Associative Editing

Ivens’ film, and many documentaries, make use of associative editing techniques. Broadly speaking, associative editing works by comparing or contrasting the content of the shots to create an association that is not contained in the individual shots. The connecting content can be either formal (color, shape, movement) or more thematic and metaphorical. The idea is that by juxtaposing shots that don’t have an immediate, direct, or obvious narrative connection, new meaning is generated.

Associative editing relies on theories of montage developed by Soviet filmmakers in the early part of the twentieth century. These filmmakers, including Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, saw the cinema as a potentially revolutionary art form that could wake up the masses to the reality of life around them and create a new form of citizen who would be highly engaged with their social reality. They were interested in the power of conflict and juxtaposition, both within individual frames and between shots.

In his essay “Methods of Montage,” Eisenstein attempted to define the various relationships that could exist between shots.¹ These included:

• Metric montage, where the cut point is based on the duration of the shot.
• Rhythmic montage, where the length of the shot depends on what is happening in the frame. Length can vary, and effect can be obtained by changing the length of shots. In this type of montage, changes in rhythm create new meaning.
• Tonal montage, which uses the emotional meaning or “mood” of the shots to determine their placement relative to one another.
• Overtonal/Associational montage, which is the combination of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage properties in a sequence.
• Intellectual montage (the highest form, according to Eisenstein) juxtaposes shots to create a new intellectual meaning.

While these categories might seem abstract and unrelated to documentary practices today, they are in fact quite present in most documentaries. In Nostalgia for the Light (2011), Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman uses a variety of these tactics to bring seemingly unrelated elements into relationship with one another. The film documents astronomers who use high-powered telescopes in the Chilean desert to see into outer space, as well as a group of women who comb through the desert sand in search of the remains of their loved ones who were “disappeared” during the brutal military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. One particularly devastating sequence uses several of Eisenstein’s montage categories to bring these seemingly disparate topics into relationship to one another (Figure 19.8).

■ Figure 19.8 Montage in Nostalgia for the Light. The moon (A), asteroids (B), human bones (C), and a skull (D), which matches the moon in shot (A). The camera tilts down to reveal that this is a human skull (E).

A shot of the universe as seen through a telescope dissolves into close-ups of the surface of the moon and asteroids. The shots are

■ Associative Editing in the Opening of The Most Dangerous Man in America

More commonly, documentaries employ some version of associative editing in an opening montage. An example is the opening sequence of The Most Dangerous Man in America (2009), a documentary by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith about the Pentagon Papers, secret documents leaked by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg that exposed the extent of US involvement in the Vietnam War (Figure 19.9). In the first two minutes of the film, we see the juxtaposition of at least six types of footage: maps of Cambodia and Vietnam in a vintage photocopying machine, stylized reenactments of a man sneaking documents out of a file cabinet and into a briefcase, archival footage of aerial bombing, official State Department documents, interview clips, and archival footage of Richard Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Daniel Ellsberg himself.

This rich assortment of images and the accompanying sounds draw the viewer in through a series of juxtapositions. The past is seen next to present-day interviews, which gives us a sense that we will be viewing historical events through a contemporary lens. Footage of aerial bombing superimposed on official State Department documents creates a sense that policy formed in Washington has an impact on actual lives on the ground in Vietnam. There is also the juxtaposition of the perspectives of government officials like Nixon and Kissinger, who say things like, “If entire file cabinets can be stolen and given to the press you can’t have orderly government anymore,” with that of Daniel Ellsberg, who is seen saying to reporters, “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”

In addition to the more thematic and content-related associations, there is a juxtaposition of styles at work. The dramatically lit reenactments feel like a spy thriller, but their theatricality is undermined by the gritty 16mm news footage that follows. The film is telling us that although this has all the suspense of a Hollywood thriller, it is a story based in reality. This raises the stakes for us as viewers.

