the baptism/murder sequence of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), there is a shot of Michael (Al Pacino) that tells us, just through the shifts of his eyes, that his mind is in two places at once: here with the holy ritual in the church and away with the unholy ritual taking place at his behest. [Photo credit: Paramount Pictures, Alfran Productions]

Michael is not looking at him, Michael’s gaze is on the images in his mind’s eye: the preparations for the killings. Had the editors left the shot 46 frames, or 1½ seconds earlier, they would have left us with the impression that Michael’s thoughts were with the baptism. Instead, the timing leaves us with the impression that his thoughts are far away.

From there forward, as both the music and the mayhem escalate throughout the sequence, the editors use a repeating pattern of cutting back to Michael as he is looking inward and then holding on the shot as he responds to the priest. The response is performed calmly, even beatifically, and allows us to align with his thoughts, to believe, with him, that he can be both good and bad at the same time. It is the timing of the cut to Michael as he looks inward that tells us he knows what is going on, the holding on the shot as he responds that aligns us with him emotionally, and then the cutting back to the violence that creates the irony: we are emotionally aligned with the perpetrator of inhuman acts, who is reflective, sorrowful, and imbued with the righteousness of the Church. And this is the irony of the entire film. The good people in the film, the ones we understand, like, and feel with in the cycles of tension and release, are the monsters. The film form, including performances, shooting, cutting, sound, music, and devices, moves our understanding, caring, and allegiance toward the protagonist at the same time it reveals his stately, mindful, even responsible descent into base thuggery.

The Borgias (Neil Jordon, series creator, 2011–2013)

Parallel action is a core device in the structures of complex television series where multiple plot lines run in parallel to each other over many episodes and seasons. The Borgias is just one example of this kind of construction, but it is one where the parallel action is particularly energized, especially near the end of season three. Apparently the series was abruptly cancelled by Showtime, one season short of its intended four-season arc. This may explain why the parallel cutting is so pronounced in season three. There were many plots and relationships that had to be closed and cutting them in parallel creates efficiencies and impact.

This is not the only function of parallel cutting in this series though. The editors Lisa Grootenboer and Wendy Hallam Martin synthesize all of the purposes and techniques of parallel action as they swirl us through the season’s climax.

Figure 10.5 Rogerigo (Jeremy Irons), Lucrezia (Holliday Grainger) and Cesare Borgia (François Arnaud) have competing plans and ambitions. The complex parallel cutting of season three of The Borgias keeps each of their plots moving forward rapidly and adds energy to the drama with sharp juxtapositions of actions and emotions. [Photo credit: Showtime Networks]

• They bring excitement of rapid movement from place to place to what could otherwise become a staid period drama.
• They plant the questions: How will these multiple strands of action impact each other?
• They develop tension by revealing characters plans but withholding information about execution.
• They use “meanwhile” to complicate the plots with other characters’ intentions.
• They keep all of the characters’ stories present in the viewer’s minds.
• They balance “action” and “emotion” so that we care about what is at stake for each.
• They make metaphoric connections, use overlapping sound and music, and throw the energy from one shot to the next so that we stay synchronized with the movement of events, emotions, images and sound.

Snatch (Guy Ritchie, 2000)

The parallel action sequence in Snatch is, like The Great Train Robbery, not really parallel action. In fact, Guy Ritchie takes filmmaking back almost 100 years and makes a slyly winking sequence that brings the viewer in on three “parallel” sides of a story by taking us backward and forward in time, just as Edwin Porter did in 1903.

Figure 10.6 Dennis Farina and Vinnie Jones get ready to go on more than just a car ride in Snatch (Guy Ritchie, 2000). [Photo credit: Columbia/SKA Films; The Kobal Collection; Sebastian Pearson]

In Snatch, as three sets of interests converge on their common objective, they collide, literally, in a violently fatal car crash that is absurd and clever. We see the crash three times, as though we can see all points of view, not in parallel, but sequentially.

