CHAPTER 2

Editing as Choreography

Chapter 1 established that movement is what editors use to shape rhythms; it is what they mirror neurologically, what activates their kinesthetic empathy, and what they work with intuitively. Building on that premise, this chapter compares cutting rhythms to another art of shaping movement: dance.

Choreography is the art of manipulating movement: phrasing its time, space, and energy into affective forms and structures. In their work with rhythm, editors do similar things. This chapter compares editing to choreography for the pupose of uncovering some principles that choreographers use that may be applicable to the editor's work with the shaping of the film edit. It begins by examining the uses of the more common metaphor for editing: music. It then puts forward that, although the word “rhythm” is commonly linked to ideas about music, the actual materials that editors shape in time are movement and energy. The pulse, which is the smallest expressive unit of the movement of time and energy, is discussed before looking at the choreographic processes of shaping pulses into phrases. The ways that choreographers construct dance movement phrases are compared to the ways in which an editor assembles movement into phrases and sequences when creating rhythms. Finally, the questions choreographers might ask themselves when shaping movement are recast as questions editors might ask themselves when shaping rhythm in film.

SHIFTING THE DISCUSSION FROM MUSIC TO MOVEMENT

Editing is often compared with music making. Many people understand the use of the word “rhythm” in film to be a musical metaphor. The discussion of rhythm in, for example, the 2004 book about the editing craft, The Eye Is Quicker, opens with the following quote: “‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’—Walter Pater.”¹ Another example is filmmaker Martin Scorsese's quote: “For me the editor is like a musician, and often a composer.”² And “Eisenstein . . . often makes implicit appeal to musical analogies, whence the frequent recourse to musical concepts such as meter, overtones, dominant, rhythm, polyphony, and counterpoint.”³ Music is a very rich source of language and ideas for the consideration of rhythm; however, sometimes the terms it supplies are used quite vaguely or generally. This section will look closely at some of the specific words used when comparing editing to music to discover the ways in which they are or are not useful.

When using the musical metaphor, the processes of composing, orchestrating, and conducting are often made analogous to the process of editing, particularly the creative editing process of shaping the film's rhythm. Each of these activities is analogous in some ways to editing a film, but, for different reasons, none of them are particularly precise comparisons.

Composing, in general, is more like writing than it is like editing. A composer delineates the form and structure on which the musicians base the performance of their craft. A screenwriter does the same for the cast and crew of a film. The composer makes up the music and its rhythms, whereas an editor doesn't exactly make anything up. Editors compose rhythms in the sense that someone might compose a flower arrangement: not by making the flowers, or in this case the shots, but by choosing the selections, order, and duration of shots.

The use of the word “orchestrate” comes from the idea that there are many different elements within shots, and between them, that an editor coordinates. These might include performance, composition, texture, color, shape, shot size, movement energy and direction, and many more. Eisenstein called these “attractions,” as in the different elements within shots and films that might attract the spectator's attention.⁴ Orchestration, in this case, is a metaphor for giving each set of attractions due consideration in relation to the others. However, orchestration is actually a distribution of parts to various instruments rather than a joining together of shots, in which the “instruments,” or constituent parts of a shot, such as the frame, the design, the performance, and the lighting, have already been orchestrated in relation to each other. The description of what Theo Van Leeuwen calls “initiating rhythms” in his essay “Rhythmic Structure of the Film Text” is perhaps more useful for describing what an editor does than “orchestrate.” Van Leeuwen suggests that there may be and usually are a few things attracting the attention, creating emphasis, or shaping time in the raw material, so that “editors are faced with the problem of synchronizing” the various elements into a coherent rhythmic experience. To do so, the editor chooses one of the lines of movement, energy, or emphasis “as an initiating rhythm and subordinates to this rhythm the other profilmic rhythms.”⁵ Shaping “initiating rhythms” is a more precise description of the editor's decision-making process than orchestration.

