CHAPTER 11

Common Scenes

This chapter will look at two types of common scenes: two-handers (scenes with two characters talking in them) and chases. The two-handers are trickier to cut, but the chases are what win the editing awards because they are flashier, more visible editing. The analysis of each of these types of scenes draws on the theories and vocabularies proposed in this book, as well as theories proposed by others, and applies both to the practice of editing common scenes. In the case of two-handers, I will use the definition of a scene proposed by Robert McKee in Story¹ to provide a framework for extracting cutting principles. When discussing chases, I will make use of the work done by Ken Dancyger in The Technique of Film and Video Editing² in defining the elements of an action sequence. His explanation of the kinds of shots found in these sequences helps define some of the options an editor has when working with her material.

TWO-HANDERS

To look paradigmatically at two-handers, that is, look at what any of them may have in common, wherever they sit in the syntax or structure of a production, a definition of scene has to be established first. The definition I'm going to use comes from Robert McKee's book on screenwriting, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. I'm using this definition rather than the standard definition that a production manager would use because McKee looks at a scene as an emotional or story event, whereas a production manager would look at it as a technical or practical event.

For a production manager a scene is the action that takes places in a given location at a given time, and when the time of day or location changes, the scene, for production purposes, is given a new number. This scene numbering does not need to take into account flow of emotions, image, or story events in the final edit because scene numbering is concerned only with getting the production shot, not with storytelling.

The following definition of a scene by Robert McKee looks at a scene the way an editor needs to look at it: in terms of its opening and closure as an emotional or story event. McKee says:

A scene is an action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that turns the value-charged condition of a character's life on at least one value with a degree of perceptible significance.³

I have put the italics into that definition of a scene to highlight the important parts for an editor, which I will provide some more detail about in a moment. McKee discusses each of these italicized phrases in his book, and I will draw on his breakdown of terms to explain what the above quote means at a practical level. But I will also reinterpret these terms slightly to make them a bit more directly applicable to what an editor, as opposed to a screen writer, is doing.

Action Through Conflict

Action through conflict is something that is happening (action) that is not what one or more of the characters wants. In conventional drama, characters are pursuing goals, and conflict arises when they confront an obstacle to achieving their goals or getting what they want. Very often that obstacle is another person, a person with different or competing goals.

So a two-hander is action through conflict when two characters, who are each other's obstacles, meet and try to move, change, negotiate, get around, or defeat each other to achieve their goals. It is important to remember that the conflict may not be an overt conflict. It is not necessarily a fist fight or even an argument. The characters may just be talking about tea and cake, but the screenwriter and the editor both need to understand the underlying desires the characters are operating from to create drama. As discussed in Chapter 7, one character may ask for cake, but his underlying emotion is his desire for love. The other character may give him cake, but the underlying emotion she is operating on is her desire to escape. The conflict is not the subject of the scene, but it is the substance, and it is therefore what the editor is shaping. The editor shapes the emotional rhythm of a two-hander to convey the emotional conflict.

McKee says that a scene takes place in “more or less continuous time and space” because for him a scene is the rise and resolution of a particular conflict or event of emotional substance, not a change of location or of time of day.

Turns

When McKee says a scene involves a “turn,” he simply means a change to another direction. So in a two-hander, a character may come in expecting to achieve his material or emotional goals and have his expectations thwarted or turned in another direction, so that by the end of the scene he doesn't expect to get what he wants anymore; rather, he has a new problem to deal with: not getting what he wants. Turning a scene is the heart of the editor's craft contribution to shaping a two-hander, but to turn a scene the editor has to understand what the action through conflict of the scene is, and also, as per the explanation below, what the “value-charged conditions” of the characters are.

Value-Charged Condition

McKee says, “Story values are the universal qualities of human experience which may shift from positive to negative or negative to positive, from one moment to the next. For example alive/dead (positive/negative) is a story value, as are love/hate, truth/lie. . . . All such binary qualities of experience that can reverse their charge at any moment, are story values.”⁴ So if a value is a universal quality of human condition that can shift from positive to negative, then where it starts is its value charge: its positiveness or negativeness at the beginning of the scene. The value charge is either the positive or the negative state that a character is in with regard to her desires and her life.

In a dramatic two-hander scene a character will perform an action that will be in conflict with another character's goals, and, for at least one of them, the value charge will change from positive to negative or negative to positive depending on who wants what and who gets what he or she wants.

On At Least One Value

Characters are not simple; they don't just want one thing, they may want love and security or love and adventure or revenge and money. So their conflicts are not necessarily simple either. McKee describes three levels of conflict that a character may be experiencing at any given time, or that may be running through the story: internal, interpersonal, and social or environmental. Internal conflict is obviously something going on in a character's own emotions or conscience, whereas interpersonal conflict is a collision of two or more characters’ desires. Social or environmental conflict refers to the material or external world and how it may block or facilitate a character getting what he wants. When McKee says a scene turns on “at least one value,” he means that a character may accomplish one thing he expected to but be thwarted in another. So in our example of one character asking for cake but wanting love, well, he gets cake, so that is one emotional state that doesn't change its value charge. However, in this case he is optimistic about his chances of getting love, too, and doesn't get that. So on another level, the interpersonal one, the value charge does change from positive to negative.

This notion of three levels of value charge is well worth the editor exploring further as she works on a scene. The question to ask herself is: What is the value charge of each character coming into the scene, internally, interpersonally, and socially or environmentally? (A given scene or production may not have all three operating at once, but the most fascinating, cinematic, and engaging characters often will have all three at work at some point.)

