CHAPTER 10

Devices

A device, for our purposes, is something that “complicates the formal patterning . . . providing form with variations.”¹ It is a way of constructing a moment or a passage that varies the unfolding of a story from direct linear cause-and-effect chains to more complicated and potentially formally more expressive patterns of telling. In particular, for editors, an editing device varies the form by playing with some of the unique capacities of cinema to shape time, space, energy, and movement to create experiences of tension and release.

Before talking about devices and their uses, it is important to note here something editors often say when trying to make generalizations about their work or working process, which is, “It depends on the story.” These editors are, of course, absolutely right. Every decision made in the edit suite needs to be made with reference to the unique story being told, whether that story is narrative drama, abstract meditation, investigative journalism, or some other form. But devices, unlike individual decisions, styles, or processes, do have modes of construction that travel across stories and can be discussed out of the context of any particular production and applied to any story. This chapter looks at two devices, parallel action and slow motion/fast motion, and how they are constructed. It presents some case studies on how they have been effectively used and offers some principles about them that may be useful for any production. But ultimately it will be up to the individual editor to make use of them, and their particular applications will be unique to their stories.

One question that can be applied to almost any production is: How do these devices shape the audience's perception of story, or, how do they “show” story? One way that parallel action shows story is by allowing the audience to move ahead of the character in its understanding. As a spectator, we experience both sides of a parallel action sequence, but the characters do not. So our understandings and feelings for the story in these sequences are shaped by the device as much as by the performance or the events taking place. The device shows story, rather than saying it, by revealing events in two places at the same time and creating a space in which the viewer can surmise and feel more than just what is happening in each. The viewer's mind can juxtapose the two and draw conclusions, take sides, hope, and fear, without being told what to think. By the audience being shown more than the characters can see, and being shown it with a rhythmically shaped passage of time, energy, and movement, the meaning and the feeling of the story is conveyed cinematically. It is shown, not said.

Slow motion and fast motion are also cinematic story-showing² devices. They give audiences direct physical experiences of the ways in which characters are thinking or feeling. These time-manipulation devices can distort the flow of time's movement in the film to convey an inner world. They also create an image of time that becomes our experience of time; sometimes aligning us more closely with the character's subjective experience, other times commenting or creating an experience in us that is outside of what the character could know or feel.

The following case studies on parallel action and slow/fast motion discuss each of these devices in a craft sense, so that they are readily available to practitioners, and extrapolate principles from the specific examples given of how they might work affectively, or not work if they become clichés, and what thought processes they might be relied upon to convey or create in any screen production.

PARALLEL ACTION

Another way of saying “parallel action” is to say “meanwhile.” “Meanwhile” is a literary device that was very fashionable in the early years of film. The grandfather of many film devices and conventions, filmmaker D. W. Griffith, says that he was heavily influenced by Charles Dickens, the king of plotting meanwhiles, but actually this use of meanwhile can be found all over literature.³ Ironically, just as Dickens is credited as an authority for a device that is really “common to fiction at large,” D. W. Griffith was later credited with devices that were common, even intrinsic, to the development of narrative film form at large.⁴ Whether invented by Griffith or having evolved as the aggregate of filmmaking knowledge developed and spread from country to country, parallel action is one of the earliest cinematic storytelling devices to be explored and continues to be used as an extremely effective, efficient, and exciting way of moving story events, creating feelings, revealing information, and heightening tension.

As a film-editing device, parallel action essentially leaves one character or story in progress and turns to look at what is happening elsewhere at the same time. Why do this? One reason is, as Eisenstein said, to relieve boredom. But I would put that in the positive and say that one of the primary purposes of parallel action is to create excitement. From the point of view of shaping cycles of tension and release, the device of cutting parallel action opens questions. How will the two things that are happening in two different places at the same time impact each other? And, inherent within that question, how will these events impact each other, is the even more tension-filled question of when will they?

The nuances of “when” are the editor's domain. As editors, we know from the script that the two sides of the parallel action will eventually connect and that the plot events that are the result of their convergence will occur. Contemporary audiences are pretty well aware of this, too. If one were screening a dramatic film in which a fireman was racing to save a child in a burning building and paused the film midway through the action to ask, “Will the fireman get there in time?” the audience would be most likely to say, “Yes, probably.” But audiences are not really in the theater just to experience the unfolding of events. They also come to the cinema to have the psychosomatic experience of how the events unfold. It is their empathetic experience with the characters on their journeys, and their feeling with the movement of image, sound, emotions, and events, that they also come to the movies for. They may be confident the fireman will save the child from the burning building but still come to the movies to enjoy the tension of the open questions. How close will he get to missing it? How much tension will there be? How well will the editor cut the parallel action sequence? How well will she modulate the rate and angle of convergence to create a satisfying tension, a satisfying unfolding of the action in time, a satisfying rhythm?

