Conclusion

In the introduction to this book, my approach was described as “problem-driven research,”¹ the problem being to find a way to describe modes of thinking about rhythm and the processes and purposes of shaping rhythms, so that rhythmic creativity in film editing can be understood and extended.

Because editors always say that shaping rhythm is intuitive, I began by inquiring into what editors mean when they say that. I found that what an editor is doing when creating rhythm is creating something that “feels right,” but that that sense of feeling right—that rhythmic intuition—is an explainable psychosomatic phenomenon and not a veiled and indefinable one. Making an edit feel right is the editor's contribution to a film, her special skill, her signature, but it is not just a gift or talent. Knowing when something feels right is an awareness of the rhythms of the world and the rhythms of the body—an awareness that can be trained and developed.

Feeling rhythm is “a body thing.”² The intuition that informs the process of cutting rhythms is based on knowledge of rhythm in the world that is acquired physically: through kinesthetic empathy and mirror neurons, as discussed in Chapter 1. Rhythmic thinking is also informed by the body's own rhythms. In the process of cutting a film, knowledge of rhythms of the world and rhythms of the body support, extend, and enhance the creativity, judgment, expertise, and sensitivity that editors use to cut rhythms. Knowing what some sources of intuitive knowledge are, and how that knowledge is assimilated, opens to the editor the possibility of actively developing and articulating her rhythmic intuition.

One body of articulated knowledge that offers editors ways of extending their intuition about rhythm is the art of choreography. The ways in which dance makers create affect have some things in common with the ways editors create rhythm, because choreographing and editing are both manipulations of movement. Consideration of the choreographic possibilities for shaping movement and energy over time is one way of understanding and possibly expanding the craft of cutting rhythms.

Choreographers make dance phrases, and editors make cine-phrases, but both are shaped by the tools of timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing. In editing, timing works on choosing precise frames, durations of shots, and placement of shots in the film. Pacing manipulates the frequency of cuts and the concentration of movement or change between shots in scenes, sequences, and the overall film. Trajectory phrasing is a term I arrived at by bringing together research in dance and in editing. It is the phrasing of movement energy and direction. It governs the choices about smooth linkage or abrupt collision of shots, the selection of movement energies to be juxtaposed by cuts, and the stress accents that punctuate the movement of energy.

Timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing are generally all at work in any given sequence, not just as tools that an editor is employing, but also as attributes that rhythms have and faculties that editors possess. As faculties, they are part of the editor's somatic intelligence and function without being verbally articulated. However, a clear definition of each of their functions may help editors in their conversations with colleagues and collaborators. These definitions may provide editors with more specific ways of articulating their intentions or more precise ways of interrogating their own work.

The intuitive, choreographic shaping of movement and energy over time, through timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing, creates the rise and fall of tension and release in a film. That is the purpose of rhythm in film: to shape understanding and emotions through cycles of tension and release. Rhythm signals the story's meaning and the character's intentions at an immediate, physically recognizable level. By creating the waves of tension and release, the editor creates the film's “beat or ‘pulse.’”³ By riding the waves of tension and release, the spectator's body rhythm is drawn into a kind of synchronization with the film's rhythm. This physiological syncing function of rhythm in film makes movies a form of meditation for the unquiet mind, not one that is likely to result in enlightenment, but one that nonetheless gives the mind's fluctuations a unity of focus for the duration of the rhythmically articulate film.

An editor may shape rhythms according to the film's dominant priorities: the physical movement, the emotions, or the events. The distinction being drawn between types of rhythm is actually a distinction between types of movement to which an editor chooses to sensitize herself when making cutting decisions. In most films, all three types of rhythm are always present, but they can be prioritized at different moments, and there are some principles about cutting each that can be articulated.

If the film prioritizes physical movement, then the editor is dealing primarily with physical rhythms. Her choices pertain to linkage or collision, to the rise and fall of energy, to the rate and concentration of movement, the pulses and cycles of tension and release of the visible and audible movement in shots and between them. Choreographic ideas about shaping movement phrases and refining the movement's flow and cadence can be useful to an editor working on physical scenes such as dance scenes, chase scenes, or fight scenes.

If the movements of emotions are the focus of the film (or a sequence within a film), then the editor's work is focused on the rise and fall of emotion, not the phrasing of the physical. But, the shaping of emotional rhythm actually involves shaping of the physical images and sounds, for the ways in which emotion moves through them. Knowledge of techniques that actors use to create the movement of emotions in the movement of their bodies and voices can help train the editor's eye to “see feeling.” The editor can see cycles of preparation–action–rest, actions and beats that course through the physically visible performance, and use the movement of these cycles to throw the emotional energy from one shot to another. In this way, the editor can shape the performance and the emphasis on a given emotional moment by using the time, energy, and movement of one performance in a cause-and-effect relationship with another.