Conducting is perhaps a more apt musical metaphor because, like the conductor, the editor decides on the pacing, timing, and emphasis presented in the final composition. However, in music, conducting also suggests that a finished composition has already been submitted to the conductor and he interprets it, which is not really what happens in editing.

There is a nonmusical meaning to the word “conducting” that might be more useful for describing what an editor does. This is conducting in the sense of facilitating the flowthrough of rhythm like wires facilitate the flowthrough of electricity or, as filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky suggests, pipes facilitate the flowthrough of water:

Time, imprinted in the frame, dictates the particular editing principle; and the pieces that “won't edit”—that can't be properly joined—are those which record a radically different kind of time. One cannot, for instance, put actual time together with conceptual time, any more than one can join water pipes of different diameter. The consistency of the time that runs through the shot, its intensity or “sloppiness,” could be called time pressure: then editing can be seen as the assembly of the pieces on the basis of time pressure within them.⁶

Tarkovsky's implicit comparison of shots to water pipes shifts the discourse about rhythm away from music and toward the more visible movement of time “imprinted in the shots.” Although Eisenstein and Tarkovsky generally present aesthetically and procedurally oppositional ideas about the nature and purpose of the editing process, this shift from music to movement also has precedent in Eisenstein's writing. When Eisenstein writes “in rhythmic montage it is movement within the frame that impels the montage movement from frame to frame,”⁷ he succinctly summarizes the core principle of what he calls “rhythmic montage,” one of his Five Methods of Montage, described in full in Film Form. Rhythm is not categorically or completely defined by Eisenstein's discussion of “rhythmic montage.” However, it does, for our purposes, firmly shift the focus of the discussion of rhythm from music to movement.

The next question, then, is: What can be said about the art of shaping movement that can inform our intuition for shaping rhythm in film editing? For insight into this, I turn to studies of the art of choreography, which, of course, is the art of shaping movement.

A team of Australian researchers, including psychologists, scientists, and choreographers, provides a useful starting point for looking at editing as a form of choreography. Their study, Choreographic Cognitions, talks about how dance is made and how it is perceived and understood by audiences. This cognition of dance is, I argue, similar to the cognition of rhythm in film.

The Choreographic Cognitions team explains that time is the artistic and expressive medium of contemporary dance. So, when we watch dance, we see movement, but we understand what movement means by how it expresses the invisible elements of time and energy. In the Choreographic Cognitions team's words, “the artistry of movement is in trajectories, transitions, and in the temporal and spatial configurations in which moves, limbs, bodies, relate to one another . . . change to a single component can affect the entire interacting network of elements. In a dynamical system, time is not simply a dimension in which cognition and behavior occur but time, or more correctly dynamical changes in time, are the very basis of cognition.”⁸

FIGURE 2.1

Jaz Allen performing a phrase of movement from Doesn't Fit in a Box (Karen Pearlman, 2008). [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Christophorus Verheyden]

If we apply this to editing, we could say that, like choreographers, editors shape the trajectories of movement across shots, scenes, and sequences, the transitions of movement between the shots. Like choreographers, editors work with the temporal and spatial dynamics of movement to create a flow of moving images that carries meaning. And, just like choreographers, editors will often describe the way a “change to a single component can affect the entire interacting network of elements.”⁹ Editors less often describe rhythm and time as a basis of cognition. But I argue that, in a sense, they are. As we shall see in the upcoming discussions of pulse and phrasing, and later in the chapters on emotion and events, rhythm is how we understand the meaning of information, interchanges, and images in relation to one another. Rhythm is part of the sensual experience of the film and a core means by which we interpret and understand what we see and hear. So, the “dynamical changes in time”¹⁰ that are the core of the choreographer's art are also the core of the editor's rhythm shaping art.

The next section will look at the pulse, the smallest unit of movement shaped by choreographers and editors into rhythm, and the role of pulse in defining dynamical changes in time.