PARALLEL ACTION CASE STUDIES

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 Practice⁵ 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?

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]

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 does serve as 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.

Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)

The opening sequence of Strangers on a Train⁶ 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 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, as viewers, to think we know more than the characters, to think we are moving ahead of them, to feel tension about the impending collision, and it even creates the possibility for the viewer to learn 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, and how time, movement, and events feel 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's 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: the organ music and sounds of the service, which are artfully cut across from the grand church to the sordid sites of violence, and the precise timing of image cuts to cue clearly to the audience that Michael Corleone knows what is going on and condones it.

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.

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, Michael replies affirmatively, in sync (meaning we see him in the church saying the words we are hearing). 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 the 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 he 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 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.

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.

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.

Snatch (Guy Ritchie, 2000)

The parallel action sequence in Snatch, the most recent and most self-conscious film of the five discussed, 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 10.5

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, and the cleverness arises from the sequential way in which 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. As the three cars approach a common destination, the editor (Jon Harris) subverts classical parallel action so that it is not just showing what is happening in one spot and meanwhile what is happening in another spot. Instead, 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 God. As well as showing information the characters would not know about things going on, meanwhile, in another place, it reveals information that the characters could not know about their own actions or trajectories.

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 God, knows more about the story than any of his characters could.

This case study does not have an exercise to go with it, because the principle behind it, that explicit manipulation of a convention will draw attention away from the story and toward the film as a film, is a principle likely to be used only in very specialized scenarios. However, this case study does provide an opportunity to consider another implication for the audience that relates to French film theorist Christian Metz's idea that cinematic space and time allow the audience a kind of godlike quality, an omniscience of always being in the right place at the right time. Parallel action allows spectators to be where the action is. It places the viewer in the important place at the important time, 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.

SLOW MOTION

Slow motion is a simple technical device and can be quite useful in the shaping of rhythm and affect.

Technically speaking, slow motion of live action can be created one of two ways: if shooting on film, it is a matter of running the film through the camera at a faster rate. That way, more frames are shot per second, and when the film is projected at normal speed (24 frames per second), the action looks slower and smoother because there are more frames of it. An action that took 1 second to perform but which was covered with 48 frames of film now takes 2 seconds to project and looks much smoother because the action's flow is captured in twice as much detail.

The other way to create slow motion is in the edit suite. When you use the motion effect functions in a digital nonlinear editing program to create slow motion, what the program is doing is duplicating frames so that the action takes longer to occur. If you specify that the shot should run at 50% of its original speed, the program will duplicate each frame and make the shot last longer by playing each frame twice. This does not create exactly the same smooth effect as in-camera slow motion, but really this becomes noticeable only when you go to more extremes of slow motion, such as running the shots at one-quarter or one-eighth their normal speed. Then the fact that frames are being repeated becomes more visible, and there is a stuttering effect created as one frame is held for the length of time it would normally take eight frames to pass. In filmmaking processes before the advent of video cameras or digital edit suites, slow motion created in postproduction was called step printing and was done with an optical printer by repeating frames, just as it is done in the digital nonlinear edit suites. This repeating of frames creates a effect different from running the film faster through the camera, but it is still an aesthetic effect that can be put to good use for many purposes.

But what are these purposes? Why make something slow motion? The major function of slow motion is to prolong for the purpose of heightening whatever effect the gesture or action covered is meant to have; i.e., to make it more poetic, romantic, glorious, horrifying, or otherwise heighten the emotionality or importance of a moment.

Why would seeing something for a longer time make us more emotional about it? There are, I believe, at least two answers to this question. The first is a simple matter of temporal emphasis. If an emotion or action is in progress and it is portrayed in slow motion, then it will automatically have more emphasis by duration than it would normally have. The other reason slow motion heightens affect is emphasis by stress. As discussed in Chapter 3, the emphasis by stress is the accent or emphasis created by the energy or quality of movement, not by its duration.

Slow motion changes the energy or quality of a normal movement and thus gives it a greater emphasis. It increases the magnitude of an occurrence in our perception and changes the quality of our kinesthetic empathy, I believe, because it creates an image of a greater effort of bodies in motion. Bodies (and these could be human bodies, bodies of water, bodies of objects) expend greater energy to do an action when they appear not just to push against obstacles on their journeys but also to be pushing the resistance of time. This “resistance of time” can, in some cases, also create the opposite quality of movement; not greater strain but a floating, buoyant quality can be created by that temporal resistance. In this case, time becomes a sort of cushion of air holding a body up as it moves in slow motion. As viewers, our kinesthetic response to the effort involved is heightened as the bodies appear to strain against time or float within it, unable or unwilling to break free and move with normal gravity and tempo. The great Soviet documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov⁷ is quoted as saying that “slow motion is time in close-up.” The idea of time being close-up suggests that slow motion does for time what the close-up does for space, which is make us more intimate with it, more cognizant of it, and more sensually affected by it.