■ Figure 19.9 Associative editing in The Most Dangerous Man in America. Stylized “spy thriller” reenactments (A) are juxtaposed with archival footage and documents (B). Mrs. Ellsberg tells us this will be a private story (C) but it is also very public (D). And the film’s central conflict: government secrecy (E) vs the public’s right to know (F).

approximately four seconds long each (metric montage) and have similar lighting, color palette, and texture (tonal montage). The ambient audio, which sounds roughly like air blowing in a tunnel, plays under all the shots, joining them together. These shots of space are followed by extreme close-up shots of human bones, which look astonishingly similar in texture, color, and shape to the surface of the moon and asteroids. The last of these shots is almost identical in shape to the first shot of the moon (this is called a graphic match because of the compositional similarities between the shots). The camera then pans down to reveal that what we are viewing is in fact a human skull.

This beautiful and emotional sequence is the essence of Eisenstein’s intellectual montage. Questions of scale and context collapse, and the viewer is left to experience the contrast between the dead mineral composition of the moon and the organic nature of the bones that just recently held flesh. We are left asking what the relationship is between outer space and the most inner anguish, and how do humans find purpose in a world with such unknowability and injustice?

1. Continuity of Mise-en-Scène (Shared Shot Content)

Let’s start with two shots connected by one single edit (Figure 19.10). We want to cut shot A with shot B as seamlessly as possible. Shot A is a long shot of two men at a chess table in the park starting a game. Shot B is a medium close-up of the player with the white pieces making his first move.

Mise-en-scène is a term derived from film studies that refers to everything that appears before the camera and its arrangement. In documentary, this means our subjects and their environments. The first rule of continuity—preserving continuity of mise-en-scène—means that the clothes our character wears, the things he touches, and his surroundings need to remain the same from one shot to the next. Because in real time our chess game might last an hour, it’s not uncommon that two shots like these might not actually be shot one right after the other. Perhaps as the day gets colder, our character puts on a jacket. Preserving continuity means that a shot with the jacket off will not cut seamlessly with a shot taken later on, when our subject is wearing the jacket. Similar issues come up around anything that changes noticeably over time, including plates of food being consumed, drinks, cigarettes, clocks, or even the position of the chess pieces on the board. Coauthor Kelly Anderson was once the coproducer on a TV program where Character A was washing a frying pan at the kitchen sink. When the scene was edited, the shot was cut next to a shot of Character B listening to Character A speaking. It took the filmmakers a while to realize that the frying pan being washed was also seen, full of scrambled eggs, on the stove next to Character B. Many jokes about this being a “2-frying-pan-family” ensued. The audience likely never noticed the continuity error, but it’s a good idea to keep these things in mind when shooting and editing. The idea of the observational style is to allow the audience to experience what is going on with the characters in the moment, without being distracted by reminders that images were actually shot at different times.

■ Figure 19.10 A simple edit. Cutting from a long shot (a) to a medium close-up (b).

The angle and quality of the light must also be consistent if you want to edit shots together and create the illusion of continuous space and time. Documentary audiences are more likely than fiction film viewers to forgive small changes in lighting between shots, and color correction in postproduction can help you match different lighting setups, but joining images shot at noon with others shot at dusk will likely present problems if you want the audience to experience them as occurring in a continuous time.

2. Continuity of Performance, Actions, and Placement

In the chess game above, if we are to cut shot A seamlessly with shot B, then the placement and physical actions of our performers must be consistent. In the example of the chess game, our character moves the king’s pawn with his left hand in the long shot, so he must move the same chess piece with the same hand in the medium close-up. This ensures that the visible actions in the two shots match. Also, our character is sitting upright with his right hand in his lap in the long shot, so he cannot be leaning forward, resting his chin in his right hand in the medium close-up.

Consider these two shots from Zachary Heinzerling’s Academy Award^®-nominated film Cutie and the Boxer (2013), discussed in Chapter 7 (Figure 19.11). The long shot on the left shows Ushio wetting craft paper and hanging it on a clothesline. This is followed by a medium shot of the same activity. Even though the second shot was probably taken later, the two shots cut together relatively seamlessly because the setting, lighting, and Ushio’s wardrobe, as well as the position of the paper and of his hands, match between the two shots.