Shaping event rhythm relies, in the first instance, on knowledge of the audience the film is addressing and their likely physical rhythms, rates of assimilation of information, and expectations of change. The editor uses this knowledge, and her own feeling for sustaining the tension of dramatic questions, to organize the plot events into a rhythmically coherent and compelling structure. To shape event rhythm effectively, the editor has to continually refresh and retune her awareness of her own kinesthetic responses to the movement of the events in a film. Editors sculpt the tension and release in scripted events by working with the timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing of ideas and information across the flow of the whole, not just the individual scenes or parts.

In most films, editing involves working with all three kinds of rhythm. The physical, emotional, and event rhythms come together to create the rhythm of the film. This rhythm and its components are not necessarily experienced cognitively. Rhythm in a finished film is a “felt phenomenon,”⁴ just as it was in the cutting room during the creative process of shaping it. As award-winning editor Merle Worth says in First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors:

It is not cognitive in the conventional way that we understand the word. You are looking from inside the bloodstream of what's going on. Initially you are working exclusively in the realm of intuition.⁵

The objective of this book is to respect intuition at the same time it provides specific information about the materials, processes, and purposes of rhythm in film editing. My own mix of practical and theoretical work has demonstrated that intuition can work effectively with the knowledge of what intuition is, how it is informed and developed, and what the processes, tools, and purposes of rhythm in film editing are. This knowledge supports the somatic impulses and gives the editor options to consider, consciously or subconsciously, when making something feel right.

Explicit knowledge about rhythm is not prescriptive, but it is useful when an editor is stuck and doesn't know how to make something feel right. At that point it gives her questions to ask herself about what may be wrong. Readers who have come this far in this book will be aware that I have not at any point described a “good” rhythm or a “bad” rhythm. In the last three chapters I talked about specific instances of cutting and the tools, conventions, and operations that may often be at work in shaping their rhythms. But the application of these principles is always particular to the material available and the premise it is trying to convey. Rhythms can be manipulated to give shades of meaning, subtext, and impact to material that may be quite surprising to both director and editor, even within the conventions and operations described herein. The methods I propose are methods of asking questions of the material that will yield the rhythms its story requires.

This articulated knowledge of what rhythm is, how it is shaped, and what it is for has a place in conversations between editors and directors, where it can be used, diplomatically, to establish common vocabularies and ways of working. It also has a place for directors and writers long before they even get to the edit. A director and writer who have a developed consciousness about rhythm and the ways it conveys their meanings will be able to work much more effectively with collaborators in performance, images, sound, and music to come up with the material the edit will shape into the production's finished form. The ideas about rhythm in this book may also be useful to screen studies scholars who are interested in the effects editors have on shaping a film, and the effects of rhythm on the spectator's experience of film.

Through practical application of these ideas to films I've cut, especially Thursday's Fictions, I have found that the knowledge I have researched and articulated herein is useful in the creative process. It has expanded my own intuitive resources by making me aware of the confluence of rhythms in the rushes, the rhythms of the world, and the rhythms of my body working together on shaping the rhythms of the film. The ideas in Cutting Rhythms are about moving fluidly between the conscious process of evaluating work and the intuitive process of feeling it. These ideas are written to support and legitimize body knowledge or somatic intelligence as a credible and educated resource and, at the same time, to make the body knowledge accessible, even within a complex or verbally driven collaborative process. My own experience of practical and theoretical research has been, for me, a successful exercise in archeology of my own intuition and “thinking body.”⁶ My hope is that my findings will also be useful to other editors, to filmmakers, and to screen studies scholars who are interested in an integrated somatic, kinesthetic, and cognitive approach to the study and creation of rhythms in film.

ENDNOTES

1. Bordwell, D., and Carroll, N., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, p. xvii.

2. Rowe, K., “Dany Cooper interview,” Inside Film Magazine, p. 43.

3. Bordwell, D., and Thompson, K., Film Art: An Introduction, p. 197.

4. Preminger, A., and Brogan, T. V. F., editors, “Rhythm,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 1068.

5. Worth, M., as quoted in Oldham, G., First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors, p. 320.

6. Todd, M. E., The Thinking Body: A Study of the Balancing Forces of Dynamic Man.