The following case studies look at a few examples of slow motion in films to extract some principles about how and why it is used, what the particular effects of our heightened kinesthetic empathy may be, and also to consider when slow motion might be cliché or overused.

SLOW MOTION CASE STUDIES

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 cooperations 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 kinesthetic 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.” 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 kinesthetic 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 and, given that these are Olympic athletes running a mere 100 meters, very quick. Under 6 seconds, including the win.

FIGURE 10.6

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]

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 the finish line (Fig. 10.6). 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 kinesthetic 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 kinesthetic 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.⁸ 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 kinesthetic 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. “As audiences we experience emotion when the telling takes us through a transition of values. As soon as the plateau is reached, however, emotion quickly dissipates. An emotion is a relatively short-term, energetic experience. Now the audience is thinking, great, he got what he wanted, what happens next?”⁹

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 me dieval 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 final 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?

FIGURE 10.7

Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon as the title characters in Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991). When they make the decision to go forward rather than surrender, is their decision noble, lyrical, and redemptive or ignominious and wasteful? The filmmaker relies on slow motion and a few other editing devices to show his perspective. [Photo credit: MGM/Pathe; The Kobal Collection]

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.

FAST MOTION

Technically speaking, fast motion is the opposite of slow motion. It can be created either by running the film more slowly through the camera or by dropping out frames in the edit suite using the motion effects function. Unlike slow motion, there is no perceptual difference in using one of these techniques or the other. Running the film through the camera more slowly means that the action is covered in fewer frames, which is the same effect as dropping frames out in editing so that action goes by more quickly.

Affectively speaking, the function of fast motion may also be the opposite of slow motion. If the function of slow motion has been to make something more poetic, romantic, glorious, horrifying, or otherwise heighten the emotionality of a moment, then is the function of fast motion to make you feel less?

In many cases, we laugh at fast motion or experience it as a light moment. By being too speeded up to be real, fast motion is kinesthetically comic; it creates absurdity by ellipses.

According to Robert McKee, comedy is predicated on the audience feeling that no one gets hurt. So, if fast motion makes us feel less, perhaps it does so by leaving the impression that the characters feel less. Our kinesthetic empathy is activated by the recognition of an on-screen figure's kinesthetic experience, so if those figures don't feel an event, we don't either.

This kinesthetic effect could be said to be drawn from the technical means of production of fast motion. It is almost as though, by dropping out frames, you eliminate the points of contact at which the body would normally feel pain. The actual crash of the body into the ground is missed or passes to quickly to hurt. Instead of straining against time or feeling it as a force of support or cushioning, bodies on screen slip through time with very little contact, too little to have an impact.

TWO QUICK FAST MOTION CASE STUDIES

Romeo and Juliet (Baz Lurhmann, 1996)

Two for the Road (Stanley Donen, 1967)

In Baz Luhrmann's 1996 version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, editing rhythms and style do a great deal to update the story to contemporary Southern California. In the scene in which Juliet's mother asks Juliet if she would like to marry Paris, the editor, the audacious and daring Jill Bilcock, conveys a great deal about the mother's character and her relationship with her daughter by use of fast motion. The scene is cut with absolute respect for the rules of classical continuity cutting. There are no jump cuts or even jarring cuts from long to close-up shots. Shot sizes and composition progress from wide to medium to close in an orderly and reliable way.

As Juliet, Claire Danes's performance is unaffected and sincere. Meanwhile, however, her mother (played by Diane Venora) is getting ready for a costume party, which she intends to go to as a Las Vegas-style Cleopatra in a gold wig and sequins. She is chain smoking, barking at servants, and stressing equally about her daughter's future prospects and her own appearance. Bilcock supports and conveys the mother's manic energy and scatterbrained approach to life by speeding up her action, so that by contrast with Juliet she appears silly, slightly insane, and, even more importantly, utterly lacking in feeling. The point of the scene is that Juliet's mother is oblivious to Juliet's emotions, and this is conveyed through use of fast motion. She dashes, spins, and slips through the scene feeling nothing, being impacted on by no one, and letting nothing touch her.

In Two for the Road Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn play lovers on a road trip to explore Europe and their love. The couple inadvertently meet up with some old friends of Finney's character and get dragged along on a tourist trip to see a chateau somewhere in France. The whole sequence of visiting the chateau, taking photos, getting ice creams, and attending to other needs takes place in under 2 minutes, all in fast motion. The players look, exclaim, pose, snap, eat, smile, and carry on just as tourists ought to but at such a rate that none of the experiences has any meaning whatsoever, and this, of course, is the point. This tourists’ view of an antique culture is a kind of desecration of time, the friends’ grotesque parody of family living is a warning to the young lovers, the whole event is a travesty of a felt experience, but a funny one because although they miss the actual meaning of anything they are doing, they don't feel bad. At this rate of fast motion, they don't feel anything.