PULSE

Pulse is the smallest, the most constant, and perhaps the most ineffable unit of rhythm in film. It is ever present, just as it is in your body, and unnoticed, just as in your body. Pulse in film has a few other characteristics in common with a living body—it tends to stay within a certain range of speeds, it organizes the perception of fast and slow, and it keeps the film alive. Just as in a living body, if a film's pulse stops, slows, or speeds too much, the results can be dire for the rhythm, the story, or the experience of the film.

Pulse defines and demarcates what Tarkovsky calls “the consistency of time” or the “time pressure”¹¹ within shots. A single pulsation is the extra effort placed on one part of a movement compared to the less intensively energetic other parts of the movement. So, just as in the beating of a heart, there is a continuous on/off of emphasis points, accents on words, gestures, camera moves, colors, or any other profilmic event. Actors may develop characters in part by developing a distinguishing pulse; that is, the energy and speed with which they put emphasis on words, gestures, etc. Pulses are shaped by the energy or intention behind movement or speech and make that energy or intention perceptible to the spectator.

Professor Theo Van Leeuwen writes, “‘pulsing’ plays a key role in articulating the meaning because it foregrounds the sounds or movements that carry the key information.”¹² The film editor does not necessarily set the pulse of a shot—the director and actors do that mostly—but the editor has choices to make about the sustaining, changing, and coordinating of pulses into phrases. These choices are made through the selection of takes (the pulse in any two takes of the same action may be different) and the choice of cutting points. Pulse accents can also be emphasized or de-emphasized and even shifted by cuts.

Pulses in movement are shaped by choreographers and editors into phrases. The next section of this chapter describes two choreographic methods for shaping phrases and compares them to two of the various kinds of editing challenges. It then looks at how a choreographic approach could apply to the shaping of nondance movement in the context of a narrative drama.

MOVEMENT PHRASES

Movement phrases in dance, and in film editing, are compositions of movement into perceptible and intentionally formed rhythmically expressive sequences. A phrase in the choreographic sense is distinct from a linguistic phrase in that it may be of any length and may contain more than a single choreographic “thought.” A choreographic phrase is a series of related movements and grouped emphasis points.

There is a broad spectrum of approaches a choreographer might take to shaping movement phrases in dance. What follows is a description of two points along that spectrum, provided to illustrate the commonalities of the choreographic and editing approaches to the shaping of movement phrases.

One choreographic approach is for the choreographer to create a movement sequence with inherent timing, spatial organization, and emphasis, and then teach that phrase to the dancers. This approach to choreography has an affinity with Tarkovsky's water pipes. If a film director works in this way, he provides the editor with rushes that have immutable, self-contained phrases of movement. So, the editor's job is not to create the phrase's rhythm, but to respect and realize the phrase's rhythm. In this approach the editor's choreographic input comes in extending these rhythms to the construction of the larger sequences. She does this by shaping the joins of phrases. So, she is still grappling with the shaping of movement “trajectories, transitions . . . and temporal and spatial configurations,” but the smallest unit for transitioning or configuring is not the pulse or the single gesture or movement fragment, but the phrase.

FIGURE 2.2

The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974). In all Tarkovsky films, the phrasing is not created in editing; rather, it resides in the shot. The movement of the camera, the actor, the dialog, and the sound are all coordinated in the rehearsal and shooting process to create the flow of time and energy, which expresses the meaning. [Photo credit: Mosfilm; The Kobal Collection]

A different approach a choreographer might take is to give her dancers “movement problems” to solve, such as, “Find five gestures of frustration and helpless anger.” These five gestures are fragments, like a series of short shots. The choreographer connects the fragments into phrases and in doing so designs their temporal flow, spatial organization, and emphasis. In film, the connecting and shaping of fragments into rhythms is done by the editor. This approach has more affinity with Eisenstein's sense of montage than Tarkovsky's. Tarkovsky's approach to rhythm considers time to be present in the shot, and the editor's job to be to construct the film so that time flows effectively almost in spite of cuts. In Eisenstein's view the course of time is created in the cutting. The editing process actively choreographs rhythms; i.e., editing connects bits of movement on film to create the passage of time. In this approach, the editor takes fragments of movement and designs them into phrases. Rises and falls of emphasis, direction and speed changes, size, shape, and performance are all shaped into the dynamic flow that is the “cine-phrase's” meaning.