The editor also has to determine, in collaboration with the director, which of these values is the real substance of the scene, because that is the value she will use to shape the flow of the performances. The substance and rhythm of a two-hander, as we shall see from the case studies that follow, are shaped by the editor's choices about which character's performance to emphasize and when. These choices direct the spectator's attention to aspects of performance and character that provoke our own hopes and fears about what will happen.

The editor can also make vitally important choices about where and when to turn the scene; that is, what shot or character to be on, and what moment of his performance to show, to shape the emphasis and empathy we experience as the emotions in the scene turn. Turning a scene is not just a one-way street from script to final cut. The editor can create or realize a turn through choices of editing patterns and shots. A scene may be written with a particular point at which it turns, but this may not be convincing or energetic enough in the performances or shots or story. In the end we find that a scene can play as written, but the editor can rewrite by shaping the scene's flow. A scene can turn, or the editor can turn it.

The case studies that follow rely on the reader having read Chapter 7 of this book, or at least bringing his own foreknowledge of the terms used in that chapter, such as beats, actions, and intentions, to his reading of these case studies, because these terms are used to elucidate the strategies the editors are using in the given scenes to shape their emotional flow.

TWO-HANDER CASE STUDIES

Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)

Gone with the Wind is an epic romance about Scarlet O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) and the changes she and the “Old South” undergo during the American Civil War. Scarlet experiences inner conflict as she has to shift from being what she was raised to be, a Southern belle helplessly dependent on slaves and protective men, to being who she really is: a successful, independent, and shrewd businesswoman. Her interpersonal conflicts are many; in fact, just about everyone in the story presents her with conflict as they either try to repress her independent spirit and initiative or rely on her to solve all of their problems. In her love relationships the inner and the interpersonal conflicts intertwine for Scarlet as they overlap with her own understanding of who she is or ought to be. Socially and environmentally, conflict is everywhere: the story is set during war, but only when the war changes Scarlet's life does Scarlet come into conflict with it.

FIGURE 11.1

Clark Gable as Rhett and Vivien Leigh as Scarlet in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939). Scarlet is trying to stop Rhett from leaving her, and her emotional dynamic is shown physically through the blocking: Rhett takes the lead and walks out of shots so that after each cut, Scarlet has to run into the new shot, chasing Rhett as he moves ahead of her. In the background of this still, a portrait of her and other details of their surroundings are clearly visible, as they are in most of the shots of this scene, but these details are not visible in the climactic close-ups at which the scene turns. Why? [Photo credit: Selznick/MGM; The Kobal Collection].

The last scene of Gone with the Wind is the scene in which we hear Clark Gable, as Scarlet's husband Rhett, say the famous line, “Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn,” and then leave her. Up until this scene, Scarlet has been known, even by Rhett, to be in love with another man, Ashley. In the scene just before this final one, Ashley's wife dies. For reasons that are not quite clear, probably owing to conventions of the epic romance, which at the time would have dictated that successful independent women should be punished by being failures in love relationships, as soon as Ashley's wife dies, Scarlet realizes she isn't really in love with Ashley at all; rather, she loves her husband, Rhett. She races home to tell him that she loves him, filled with the uplifting optimistic expectation that he will rejoice in her declaration and they will live happily ever after, only to have her expectations thwarted.

The scene is beautifully shot, with the director Victor Fleming taking tremendous care with the framing and shot sizes to convey the power shifts and changing expectations between the two characters cinematically. Consequently, the editor has few choices to make throughout the bulk of the scene about where to cut or what to cut to. The scene is played in a series of shots that start on a framing of Rhett, then Scarlet moves into the frame to talk to him, then Rhett leaves the frame. Then the editor, Hal C. Kern, cuts to the next shot, framing Rhett and forcing Scarlet to run into the shot, to pursue Rhett, to ask, plead, and finally beg him not to leave her. Throughout this scene Scarlet is being refused and denied what she wants, but she keeps hoping. She keeps believing she will get what she wants, she keeps changing her action as she pursues her goal, until a specific moment when the realization dawns on her that she has lost. This one moment is the turn of the scene, and I would argue that, in this case, the editor created it.

If you watch the scene, you can't help but notice how beautifully the mise-en-scène is articulated in most of the shots. It is shot with a fairly wide but not distorting lens, so that the backgrounds and the foregrounds are sharp. It is important that the backgrounds are sharp because the set contributes to the meaning of the scene as the characters move through it. It frames them and creates opportunities for the balance of power to be visible in the shot's composition and movement. The whole scene is shot this way until it turns. The moment when Scarlet realizes her desires have been thwarted, the cinematographer suddenly changes from a wide lens to a long lens, the backgrounds go completely soft and blurry, and, at the same time, the shot pattern changes from medium-wide two-shots (shots in which both characters are in frame) to a much tighter two-shot and then a tight close-up on Scarlet. Now it would be possible to surmise that the director planned this change in the shot pattern in order to turn the scene at this moment. But I would hypothesize that in fact what happened was that the editor realized the scene did not have a satisfactory turn, and he ordered a “pickup” of the moment at which the emotional expectations actually change.

A pickup is a shot the editor asks for after main shooting has been completed. If, as he would have been in the Hollywood studio in 1939, the editor is assembling the rushes or dailies during the production period, he can recognize if there is an important moment missing in the coverage before the cast and crew disperse and the shoot is finished. In Gone with the Wind, I hypothesize that the editor realized the scene didn't have a change in shot pattern that would help him to turn it, and he notified the director. The director then got shots according to the editor's specifications, but, as the crew had probably moved on from the location of the original scene, he picked them up with a long lens, which blurs the background, rather than a wide lens, which would have revealed the fact that they were not on the original set. By blurring the background the director was able to make the pickup shots match the original coverage closely enough to get away with it.