Unlike in fiction filmmaking, where the editor will have multiple takes of a scene shot from many angles to work with, the documentary editor will comb through the footage looking for shots that can be edited together seamlessly to convey the action of the scene. This is not always easy. For example, in the sequence above, a close inspection reveals that there is actually more paper hanging from the line in the second shot, but the match is close enough that audiences don’t notice the difference and the edit is “good enough” to pass muster. In certain cases where even a “good enough” match cannot be found, one can always use a cutaway between two shots of action, creating a “bridge” that maintains the illusion of continuous actions (p. 317).

■ Figure 19.11 Continuity of performance and action in Cutie and the Boxer (2013).

3. Continuity of Spatial Orientation

For the viewer to understand the physical space of the scene and the relationships between characters and objects in that space, we need to maintain coherent and consistent spatial orientation. Spatial orientation begins with the 180° principle, which, in basic terms, means that you must shoot all of the shots in a continuity sequence from only one side of the action. In other words, when a scene begins with a shot taken from one side, you cannot cut to shots taken from the other side because the perspective of the viewer will be reversed and create disorientation. See Chapter 7 for an analysis of how this plays out in a scene from Cutie and the Boxer.

■ Figure 19.12 Continuity of spatial orientation. Character sightlines establish the 180 degree line of action and shot (A) establishes on which side of that line the camera must remain. Shot (C) crosses the line and you should not use shots from that camera position.

Using our chess game as an example, this means you can cut from shot (A) to shot (B), but not from shot (A) to shot (C) (Figure 19.12). When you begin shooting, the man playing with the white pieces is to your left. When he looks at his opponent, he faces left to right. The opponent playing the black pieces is to your right and he faces right to left. This is the spatial orientation from your side of the table. However, for the onlooker who is watching the game from the other side of the table, across from you, everything is reversed. When we make a film, the camera is the spectator, and to shoot this scene we cannot take some shots from one side of the table and others from the opposite side because that would reverse the direction and position of the players’ faces.

Notice in shot (C) that our character now suddenly faces screen left, and is positioned on the right side of the frame. This shot will not cut with the first shot without causing spatial confusion for the viewer. The viewer might think that the players, for some reason, suddenly changed places and the total shift in background and the position of the clock will seriously throw off the illusion of continuous activity.

4. Avoiding “Too Similar” Shots

The too-similar-shot rule (our own term) states that, when we cut from one shot of a subject to another shot of the same subject, we need to make sure that each shot is a distinct composition in terms of frame size or camera angle. If we try to cut together two shots of the same subject when the frames are very similar, then the viewer has the feeling that a single shot has simply lurched forward a little bit. This is called a jump cut, and the awkwardness of the edit calls attention to itself. In some instances this may be a desirable aesthetic approach, but if you are trying to create a sense of seamless time and space it won’t work. Basically, this rule tells us that in order to cut from shot (A), the men sitting at the chess table, to shot (B), white making his first move, we must significantly change the angle or the size of shot (Figure 19.13).

■ Figure 19.13 The “Too Similar Shot” rule. Two shots of obviously different sizes and angles such as shot (A), a long shot profile shot, and shot (B), a close-up frontal from a frontal three-quarter angle cut together smoothly. Two shots that are nearly identical in framing, such as shot (A) and shot (C), will cause a jump cut when edited together.

In documentary interviews, you can often see this principle in action. Since most people talk in a more long-winded way than most documentary directors find economical, it is common to edit together various pieces of an interview to make a statement clearer or shorter. Often a cinematographer will vary the shot size while the interviewer is asking each question to give the editor more options for cutting between parts of the interview. Figure 19.14 shows an example from Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare (2004), which explores the impact of the globalized trade in fish and guns on the people who live around Lake Victoria in Tanzania.

■ Figure 19.14 A medium shot of an interviewee, cut next to a close-up shot. These two shots cut together without creating a jump cut because the framing is significantly different.

In the scene, we see an interview subject talking in a medium shot, then there is a cut to a close-up of the same person in the same interview setup (Figure 19.14). The cut feels seamless because there is enough of a change in the shot size.