FIGURE 2.3

In Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) shots are cut together to form phrases. Eisenstein's films make use of cutting as a form of movement, not just camera movement and actor movement. So each cut is a move to a different shot, a move of the spectator's mind and eye, and a move that contributes to the phrasing. [Photo credit: Goskino; The Kobal Collection]

Choreographers often work with abstract or nonnaturalistic movement, and editors often work with naturalistic movement of actors or subjects, but the choreographic principles can still be applied. A movement phrase is not just a unit of rhythm in abstract movement. A naturalistic character's movement in narrative drama is also shaped choreographically into phrases. For example, the action in a given script calls for a character to enter a room, drop the keys on the table, and open the fridge. This is a series of movements that may be handed to the editor with its phrasing intact in one shot, or it may be a series of gestures covered in a variety of shots from which the editor must select and shape fragments into a phrase. In either case, the phrasing of the movement's rhythm will carry and impart a significant portion of the movement's meaning.

A choreographer trying to elicit affective phrasing from a live performer would just say, for example, “Come in quickly, hesitate, then walk very deliberately.” An editor may have one take in which the performer does all of this—walks in the door quickly, hesitates before dropping his keys, and then walks deliberately to the fridge. Within this single take, each of these movements contains one or more pulses, and together they constitute a phrase.

Or the editor may need to construct this quick–hesitant–deliberate relational nuance of the movements out of three or even more takes if that is the rhythmic phrasing she wants. If she has coverage in a selection of wide, medium, and closer shots, the editor would phrase this series of movements by choosing the performer's quickest entrance, cutting to his hesitation before dropping his keys, and then inserting a shot or two of his deliberate walk to the fridge.

FIGURE 2.4

Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard, 2001). A Beautiful Mind is just one example of hundreds that follow a middle way between Tarkovsky's and Eisenstein's views, creating some of the phrasing in the shots and some through the cuts. Ron Howard's films have a very silky smooth (some would say slick) feel to them, with every aspect of movement, including camera movements, performers’ movements, and movements between shots expertly gauged to propel the narrative and not to draw the eye away from story. Cuts are tucked almost imperceptibly between similarly composed shots, with the performance movement motivating the cut or used as punctuation at the beginning or end of phrases. [Photo credit: DreamWorks/Universal; The Kobal Collection; Eli Reed]

Once it is phrased, the movement becomes the emotional content in the context of the story. If the character comes home very late in a domestic drama and rushes in the door, the hesitation before dropping the keys might be a questioning, “Is everyone asleep?” Or more melodramatically, “The house feels deserted, has my wife left me?” The deliberate walk to the fridge then becomes thoughtful, maybe even anxious, depending on the story context. The story context tells us the focus of the emotional content—what the questioning and the anxiety are directed toward—but it is the hesitation and the deliberate walk that gives us the feeling of questioning and anxiety. This is important because we don't go through a conscious process in our thoughts to understand the feeling we are seeing. We feel with it, we use our mirror neurons and our capacity for kinesthetic empathy to grasp the pulsation of the movement directly. When a movement phrase is satisfactorily choreographed by an editor, it gives us the kinesthetic information the story requires. It does so without confusing us or making us stop feeling and start asking questions about what we're supposed to be feeling, and it does so immediately—it lets us feel and move on to what happens next.

PHRASING CONSIDERATIONS

One reason to compare editing to choreography is to create the possibility of using knowledge about the craft of choreography to extend ideas about the crafting of rhythm in editing. If the construction of rhythm in film editing is understood to be a choreographic process, then some of the questions with which choreographers grapple may become useful questions an editor can ask herself in the process of shaping a film's rhythm.