So my hypothesis that in the climactic scene of the most expensive motion picture ever made up until then, Gone with the Wind, the editor actually engineered the turning of the scene is based on three things:

1. The lens changes;

2. The background, which had been so articulated and significant before, suddenly becomes blurred; and

3. Most importantly, the pattern of shots changes from the carefully choreographed pattern of two-shots to a single in which the character doesn't move.

The last reason is the most important because, even if I am wrong and the scene was shot all at once and didn't use pickups, the change of the pattern of shots is the key to understanding the editor's control over the turn of a scene. Changing the pattern of shots is the editor's cinematic tool for underlining and crystallizing emotional change or change of the value charge from positive to negative. In a two-hander the change in pattern could be from two-shots to a single, as it is here, or from singles to a two-shot. It could be from many cuts to no cuts or from no cuts to one cut or from long shots to close or close to long. The point is not how the pattern changes but that it does. In Gone with the Wind the change in pattern of shots is the key to understanding that Scarlet's value charge has changed from positive to negative. It is subtle in this case because the value charge would seem to be changing throughout the scene. But I would argue that the turn is the actual moment at which the realization dawns, when the character who has been hopeful gives up hope, stops maneuvering or negotiating, or even pleading and begging, and accepts the new state of things, allowing the audience and the drama to move on to what happens next.

Postcards from the Edge (Mike Nichols, 1990)

Postcards from the Edge is a film Robert McKee uses to talk about screen-writing technique in his seminars and lectures. After attending one of these seminars I watched the film again and realized it also has some interesting things to reveal about constructing the “last draft of the script,” the edit.

Postcards from the Edge is obviously a much more recently made film than Gone with the Wind, and the shooting and production style are therefore quite different. It is likely that, rather than setting up each shot so that it could be cut only in a certain way, the director, Mike Nichols, would have covered most scenes from two or more angles and thus given the editor, Sam O'Steen, many more options for shaping the scene in the edit suite. In this case O'Steen didn't have to ask for pickups to shape the emotional dynamics by shaping the shot patterns; he had the material available for him to manipulate into patterns that underline the scene's emotions and changes.

One reason the change in pattern of shots is so important in turning the scene is that it is a visual cue, not a dialog cue, to the change. In other words, it can occur on and emphasize the subtext rather than simply supporting the text. Changing the pattern of shots is something the editor can do to reveal, punctuate, support, or even, in some cases, create the subtext. She can construct the rhythm of the scene by using the beats or changes of actions that the actors play in the most engaging and believable emotional cause-and-effect chain the material allows—whether that is the chain that was written or not. If she creates this cause-and-effect chain with a pattern of shots and then changes the pattern when the scene turns, then she is creating a visible, physical expression of the emotional dynamic of the scene.

Unlike Gone with the Wind, the scene I'm going to analyze from Postcards from the Edge is just a scene, not a sequence or act climax. It's a smallish turn, and the cutting is minimal, but there are some key cuts that make the most of the performances, and the places where there is no cutting are also significant in telling us how the values are shifting for the protagonist. The rhythm of this scene is very much contained in the performances, which are very finely rehearsed. The physical rhythm is fairly minimal, there are no cutaways to add texture, color, or movement; the emphasis is on the actors, their performances, and their spatial relationships. These performances and spatial relationships are carefully set up and shot to be about the static nature of the balance of power between the two characters.

Postcards from the Edge is a coming-of-age story, which is interesting considering the protagonist, Suzanne (Meryl Streep), is 35, which is much older than most people are when they come of age. Suzanne has had a recreational drug overdose and is in a rehab center when her mother (Shirley MacLaine), a once-famous movie star, comes to visit.

Define the Conflict—What Does the Character Want?

At the beginning of this sequence of Postcards from the Edge, Suzanne just wants to get through this visit from her mother without a fuss. She wants a peaceful, cheerful visit with no tears, traumas, accusations, or confrontations. In the bigger picture of the whole film, Suzanne has a slightly different goal. Her desire is to grow up, to be successfully in charge of her own life and not susceptible to her mother's manipulations. The force of antagonism blocking her is her mother, who is too self-absorbed to see Suzanne as anything but her child, certainly not as her own person. This is useful knowledge for analyzing this scene because once there are tears and confrontations, they stem from this bigger subtextual issue, not from the immediate subjects being discussed.

Note Value At Beginning

The scene starts when Suzanne's mother arrives at the rehab center. Suzanne is optimistic about her chances of getting through the visit without a fuss. She brushes off the fact that her mother is late and waits pretty patiently while her mother is adored by fans. In a sense, you could say that Suzanne is strategizing. She is being patient and lighthearted because if she can get through this visit without Mom affecting her too much, maybe she can start to achieve her larger objective, which is to get through life without Mom on her back.

Break the Scene Into Beats

Once Suzanne and her mother reach Suzanne's bedroom and begin to talk, Suzanne goes through a number of beats to try to keep the peace, all of which are ignored by her mother as she railroads through her monolog, taking charge of Suzanne's life and career.

It is worth noting here that, although it is Suzanne's story, this part of the scene is covered in one shot that features Mom at the center of the screen, talking animatedly. Suzanne, stretched out on her bed at the bottom of the screen, is barely visible. I would be very confident in suggesting that the whole scene was probably covered from the reverse position, over Mom's shoulder, and that Sam O'Steen, the editor, chose to use the shot in which Mom is featured to enhance the magnitude of the forces of antagonism arrayed against Suzanne; that is, to make Mom a bigger force.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, he features Mom to keep our sympathies aligned with Suzanne. Suzanne tries a number of actions to stem the flow of Mom's tide of plans and accusations, and most of these are to put Mom down, to belittle her, to mock her. These don't work, of course, but if we were to see them center screen they would be much stronger and the result would probably be that we liked Suzanne less. As the scene is cut, Suzanne's interjections are clever, but she is David against Mom's Goliath. She is low in the frame and a victim. If she were large and centered, she would seem to be more of an ungrateful brat than a sympathetic target for Mom's inane rant.