MIXED MOTIONS AND SPEED RAMPING

One exception to fast motion being funny is that it can be confusing or about confusion. Fast motion can be used to create a head space in which things are moving so quickly that a crisis is precipitated. But this use of fast motion is quite often mixed with slow motion and various speeds in between, the effect being one of disorientation in time and therefore a loss of one's sense of place in the world. A useful reference for this is the ending of Arthur Penn's 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. When Bonnie and Clyde are suddenly and very gorily gunned down, Penn and the editor Dede Allen use a rapid-fire mix of slow and faster shot speeds to convey the confusion, panic, and depths of feeling of the characters.

More recently, mixed motion speeds are used in action films to convey a kind of superhuman control and power in fight scenes wherein the hero might slip into a slow motion preparation, creating tension and a heightened sense of his gravitas and the power of the obstacle he faces, a feeling that he not only has to push against his enemy, but push against time itself. Then he will spin into a faster-than-the-speed-of-light kick, signaling his incredible dexterity and mastery of the elements of time, space, and gravity. Then he'll land in a perfectly controlled normal speed, regrounding us in real time and space and preparing us for the next onslaught.

Another variation on the use of slow and fast motion is a relatively new device called speed ramping. Again, this can be done in some high-tech cameras in which variable speed settings can be employed or in the edit suite, where motion effects can be controlled and modified in a range of ways. The device involves starting at one speed—for example, one-eighth normal speed—and then ramping up to, for example, eight times faster than normal speed, in one shot.

If the function of slow motion has been to make poetic, romantic, glorious, horrifying, or otherwise heighten the emotionality of a moment, and the function of fast motion is the opposite, to minimize the emotional significance, to make us feel less, then what is the function of speed ramping, which, in one very cool and exciting shot does both? The device is probably too recent to theorize effectively. The fact that it appears in stylish recent films and lots of music videos now does not mean that it will always be associated with being stylish or cool. In fact, its prevalent use in music clips, and the wave of British “gangsta” films that were very popular in between 1998 and 2003, or so, makes it already look dated by association with a style that is no longer stylish. So the question is open as to whether it will become a cinematic device with conventional associations and reliable emotional resonances. The most I'm willing to say about it at the moment is that sometimes it is used as a subjective expression of the character's state of mind, but more often it seems to be an aesthetic effect in which shifting from the emotional qualities of slow motion to distancing qualities of fast motion creates a foregrounded sensual experience of time.

SUMMARY

There are many more devices available to editors and filmmakers to vary their storytelling and rhythms, and very likely some still to be invented. The two discussed herein, motion effects and parallel action, were chosen because they have an easy accessibility to editors. It is possible for an editor to create parallel action in a story that is plodding along or to create motion effects to change the texture and feel of time—characters’ time and movie time. Both of these will complicate the unfolding of a story and, if used well, enhance expression as well as providing interest or variation.

Parallel action is particularly interesting as well, not just because it is one of the oldest devices, but because, in a sense, any cutting that uses a shot–reverse shot is parallel action. If there are two people in a conversation and the editor cuts between them, she is very often showing us not just what the action and reaction are—in other words, just what is happening sequentially—but is subtly manipulating time to show us what is going on meanwhile. If she cuts from a man drumming his fingers impatiently to a woman staring out the window she could be saying “he is impatient; meanwhile, she is lost in her thoughts.” If there are two characters, there are two stories, and the questions for the editor will be the same in handling any two stories running parallel to each other: questions of emphasis, of where is action and where is emotion, and which one needs to be emphasized more to give this story the right balance. This question will be taken up further when we look at two examples of common scenes in the next chapter.

ENDNOTES

1. Turim, M., Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History, p.5.

2. In his book The Eye Is Quicker, Richard D. Pepperman writes extensively about story showing and how editors do it.

3. See Eisenstein, S., “Dickens, Griffith and the film today,” in Film Form, p. 205.

4. See Fairservice, D., Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice, for more information on the evolution and development of practices and devices in editing.

5. Ibid., pp. 42–48.

6. This example of great editing technique first came to my attention when I was reading The Technique of Film and Video Editing: Theory and Practice, by Ken Dancyger. So rich are the innovations that Hitchcock brought to the film form that Chapter 6 of that book is completely devoted to experiments in editing by this master filmmaker.

7. Vertov is quoted in the DVD commentary by film scholar and Soviet film expert Yuri Tsivian on Vertov's masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera.

8. For more information on McKee's ideas about emotional transitions, see pp. 33 and 34 in Story: Structure, Substance, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, Emotional transitions and some of McKee's other principles of scene design will also be looked at in more detail in the chapter on Common Scenes.

9. Ibid.