The following ideas about methods of crafting dance are presented as questions editors can ask themselves. This is for two reasons. First, because they are not rules. These concepts are simply questions with which choreographers grapple to shape the affective qualities of movement. Second, these questions are not meant to be prescriptive. They are lateral ways of looking at the flow of movement through material, and their use value is most likely to arise when the more standard questions of story construction are failing the editor in her effort to make a film feel right.

American dancer and choreographer Doris Humphrey wrote about the craft of choreography in her book The Art of Making Dances. Her book is divided into chapters on some of the various considerations at work in shaping movement into dances. Taking the table of contents of The Art of Making Dances and reframing its topics into considerations for shaping any movement, not just dance movement, provides a series of questions editors can ask themselves. The following topics are Humphrey's chapter subheadings; the questions they raise are mine and represent just a sampling of the line of questioning raised by taking a choreographic approach to rhythm in film editing.¹³

Symmetry and Asymmetry

Just as the tension between symmetry and asymmetry can be used expressively by a choreographer, it can be manipulated by an editor who is thinking about the film's style of cutting and the rhythms created by that style. A smooth, classical style will tend to emphasize symmetry in both the composition of frames and the evenness of pulse. Disruption of symmetry then becomes an important dramatic break. For the editor, the questions of the overall film may be: Should the rhythm, and its movement phrasing, emphasize balance or imbalance? Even or uneven patterns? Measured or manic paces? These questions can also be applied to a specific break in a rhythmic pattern, as in the question of when to switch from even to uneven or from measured to manic.

One and More Bodies

For an editor, the question of one and more bodies is concerned with the choice of shots and the concentration of movement they contain. In the shaping of an expressive moment an editor may, for example, have choices between tightly framed individuals or looser frames of groups. Or she may have choices about the concentration of movement within different takes. Her questions about a given moment or an overall film might be: Is the concentration of movement high or low, scattered or unified, moving toward chaos or order? To shape these variations into an affective flow, the editor may consider the distribution of movement at a given moment and whether to amplify movement or personalize it by emphasizing a group or an individual.

FIGURE 2.5

Thandie Newton symmetrically framed in a moment of quiet reflection in Crash (Paul Haggis, 2005). [Photo credit: Lions Gate; The Kobal Collection]

FIGURE 2.6

Thandie Newton and Matt Dillon falling asymmetrically from one side of the frame to the other in a moment of crisis ( Crash, Paul Haggis, 2005). [Photo credit: Lions Gate; The Kobal Collection]

FIGURE 2.7

Movement is scattered and diffuse in this image of a community mourning the deaths they feel sure are coming in Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2002). [Photo credit: New Zealand Film Comm.; The Kobal Collection]

FIGURE 2.8

But the individual movements of Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2002) are, in contrast, focused and directed as she saves the whales and reunites the community. [Photo credit: New Zealand Film Comm.; The Kobal Collection]

The Phrase

As discussed above, the phrase is a composition of movement into a perceptible and intentionally formed rhythmically expressive sequence. The questions at work in shaping phrases of rhythm in editing include: What is the cadence of this rhythm? What is the rate and strength of its pulse? Where are its rests and high points? Where are its breaths and shifts of emphasis? Does it have even or dynamic variation of accent by stress? What about accent by duration?

The Stage Space

In this section of The Art of Making Dances, Humphrey asks choreographers to consider the use of space as an affective tool. The same questions apply for an editor faced with the frame and working to determine rhythm through the use of various shots. Of course the director and cinematographer have already given in-depth consideration to the frame and movement in the frame by the time the material reaches the editor. So, the editor's concern is with the choreographic composition of the joins of frames and the impact the material has when seen in a flow rather than as individual shots. The questions are: Are shots put together to progress smoothly from wide to close, jump from close to wide, or jump around in size? Does movement flow in a consistent direction, in alternate directions, collide from all screen directions, or are there different patterns at different times? What about angles? What kind of effect are they having and is it to be used sparingly or relentlessly?