Note the Closing Value and Compare It to the Opening Value

At the end of the scene, when Mom leaves Suzanne's bedroom, the value charge for Suzanne has changed from positive to negative with regard to her immediate and her long-term expectations and desires. Mom has managed to cry and blame Suzanne, Suzanne has had to confront and accuse Mom, the confrontation has not been effective, Mom has ignored the implications of Suzanne's accusations and left, still planning and taking charge of Suzanne's life.

Survey the Beats and Locate the Turning Point

There is a specific point at which Suzanne's desire for a peaceful, tear-free visit is thwarted, and that, of course, is when Mom starts to cry. As noted earlier, there is only one shot from when Suzanne and Mom start talking together on the beds in the room, and that shot is held for quite a long time, through quite a few small beat changes for Suzanne as Mom takes charge of the action. When Mom suddenly starts to cry, O'Steen makes his first cut. He changes the pattern of shots, draws our attention to Suzanne, and effectively turns her value charge from an optimistic expectation that she'll slide through to a negative expectation that she won't make it.

This is a very interesting choice of a moment to turn the focus to Suzanne. When I screen it for students and ask them what Suzanne is doing in the shot O'Steen has cut to, they often say “nothing” on first viewing. However, if you go back and play the cut again, you find that, in fact, Suzanne is incredibly busy in the shot. Not only is she holding her breath and freezing her movements, which are active physical actions, she is hurtling through an array of emotional actions. She is biting her tongue, holding back accusations, repressing angry outbursts, and giving up hope, all in the space of about 3 seconds. You could say that her optimism for achieving her scene goal disappears before our eyes, but you would have to add that this is because O'Steen has chosen to show us that moment, to turn the scene there, and not at any number of other points at which she could have appeared to give up hope.

O'Steen then cuts back to the original shot in which Mom is center frame again, holds this for a moment, and then, as Suzanne sits up to confront Mom, changes the pattern of shots again. O'Steen goes from holding on one shot for a long time to a much quicker back and forth, for four shots. The change of pattern signals that not only has Suzanne's immediate scene value charge changed from positive to negative, but her hopes of achieving her larger goal, of getting Mom to recognize her as her own person, are also receding.

Then Mom gets up to leave and O'Steen returns to his original shot and holds it to the end of the scene. As the ending of the scene plays out, Suzanne and Mom have their most explicit argument yet, over who will do Suzanne's laundry. But there are no cuts here. This argument is loud and overt, but it is not the substance of the scene. The scene has already turned, Suzanne has lost, and now the consequences of her loss are just being played out. O'Steen chooses to hold on the one shot for the entire argument and Mom's departure because he is in fact saying “no change.” Mom held power when she came in; she got what she wanted, which was to dominate Suzanne; she is leaving, impervious to the pain she has caused; and we are in the exact same place as we were when we started. The shot and the balance of power remain unchanged, only Suzanne's value charge has changed from positive to negative.

I have argued up to now that the editor can take charge of how and when a scene turns by changing the pattern of shots and choosing what to show and when. The next three very quick case studies are all, to some extent, cutting oddities, interesting variations on the idea that changing the cutting pattern can turn the scene. They are highly visible cutting responses to underlying themes in a scene or story, and so they draw some attention to themselves; but on close examination, it is possible to see how each supports or creates the actual emotional intentions of the scene.

Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

In Notorious, Ingrid Bergman plays a degenerate and degraded woman, Alicia, who is called upon by the U.S. Government to do a spy job that can redeem her in her own eyes, and those of the world. Cary Grant plays the agent, Devlin, who recruits her and, not surprisingly, the two fall in love. One of the key two-hander scenes between them takes place in Alicia's apartment, before she knows what her exact mission is and after Devlin has recruited her. In this scene, the two embrace and banter and kiss each other continuously until Devlin gets a phone call asking him to come to the office. Although there is lots of conversation between Alicia and Devlin over this time, there are no cuts. It is all one shot, and I would argue that this is because nothing really changes. In fact, this is sort of half a scene interrupted by a completely different series of scenes. When Devlin returns to the apartment an hour later, the scene takes up where it left off, but then there are lots of changes. Value charges change for both of them, and there are plenty of cuts reflecting the textual and subtextual conflicts they are now engaged in.

Kiss or Kill (Bill Bennett, 1998)

Kiss or Kill is an Australian film with a very distinctive style, pace, and subject matter. The underlying themes of the film are that you never really know where you stand with other people, that at any moment a person could kiss or kill. In the story, fugitives played by Francis O'Connor and Matt Day are on the run. At one point they pull into a gas station, get some gas and snacks, and then leave. This is a 1-minute scene in which nothing really happens as far as changes of values go, but there are lots of cuts. The editor, Henry Dangar, ASE, has established a style for editing the film that involves rapid jump cutting throughout. On the editing style chart in Chapter 9, this film would be an extreme example of decoupage and collision. Every shot collides with the next, creating an uneasy feeling that the ground is shifting beneath you; you never really know where you stand, which, of course is a cinematic expression of the film's themes.

The dozens of edits are a way of saying that things are always in flux. By constantly shifting our point of view slightly, the edits and shots imply that these characters, if looked at a bit differently, would change. Or, in fact, they are changing. So, Dangar establishes and sustains an editing style that conveys a meaning different from what quick cutting often conveys. Instead of conveying lots of changes, the dozens of cuts say the opposite, that change is a constant.