5. Cutaways

Later on in the same interview sequence, there is another cut in the interview. In this case, the editor employs another standard documentary convention: the cutaway. A cutaway is a shot of a detail within your scene other than the main action. Here, the cutaway is a shot of a young boy with a distended belly, a sign of malnutrition, walking on the beach (Figure 19.15).

■ Figure 19.15 A cutaway in Darwin’s Nightmare.

A word of caution is in order here. Cutaways can create strong associations and can alter the meaning of what is being conveyed in the scene. The interview we are discussing concerns the globalized competition for natural resources in Africa. As the interviewee asks, “Who is to gain, and who is to miss?” the film cuts to the shot of the boy on the beach. This creates a powerful statement that Africans, in particular the most vulnerable, are losing out. The film provides powerful evidence that this is indeed the case, but it is worth remembering that we have enormous power as documentary filmmakers. In actuality, we don’t know who this child is, why he is starving, or whether it was shot the same day or even on the beach the interview was shot on. Because of the power of continuity conventions, the audience will probably assume these things are happening simultaneously. All documentary filmmakers deal with the challenge of creating a representation of an event after it occurred. You will find your own ways of delivering on the trust your audience invests in you.

■ Figure 19.16 Significant detail in Mr. Cao Goes to Washington.

In addition to being a staple of interview editing, cutaways can also be extremely useful in observational scenes. In S. Leo Chiang’s Mr. Cao Goes to Washington (2012), analyzed in Chapter 7, a cutaway of some campaign materials tells us that Cao is the first Vietnamese-American Congressman in the history of the United States (Figure 19.16). Without this cutaway, this critical information would have had to be delivered through interviews, narration, or text cards. This shot could also be called a significant detail shot.

Timing

Timing refers to the specific placement of a shot within the sequence, meaning the precise moment you cut to a new shot for maximum impact. Good editors have a sixth sense for timing: it seems to be in their bones. The rest of us experiment—we try an edit and then trim it until it feels right. A few tips:

• Know when to cut away from an interview or a subject. There are moments when a person’s facial expression, or body language, is more important than their actual words. Don’t reduce the power of a moment by inserting a cutaway over some of your best material. The reverse is also true—to minimize an impact you don’t like, you can cut away to another shot.
• In some cases, the moment after someone finishes speaking is extremely powerful. Perhaps they have just said something they didn’t expect to say, or have more to say but are holding back. Don’t lose the moment by cutting away too quickly.
• If your shot includes a camera move (a zoom or a pan, for example), let the shot begin a frame or two before the move starts, and let it “land” before cutting away from it. This is especially true if you are cutting to another still shot. If you need or want to cut while the camera is moving, try cutting to another moving shot.
• If a person, car, or other object is moving through the frame, let them leave the frame before you cut out of the shot. Similarly, be deliberate about where you cut in or out of an action or gesture.

Rhythm

Rhythm within a sequence refers to the duration of the shots relative to each other, and the patterns of emphasis, or pulses, these durations create. If you consider an edited shot as a pulse or a beat, like a musical beat, then you will be able to manipulate the duration of these image “beats” to create regular, irregular, or syncopated visual rhythms.

In documentary, we often confront questions of rhythm when cutting a montage to music. Should you cut on the beat, holding every shot for the same amount of time, say four or eight beats of music? Or should you vary it, cutting several shots together on the beat, and then holding several shots for longer? Either approach can work. Watch a wide variety of films to get a sense of how their editors tackle this question and find your own approach.

Pacing

Pace (also called “tempo”) is, of course, related to rhythm, in that it is determined by the duration of shots next to other shots. But pace refers specifically to the rate of speed that a scene, or sequence of scenes, plays out. A fast-paced editing approach can suggest intensity, excitement, energy, or even confusion or chaos, depending on the context. Slowly paced editing can lend a feeling of casualness, contemplation, or even torpor or stasis to a movie. In Nobody’s Business (1996), an experimental documentary by Alan Berliner about his father, Berliner uses pacing extensively to create mood and meaning (Figure 19.18). During a sequence where he is researching family birth and death records, shots of what appear to be fragments of official records go by extremely quickly (3–5 frames each), emphasizing the sheer number of records and how overwhelming it must be to go through them all on a microfilm reader. Finally, the sequence ends with a 6-second wider shot with the name “Rigrod” in the center, which is the town Berliner’s grandparents were from.