The absurdity of this sequence arises from the dialog and the situation. The cleverness arises from the sequential way that information is revealed. Just as Hitchcock makes use of our expectations to subvert them in Strangers on a Train, Ritchie knows we know what to expect from parallel action. And he plays with our expectations, thwarting them by manipulating the conventions of the device. One set of characters goes forward to a certain point in time and space, and then the edit jumps back to an earlier time and shows another set of characters on their journey to converge, not just in space, but in time. This manipulation of linear time makes the viewer feel like a God. As well as showing information the characters would not know about things going on at the same time but in another place, it reveals information that the characters could not know about their own futures.

This playing with the device shifts our allegiance; it takes us outside of the story so that we do not feel with any of the characters, exactly; it is as though we feel allegiance with the filmmaker instead. We stand in his shoes, playing with time and space. We feel clever, omniscient, just as the director might feel because he, of course, like a God, knows more about the story than any of his characters could.

French film theorist Christian Metz proposed that cinematic space and time allow the audience a kind of godlike quality, of always being in the right place at the right time. Parallel action allows spectators to be where the actions are even if the two actions are taking place worlds apart. In this way, parallel action creates one of the unique and enjoyable sensations of the movies. Unlike life, in the movies we can always be where the action is. If this unique sensation is not, to quote singer/songwriter Paul Simon, “why God made the movies,” it is certainly one reason the device of parallel action arose so early in the development of film form and remains so robust. This function of placing the spectator in the right place at the right time gives rise to a final and very useful question an editor can ask herself when putting together a parallel action sequence: Where is the action? Because that, of course, whether it is physical, emotional, or event action, is where the audience wants to be.

Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981)

Chariots of Fire is the Best Picture Academy Award-winning tale of the religious and ethical conflicts experienced by members of the British track team in the 1924 Olympics in Germany. The races that take place in the film are very important ways of showing the story. They show us the characters in competition with each other, with other teams, and with themselves, drawing a physical metaphor between running a race and the competitions and co-operations of life. Variations on speed of motion are often used in depicting these races to underline, enhance, or create emotional impact, the tensions of the conflict, and most importantly, the kinaesthetic empathy required for us, the viewers, to have a felt experience of the runners’ stories.

In the climactic gold medal-winning race there is the use of a couple of different speeds of slow motion in the sequence, all done in-camera, by speeding up the rate at which film runs through it. There is a range of slow motions in the athletes’ bodies, but the crowd is in normal time. This signals that the athletes are having a special kinaesthetic experience. Some athletes are slower and more glorious or expending more effort than others, as they prepare for the race, line up on their marks, get set into their starting postures, and go. But the race itself, the first time we see it, is mostly in long shot and normal time. Given that these are Olympic athletes running a mere 100 meters, it is very quick—under 6 seconds, including the win.

Given that this is a climactic moment of the film and many of the emotional and plot lines are riding on its outcomes, running it in under 6 seconds is a very interesting choice and one which, I believe, was probably made in the edit suite. As soon as the race ends, in fact as it is won, the editor, Terry Rawlings, returns to slow motion. The winner, our hero, Harold Abrahams (played by Ben Cross), breaks the tape in a surge of effort against time that seems as though his chest is literally pushing the weight of time in front of him as he pushes across

Figure 10.8 Ben Cross as Harold Abrahams pushes against time to reach the finish line in Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981). [Photo credit: 20th Century Fox/Allied Stars/Enigma; The Kobal Collection]

the finish line (Fig. 10.8). His friends and teammates in the crowd run down to congratulate him in slow motion, and then the editor makes another interesting choice: he replays the race, this time in slow motion. One could surmise that this is the memory of the race as it was felt by the characters, but the shots are not really set up to encourage us to infer that. There is no shot of Abrahams’s head or face or gaze that would imply we are shifting into his memory. So to me, this replay of the race feels as though it is for my benefit as an audience, so that I can feel the effort, this time in slow motion, feel the physical and psychological exertion as Abrahams strains against time and circumstances toward victory. In short, the race is replayed so that I can have the experience of kinaesthetic empathy that can be created by slow motion. When I watch the race the first time, the tension of the question of who will win is foremost in my experience. Slow motion here might have the effect of making me impatient rather than making me empathetic. Also, the extreme quickness of the race is, to my mind, a more accurate representation of what it might feel like to the athletes. After all the build up, the training, the tensions, the politics of getting to this point, that race would feel very quick indeed. The second time allows me the kinaesthetic experience of being in the race as a value in itself, a heightened, more glorious, more effort-filled experience than anything in my real life.