Howard's End (James Ivory, 1992)

In contrast to the highly visible stylization of Kiss or Kill, Howard's End is a stately and classical costume drama. However, there is one scene that jumps out for its editing choices and its radical shift away from the cutting style that has been used up to that point. This is the scene in which Meg Schlegel, played by Emma Thompson, confronts her new husband, Henry J. Wilcox, played by Anthony Hopkins, over an affair he had years ago.

FIGURE 11.2

Anthony Hopkins as Henry and Emma Thompson as Meg, apparently healing a rift in their relationship in Howard's End (James Ivory, 1992). [Photo credit: Merchant Ivory; The Kobal Collection]

In the scene, Meg forgives Henry and reassures him that it will never be thought about again. The value charge appears to change in the scene, from negative to positive, in favor of their loving relationship staying the course. Then there is a fade to black and a fade up to the same scene in which the characters seem to be having a variation of the same conversation, and the exact same value change, from negative to positive in favor of the stability of their relationship, occurs again. Then fade to black again, then fade up and the same conversation, virtually, and the same value change occurs a third time. In each iteration there are changes and variations, of course. We are not seeing the same lines or blocking or shots, but substantively, we are seeing the same action, and this has a very curious effect on the value change in the scene.

On first viewing I surmised that the husband just needed a lot of reassurance and the scene keeps repeating because it takes a long time for him to believe his wife forgives him. But on reviewing the sequence it is possible to see that this is not the case at all. It may be what is occurring textually, but subtextually the opposite is happening. It is not a matter of Meg forgiving her husband, but of him stubbornly resisting her forgiveness until it becomes obvious that his real goal is to get her to see that she is the one who needs to be forgiven. He is not to blame for having been unfaithful, she is to blame for having witnessed his indiscretion. By repeating the apparent change from negative to positive three times, the editor actually undercuts the shift of the value charge and turns it into its opposite. The scene is not about the wife forgiving her husband, it is about the husband succeeding in getting his wife to take the blame. Instead of moving from negative to positive, the result of the repetition is to show them stuck. We learn that although the damage will be covered up and masked, their relationship will never recover.

SUMMARY—TWO-HANDERS

At the end of the discussion on parallel action (Chapter 10,”Devices”), I noted that cutting two-handers has something in common with parallel action as a device, in that if there are two characters, there are two sides to the story going on. Although we may be seeing the relationship of these two sides of the story sequentially—that is, in a cause-and-effect chain rather than in parallel—the questions of editing parallel action can still be useful.

When working on a two-hander it is very useful, for example, to identify where action is and where emotion is. In the scene from Howard's End, action appears to be with the wife and emotion with the husband. She appears to have to do the forgiving; his feelings and their relationship appear to be at stake. However, the opposite is revealed to be true; he is action and she is emotion, and the future of their relationship depends not on her driving the scene and forgiving him, but on her letting him drive the scene and taking the blame.

In the scene from Postcards from the Edge, Mom is action and Suzanne is emotion all the way through. As discussed above, their relationship does not change, and that, of course, is the problem.

In the scene from Gone with the Wind, Scarlet starts out as action, rushing in to declare her love and make everything all right again. But when Rhett starts to leave her, he takes charge of the scene. He becomes action and she becomes emotion. So, just as with parallel action, the question for the editor becomes: Which side are we on, when, and for how long?

CHASES

The chase is often referred to as pure cinema because it is a scenario in which the conflict is always made manifest in visible and audible action. Chases do not, therefore, have the same problems as the two-handers; in many ways, the problems are the opposite. The scene objective is always the same in a chase, for one entity to catch the other, so the editor does not need to interrogate the behavior to find out what the subtext is, or who wants what. However, the editor does have to shape the behavior to create the impression of a strong cause-and-effect chain and modulate the cycles of tension and release. Just as in a two-hander, she does these things by choosing whose side to be on, when, and for how long. This section will look at the elements an editor could take into consideration as she makes these decisions.

Some very useful principles about chases have been articulated by Ken Dancyger in The Technique of Film and Video Editing.⁵ In the section on action from page 223 to 225, Dancyger writes about four key issues for constructing an effective action sequence: identification, excitation, conflict, and intensification. Each of these four also applies to a chase, and I will use Dancyger's definitions of them to begin constructing a “recipe” for effective chase cutting.

Identification

There is much theory available on the question of identification and even the validity of it as a concept. One of the current theoretical questions is: Do spectators “identify” with a character, as in transferring their own sense of who they are onto the character? Or, as spectators, could what we are doing be more accurately described as aligning with the character, as in hoping for the same things he hopes for and fear ing with his fears, and thus, in a sense, developing an allegiance with him? Or is the action more accurately referred to as empathizing? I have tended, in this book, to promote the idea that we empathize, and that we empathize physically or kinesthetically as well as or as a part of our emotional empathy.

For our purposes in discussing chases it is not really necessary to solve this theoretical question and choose between identifying, aligning, and empathizing. It is sufficient to say that the spectator must care. As viewers we have to know enough about who the character is, and feel close enough to him, or closely aligned enough with his goals, to understand why he does what he does, to hope he achieves his desires, and to fear he won't. Then this “identification” has to be maintained throughout the chase. We can't get too far away from the character we care about or we will cease to care.

So, to create what Dancyger calls identification, he suggests we need close-ups and point-of-view shots. Close-ups bring us into greater intimacy with the characters by bringing us into closer proximity, and they reveal more minute details of their feelings and expressions than do long shots. Point-of-view shots literally give us the same view of the situation that the characters have, thus making it easier for us to understand what they feel, because we see what they see.