An example of a slower-paced film is Nicolas Philibert’s Etre et Avoir (2002), about a one-room schoolhouse in rural France. The film begins with three shots of farmers herding cattle in a snowstorm. The shots are quite long (12 to 21 seconds each), but the scene feels frenetic because the cows are panicking, the farmers are nervous, and the snow is coming down hard. Then the film cuts to a shot taken from inside the school, through the window. The snowstorm is raging outside but inside it is quiet. Then we see desks with chair piled high: an empty schoolroom. Suddenly a turtle enters the frame, then another. For a full 33 seconds we watch the same wide shot, without any camera movement at all, as the turtles make their way across the floor. Through its pacing, the film is telling us that things are going to move, quite literally, at a turtle’s pace, and that we should settle in to appreciate what can be discovered in the stillness (Figure 19.19).

■ Figure 19.18 Pacing in Alan Berliner’s Nobody’s Business (1996). Fragments of documents (left 3 images) are cut together so quickly they are barely readable. The sequence lands and holds on a wider shot of the document that shows where his grandparents are from (right).

■ Figure 19.19 In Etre et Avoir, pacing is used to tell us that things move slowly in a one-room schoolhouse, and that we should expect to spend time discovering the beauty in the stillness.

In many films, the pacing is determined by the subject matter, or by the style the director or editor chooses. However, very few films strictly maintain a single pace from beginning to end. Contrasting the pace of scenes is an important tool for creating narrative emphasis and overall story shape.

The Cut

For the most part in this chapter and in the previous chapters, we’re exploring the function, power, and versatility of the cut, which is the joining of two shots such that the last frame of the first shot is directly replaced by the first frame of the next shot. The visual shift in a cut from one shot to the next is sequential, instantaneous, and complete. The cut is the most efficient and unobtrusive way to move through the images and moments in your film, and they are by far the most effective technique for creating clear, sharp, meaningful juxtapositions. In Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes (2006), there is a powerful cut from a shot of an iron being made on an assembly line to a shot of a similar iron that is rusting away in a trash dump. The cut emphasizes a central theme of the film: the endless cycle of consumption and waste our economic system creates, and its environmental impact (Figure 19.22).

■ Figure 19.22 A powerful cut in Manufactured Landscapes.

The Dissolve

In a dissolve, the first shot gradually disappears as the second shot gradually appears. With a dissolve we see, for a moment, both images on the screen simultaneously (Figure 19.23). A dissolve can have any duration the filmmaker needs, from a few frames to many seconds. A long dissolve becomes a superimposition (two images layered over one another) before giving way to the second shot entirely. A dissolve invited the viewer to think about the deeper relationship between two shots. Dissolves are often used to imply a significant change in time, space, or theme. As such, a dissolve is a promise. It says, “Look at these two images merging, something significant is happening.” For this reason, it should not be overused. Students often throw dissolves in everywhere just because they can. Finally, if two images don’t cut together well, dissolving between them won’t fix the problem!

The Fade

The fade-out is a slow disappearing of an image into a color, and a fade-in is the slow appearing of the image from a color. Most commonly, one sees a fade to (or from) black, and less frequently, a fade to (or from) white or another color. The duration of the transition, and the amount of solid color between the images, can be short or long. Very often a fade-out and fade-in are used back-to-back as a transition from one image to another. In the language of film editing, this technique is frequently used to signal a time ellipsis or to punctuate a major shift in the dramatic direction of the movie. There is a strong sense of closure after a fade-out, and if followed by a fade-in, the audience feels a sense of a new beginning.

■ Figure 19.23 This slow dissolve from Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1988) takes us from forensic drawings to the morgue photo of a fallen police officer, reminding us that there are real beings behind abstract figures.