The Navigator (Vincent Ward, 1988)

Another very useful aspect of slow motion has to do with prolonging the occurrence of an event for storytelling purposes. Slow motion prolongs the sensation of an action occurring rather than having occurred. To clarify this point, I refer to screenwriting teacher Robert McKee’s book Story: Structure, Substance, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. McKee discusses the idea that emotion is something an audience experiences while something is going on.⁷ We experience feeling as something is occurring, not once it is over and we already know the result. This of course is similar to the tension of the open question I have been referring to throughout the book, and it is also a way of describing the kinaesthetic empathy that occurs while the question is open. Not only do we feel tension about what will happen, but we feel with the characters as they go through an event. Once an event is resolved, their emotions and ours dissipate.

McKee says there are only two emotions: pleasure and pain. They each have a lot of variations—joy, love, happiness, rapture, fun, ecstasy, etc., or misery, stress, grief, humiliation, remorse, etc.—but they all come back to pleasure and pain.

So if we experience the emotion during the journey, but as soon as we get there, we stop feeling the energy of the emotion, then slow motion, quite simply, prolongs the journey, so that we either can pay more attention to it or feel it for longer.

At the end of Vincent Ward’s moving and inventive film The Navigator, the protagonists have reached a very hard fought objective, which is to raise a cross on the steeple of a church. Because it is a mythical parable being told in two time frames, present-day New Zealand and medieval plague-ridden Europe, the storyteller, a young boy, knows that there will be a great triumph but also a terrible tragedy once the goal is reached. He doesn’t know what the tragedy is, and neither do we, until the cross has been raised and the boy starts to fall from the spire. There are a series of jump cuts that repeat and prolong the action of the boy falling away from the spire, and then there is a slow motion shot, not of the boy, but of his glove, drifting gracefully across the sky, never quite reaching the ground.

The slow motion is necessary to prolong the occurrence of the event, to give us time to realize who is falling and what the story implications of that fall are. It is also very necessary emotionally. A quick fall would change the emotional quality of the event from a lyrical sacrifice to a bad accident. But what I think is really interesting is that the slow motion shot of the fall is not a shot of the boy, but of the glove. I think that the editor, John Scott, and director, Vincent Ward, knew that putting in a slow motion shot of the boy falling would be too much. It might be maudlin or sentimental, it would almost certainly be a cliché, and it could never be lyrical, because it’s just too awful. Using the glove as a metonym allows us to see the beauty of the fall, to feel suspension of the moment as the glove is suspended by time, and to experience the grace of its movement as the grace of letting go.

Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991)

This case study on slow motion is from the end of Thelma and Louise, the 1991 Academy Award nominee for editing by Thom Noble. Thelma and Louise was a controversial film when it was released. The controversy was over the feminist credentials, or lack thereof, of the story, and one aspect of the controversy centered on the end: When the two women drive off the edge of a cliff rather than surrender to the law, is it defiant liberation or just suicidal wreckage and waste?

The use of slow motion, music, and a slow fade to white in the last shot are aspects of form that fuel the controversy. As the two women drive off the cliff’s edge, the car soars in a glorious, triumphant, arc in the air, in a gracious slow-motion suspension of time. The car doesn’t fall. Ever. Rather, the editor stops time and motion with a freeze-frame, and then the slow fade to white, timed with the rising cadence of the music, leaves us with the impression that the protagonists are flying, not falling. The very upbeat tune continues into a credit sequence montage of all of the happiest moments of the film. All of these techniques are used to convince us of one thing: a happy ending. And they succeed, largely owing to the physiological responses we can be depended on to have when we see smiling faces and graceful flows and hear happy music that synchronizes us to its infectious beat. It is only on a cognitive level that this film’s ending is sad. Only if you think about the wreckage and dead bodies that, of course, you never see, do you think about the waste and horror the events imply. How different would this movie have felt if the car had flown at regular speed? What if it had actually crashed?

This film uses slow motion at the end of the story to sustain the emotional energy generated by the action. Placed at the end, the slow motion sustains our emotional energy as we leave the cinema and, even more importantly, sustains the emotion we feel about the action in progress rather than having the feeling that freedom and flight have come to an end.