Excitation

Excitation, in Dancyger's view, is accomplished through movement: movement within shots and movement of shots (pans, zooms, tracks, dollies, cranes, etc.). Excitation is also accomplished, he says, through increasing the pace, or rate of change of movement. The earlier chapters of this book offer an expansive explanation of how this works for the spectator and for the editor in the discussions of movement activating our mirror neurons and our kinesthetic empathy. It comes down to saying that movement is what we can shape in order to shape rhythm, and the purpose of rhythm is to create the cycles of tension and release that keep us engaged in the story. So in a chase, excitation is accomplished by shaping movement into the cycles of tension and release that get our heart rates going and our pulses pumping.

An aspect of cutting that is particular to the creation of excitation is this question: Do we cut before or after the peak of the content curve? “Content curve” means how long it takes to recognize the content of a shot, to understand it, and to be ready to move on. Cutting before the peak of a content curve—that is, just as the spectator is beginning to understand what is in a shot but hasn't fully grasped it—creates a kind of uneasiness and edginess. The viewer knows something is going on but is not sure what. This can contribute to excitation, though, of course, too much of this uncertainty can also diminish excitation and create irritation. If we really don't know what's going on for long enough, we lose the thread of the action and stop being excited about it or even caring about it, in part because, when we lose the thread of the action, we also loosen our understanding of what's at stake.

Conflict

According to Dancyger, conflict is developed by crosscutting. By going back and forth between the two sides of the action, we stay in touch with how close each character is to his goal. The cutting back and forth between chaser and person being chased also keeps the stakes in the foreground of our thoughts and increases the activity of our minds as we consciously or unconsciously conjecture about what will happen. Each time, we are reminded of how close each side is to achieving its goal and what is at stake; and the open question of “what will happen?” and the tension of that question are renewed.

There is another idea about conflict that is also very useful in the context of cutting a chase, which is Eisenstein's notion of conflict: the conflict created when cutting together shots of unequal size or lighting values or movement or direction or line, shape, or mass. This sense of conflict more rightfully belongs in the category of excitation, though, because what is happening is that by cutting between shots that don't link smoothly, that collide in some aspect of their composition, you are creating more movement between shots. The viewer's mind has to move more quickly to recognize each new shot, and the jagged quality of movement is also more foregrounded.

Intensification

To quote Dancyger directly, “Intensification is achieved through varying length of shots.”⁶ This has not just to do with shortening shots but really has to do with modulating the rhythm, the points of emphasis by duration and energy, to make surprising and engaging movement phrases or patterns of accent. In different cases this could mean holding on one shot for a long time until the question of “what will happen next?” intensifies and then rushing into a flurry of short sharp shots. Or intensification could be achieved by setting up a pattern of very even cuts and then jumping into an erratic pattern of lengths. And so on. There are many, many possible variations, but overall the intensification created by varying the length of shots has more to do with the patterns of movement created, sustained, and judiciously broken than with the actual length of shots themselves.

By breaking the elements of a chase down into the categories of identification, excitation, conflict, and intensification, Dancyger has, I believe, provided us with a very useful basis for understanding how an effective chase is made. If we were to think of these four elements as ingredients, just as flour, eggs, butter, and flavoring are the basic ingredients of a cake, then we would have the first half of a recipe for cutting a chase.

The question then becomes: What kind of a chase are we making? To draw the analogy a bit further, if we were making an intense chocolate cake, we would use more chocolate and butter and less flour. If we were making a light cake, we'd put in more flour and less butter, but possibly the same amount of chocolate. Similarly, the questions for an editor are: What are the proportions of the ingredients and how will different mixes make different effects?

The following case studies look at the balance of ingredients in different chases. But this recipe is also easy to apply to analysis of scenes that you are curious about or that you are cutting. The ingredients are identification, excitation, conflict, and intensification. What are the proportions and timings of these that are going to make the most effective chase in the context of the story and style you have established?

CHASE CASE STUDIES

The Girl and Her Trust (D. W. Griffith, 1912)

The chase in The Girl and Her Trust is between robbers trying to steal the safe from a train station and a train racing to foil them. As the thieves try to make their escape, the “girl” of the title, played by Dorothy Bernard, an energetic and enterprising lass if ever there was one, jumps on board the robber's handcart and impedes their progress.

The chase lasts for 2 minutes and although there are only 23 cuts, all of the four elements of a chase—identification, excitation, conflict, and intensification—are visible in some measure.

Conflict is by far the most prevalent element in this chase, as 12 of the shots are cut together to move from one side of the action to the other. There is also a very substantial amount of excitation; that is, movement within shots and of the camera, which is sometimes mounted on a vehicle moving in parallel with the train and handcart to track their progress. However, this excitation does not look very exciting to a contemporary viewer because to our eye there is relatively little movement going on. Griffith has cleverly utilized still objects in the foreground to emphasize the speed and trajectory of the train as it passes, but to our eye he never cuts before the peak of the content curve, the shots are very similar in composition, so we have no trouble recognizing and assimilating the information within them, and they are all in long shot so their movement is not felt, kinesthetically, with the same intensity a close-up would provide.

There are only two shots in the whole sequence that would qualify as shots that promote identification or alignment with the character and her goals. These are high-angle shots looking down at the girl and the robbers on the handcart. The girl looks up toward the camera, allowing us to see her face and care about her emotions, but these shots don't show up until the middle of the chase, so their effect is somewhat minimized. Because we don't align with the girl intimately from the beginning, it is harder to engage later. Interestingly, the last shot of the girl, after she's saved the day, reveals her to be witty and vivacious; in other words, well worth aligning with. But our identification up to then has been more abstract, more with an archetype than a character.

Intensification, as in establishment of a pattern of shots and then varying it to create a particular “ride” through the action, is probably the least visible of all the elements in this particular chase. Cuts do come faster toward the end, but the framing of the shots does not add to the intensity of movement or emotion, so the speed of cuts, by itself, does not have as strong an effect of intensification as it might.