FIGURE 2.9

Bill Butler, the editor of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1972), cuts extremes of shot sizes hard together at certain moments, creating a jarring, destabilizing rhythm. [Photo credit: Warner Bros., The Kobal Collection]

Humphrey's ideas about the art of making dances are helpful to me in demonstrating the principles at work in rhythm, and they may be helpful to an editor if she is stuck. But, as we have seen in Chapter 1, these questions don't necessarily have to be verbally articulated by an editor to be the ones with which she is grappling, and there are other ways to solve problems than to articulate them. If an editor is working with the movement of time and energy in a film, she is working with these principles of movement distribution, concentration, phrasing, and spatial organization whether she knows it or not. Where these questions may be useful is if the editor knows she is working with movement to create rhythm and wants to know how to engage with choreographic principles of composition.

A choreographer will build up phrases of dance movements, vary them, juxtapose them, interpolate them, and otherwise manipulate them, shaping them within themselves and in relation to one another to make an overall experience of time, energy, and movement called a dance. In film editing, an editor is rarely simply making an experience of time, energy, and movement; she is also shaping story, character relationships, and other kinds of information. Furthermore, film editors rarely work exclusively with human movement. However, in shaping the rhythm of the film, time, energy, and movement are the salient factors; they shape the qualitative experience of the story and information. The movement through time and energy of all of the filmed images in a given project is shaped choreographically into phrases of related movements and grouped emphasis points. These phrases are then varied, juxtaposed, interpolated, and shaped within themselves and in relation to each other to make the overall experience of time, energy, and movement in a film that is known as rhythm.

SUMMARY

In this chapter the discourse about editing rhythms has been shifted from music to movement, thus creating the possibility of looking at editing as a choreographic process. The core unit of movement, time, and energy that editors and choreographers manipulate has been described as a pulse. Choreographic methods of shaping movement phrases have been mined for information about how making dances is and is not like making rhythms in films. In particular, the movement phrase has been looked at as a choreographic construction that is found either within a shot, through the juxtaposition of shots, or both. Whether the movement phrase is within the shot or between the shots, it is expressing time and change over time. The movement of a steady, inexorable press of a stranger through a bedroom door expresses one kind of time. Sharp flashes of steel, blood, water, and shower curtain create another. Movement is the action or the image of time and energy; it is the material the editor works with to make rhythm. Editing involves the phrasing of movement, or the aesthetic shaping of movement into that aspect of empathetic engagement with film that we call rhythm.

The next chapter will examine the specific tools an editor has for the shaping of rhythm in film.

ENDNOTES

1. Pepperman, R. D., The Eye is Quicker, Film Editing: Making a Good Film Better, p. 207.

2. Scorsese, M., as quoted in Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter, editorsguild.com/newsletter/specialjun97/directors.html.

3. Stam, R., Film Theory: an Introduction, p. 43.

4. Eisenstein also uses “orchestration” in a discussion of the relationships of sound and images. This is a more accurate use of orchestration in the sense of distribution of parts—the sound plays one part in creating affect, the images another, and Eisenstein et al. exhort us to use the parts contrapuntally, not redundantly. See “A statement on the sound-film by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov,” in Eisenstein, S., Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, pp. 257–260.

5. Van Leeuwen, T., “Rhythmic structure of the film text,” in Discourse and Communication, p. 218.

6. Tarkovsky, A., Sculpting in Time, p. 117.

7. Eisenstein, S., Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, p. 75.

8. Stevens, K., et al., “Choreographic cognition: composing time and space,” in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition, p. 4.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Tarkovsky, A., Sculpting in Time, p. 117.

12. Van Leeuwen, T., Introducing Social Semiotics, p. 183.

13. See Humphrey, D., The Art of Making Dances, p. 11.