Although there are many aspects of The Girl and Her Trust that are somewhat outside of our contemporary experience of what a cinematic chase might look or feel like, this doesn't mean it wasn't a good chase at the time. In fact, it demonstrates that in some sense we have changed very little in our construction of chase sequences. To a greater or lesser extent all of the elements are there. What is interesting is what the proportions of ingredients in the recipe tell us about what was important to the filmmaker and his contemporary audiences. The reliance on long shots of the train barreling down the tracks does not so much indicate naiveté about creating identification as it signals a fascination with the machine. This great, powerful locomotive was cast in the role of the force for good, and if we see it that way and recognize the novelty and powerful cultural mythological engagement with trains, we can see that the filmmaker chose shots of the train because that was what mattered to him and to his audience. The shots of the train create an understanding of the meaning and dynamics of this particular story and chase. As we shall see in each of the chases that follow, there is an ongoing fascination with new technology, and although the movement gets faster and the close-ups get closer, filmmakers are still using machines to create excitation and still shaping a balance of their ingredients to deliver the meaning of their particular chase.

The French Connection (William Freidkin, 1971)

The chase between the cop (Gene Hackman) and the drug dealer (Marcel Bozzuffi) at the end of The French Connection won a well-deserved Academy Award for its editor, Jerry Greenberg. The editor's artistry is particularly apparent in this chase from the way Greenberg balances the chase's ingredients to make us feel the story.

FIGURE 11.3

Gene Hackman as the cop and Marcel Bozzuffi as the drug dealer in The French Connection (William Freidkin, 1971). This shot shows the almost lyrical final moment of a chase that has been characterized by extraordinary effort. [Photo credit: 20th Century Fox; The Kobal Collection]

Like most contemporary chases, this one is composed of fragments of action cut to look like they're happening at a frenetic pace next to each other. Which, of course, they weren't. Chases are very arduous to shoot, involving dozens of setups; that is, moving the camera, the crew, and the actors to a new place, lighting it, and then just grabbing a short sharp burst of action on camera before the lumbering process of moving the crew begins again. To make an effective chase, the editor has to take all of these little fragments and compose them into a convincing cause-and-effect chain, a chain of shots by which we can believe that the action in the first shot causes the action in the second shot. The cause-and-effect chain has to be more than convincing, though. It has to be compelling. And this is where the balancing of identification, excitation, conflict, and intensification, to tell the particular story of your chase, comes into play.

The chase in The French Connection is unusual because at one point the person being chased, the drug dealer, jumps onto a subway train and thinks that he has eluded his chaser. But he doesn't relax, and neither does the tension of the chase. Instead, the editor uses parallel action between the drug dealer and the cop to make us feel that the two characters know where each other is and are feeling the immediate pressure of each other's presence, when in fact the opposite is true. But the intercutting or use of the element of conflict in the edit keeps both sides of the action so present in our minds that we forget this and feel that the characters are under extreme pressure.

Excitation is a big element in The French Connection chase. Even though it was made in 1971, it still feels as though the rate of movement within and between shots is dazzlingly high. In particular, Gene Hackman's performance as the cop is filled with very dynamic and revealing movement. His body language speaks of intense focus, the ravages of the long chase, and the fury that fuels the effort he has to make to reach his goal. Excitation emanates from all of the shots associated with him, too—his car windshield, tires, the subway tracks overhead, and the architecture and inhabitants of the city around him all whip past with fast-moving, high-contrast shadows, lines, colors, or directions.

The spinning of tires and slamming of feet on the pedals have now become old chestnuts of shots to enhance excitation in a chase (in fact, they were used as far back as 1916 in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance), but they do their job here and keep our heart rates up. Part of the success of these elements is the soundtrack for this scene. Unlike most chases, this one does not use music. Instead, it relies on sound to articulate the rhythms and pulse of the sequence. Therefore, the sounds of things moving are fully exploited and enhanced in the sound design, and this contributes to our sense of the immediacy of the excitation.

Another very important device that comes into play in The French Connection is what I call jeopardy-enhancing elements. These are the innocent bystanders who are endangered by the chase: the baby carriage narrowly missed, the passengers on the subway car. All of these add to our sense of the danger and tension of the scene and allow for some variation in the patterning of shots. The conflict is more intense when Greenberg does not just cut back and forth between protagonist and antagonist but develops some stronger sense of identification or knowledge of who they are, in each of their stories, by use of jeopardy-enhancing elements. We have emotional responses to each of the characters when we see their response to these. The cop is alarmed and almost hysterical when he narrowly misses a baby carriage. The dealer is calm and callous when the subway train driver dies of a heart attack. In both cases, close-ups and point-of-view shots are used and we understand more about each of them.

Intensification is beautifully realized at the end of this frenetic and high-anxiety chase when the two opposing sides finally meet on the subway entrance stairs. At first it seems that the dealer will just surrender. But then he starts to make a run for it, and after all the fast and furious cutting, the shot in which he is killed is elegiac, almost lyrical, and held for a long time as the cop, exhausted and spent, slumps down onto the stairs after the very hard won capture of his prey.

Identification, excitation, conflict, and intensification are very equally balanced in this chase, unlike The Girl and Her Trust, in which there is plenty of conflict but almost no identification. The difference created by using a different balance of these ingredients is that the chase becomes a different story. Both have the same plot in the sense that someone is being chased by someone else. And the chases end in the same way, with capture. But they are very different stories. The Girl and Her Trust is the story of unexpected elements, a girl and a train, foiling the villain's plans. It is a story of archetypes colliding and simple good triumphing. The chase in The French Connection is much more a story of humans against machines, rather than working harmoniously with machines. The characters have some complexity to them, which is made apparent through the elements of identification and intensification. The characters strategize and persist against overwhelming odds, and in the end their emotions, their frailty, and the magnitude of their effort tell a story of humanity locked in a struggle with overwhelming forces and succeeding, but just barely, and at a cost.

Terminator 2 (James Cameron, 1991)

There is a chase early on in Terminator 2 between the new model Terminator, T-1000 (played by Robert Patrick); the 12-year-old boy, John (Edward Furlong), who he has been sent to kill; and the old model Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who has been repurposed for this sequel and given the mission of saving the boy.

This chase is once again a battle of vehicles and, just as in the other two chases, in which the cop's car becomes a beat-up version of him and the train is a stand-in for the hero, the vehicles become part of the identity of the characters themselves. The boy, John, is riding a motor scooter. On it he has some power—it is not as feeble as a bicycle would be—but he is small, exposed, and vulnerable nonetheless. T-1000 commandeers a massive shiny black truck. Its façade is the size of a small house and in it T-1000 is elevated way above John. Midway through the chase, Schwarzenegger rides in on a huge motorbike, its bass roar replacing the scooter's anxious whine in a patriarchal sweep as Schwarzenegger pulls John off his bike and deposits him in his lap. John's scooter gets crushed under the wheels of the truck that is pursuing them, but this is not just a jeopardy-enhancing element. It tells us how much danger John is in by crushing an aspect of him with barely a bump to the truck's suspension system. This may be a vehicle getting crushed, but it is definitely a use of identification to heighten our emotional responses.

In fact, this chase relies primarily on identification and conflict to achieve its affect. There is very little intensification. The cuts come evenly throughout the whole, about a second apart. The music and sound effects add to this blanket feeling of even pace by being evenly intense and carrying the same pulse throughout. The only exceptions are when Schwarzenegger leaps into the fray and time is momentarily suspended, and the end, when the pace slows down considerably, once the heroes think they have vanquished the villain.

There is also surprisingly little excitation in this sequence. Although, of course, everything is in motion, the rate of movement stays roughly the same. The actors are not using body language to express subtext or any layers of feeling, in part because the boy's feelings are very simple and the other two of them are machines without feelings. So performer movement is minimal, vehicle movement is even, and there are almost no cutaways to objects hurtling or other things moving. The main exception to this is shots of the truck hitting the cement sides of the laneway it is hurtling down. When the truck is driving straight forward its mass fills the frame and very little movement is actually visible. When a part of it slams into cement we can see the contrast between wall and wheel and the resulting shower of sparks.

Almost every shot is either of the protagonists (the boy and Schwarzenegger) or of the antagonist, meaning that the majority of shots are in conflict or a crosscut relationship to one another. A great deal of tension arises from us knowing just how close T-1000 is to overrunning the boy. But it is identification that sells this chase and tells its story.

Of the 170 or so shots, depending on where you locate the start and end of the chase, almost forty of them, or almost one in four, are shots of the boy (or his bike being crushed) that are close enough for us to see his expression and emotion. Another fifty are, or could be, his point of view. The rest of the shots belong to either Schwarzenegger or the environment or are shots that could not be the kid's point of view, but they still serve the purpose of raising the levels of anxiety for the kid by showing the imposing force of his pursuer. The primary expressive and anxiety-creating element in this chase is the boy. A great deal of the power of this chase rests in the tug on the emotions that a boy being pursued by a giant truck would create. Therefore, none of the other available elements for engaging our sensations or emotions, such as intensification or excitation, come anywhere near the prevalence of close-ups and shots of the boy's point of view. The editor is relying on the boy as emotion, or what's at stake, and the truck as action, or what's driving the scene, to tell the story.

The story this chase tells is once again man against machine, but this time the machines are men, too, so the result of the chase is not really a victory for the boy or for the power or intelligence of life; rather, it is one machine managing to, temporarily, elude another. Although the story of John's vulnerability and Schwarzenegger's strength comes through, it comes through with little of the musicality or rise and fall of excitement that a stronger mix of excitation and intensification could have given it. So, in the end, the chase reads as somewhat mechanical, but, given it's really about the battle of the two Terminators, perhaps that is how it was intended to feel.

At around 170 shots in 4 minutes, Terminator 2 has about forty cuts per minute as opposed to the eleven or twelve per minute in The Girl and Her Trust, but both, in different proportions, have all of the elements of a chase, even though The Girl and Her Trust relies of conflict and excitation, and Terminator 2 consists almost entirely of identification and conflict. The French Connection balances the four elements roughly equally and is, in my view, the most consistently satisfying of the three.

SUMMARY—CHASES

The point of analyzing these chases is to understand that each of these different recipes or balances of different elements tells a different story. The questions that are useful for an editor then are, not surprisingly: What is my story? What is the balance of elements I need to tell it? Is your story more about the people or the problem, the energy or the effort, the intensity or the confusion? Does it rely on us feeling empathy with character, being excited by movement, being anxious about the pressure of the conflict, or riding the rise and fall of intensity? Or some judicious combination thereof? Understanding your chase as its own particular story will let you use the four ingredients of the chase—identification, excitation, conflict, and intensification—not just as a recipe but as a way of creating a physical and emotional experience of story. You can shape what you see and hear, using a combination of these four types of images and sounds, into the psychokinetic ride you want your spectator to take.

ENDNOTES

1. McKee, R., Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting.

2. Dancyger, K., The Technique of Film and Video Editing, Theory and Practice.

3. McKee, R., Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, p. 35.

4. Ibid., p. 34.

5. Dancyger, K., The Technique of Film and Video Editing, Theory and Practice, pp. 223–225.

6. Ibid., p. 224.