Event Rhythm

Event rhythm is the timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing of the movement and energy of events over the course of a whole film. It is found in the temporal, kinetic, and energetic flow of story or structure, of sequences, or of a series of two or more scenes. Each scene in which a problem is initiated and resolved or a question is raised and addressed is an event. Sequences in which a series of scenes opens and explores problems, questions, or ideas are events. A series of events collected and shaped into a cause-and-effect relationship is a plot. Shaping the rhythms of events and plots involves balancing the flow of information, ideas, unanswered questions, or character journeys so that enough is happening to engage the interest, but not so much is happening that there is confusion. If at any point the film loses the audience's curiosity, its willingness to stay and find out what happens next, it has lost the momentum and energy of event rhythm.

The process of shaping event rhythms takes into consideration practical factors such as the required length of the finished project, the number of story or informational points that need to be included, and the relative importance or emphasis of these events. In some productions—for example, narrative drama for a 1-hour commercial television slot—the parameters within which editors have choices about these things are very narrow. For these productions, a formula will have been set that dictates a certain amount and flow of information, a certain amount of tension and release. There will be a set number of story beats or plot points between each commercial break, and each of these sequences will end with a high-stakes, open question to be resolved after the break. In art films, conversely, there are rarely such constraints, and the event rhythm may well take precedence over any other consideration in the structuring of a film.

FIGURE 8.1

In this sequence from Episode 2, Series 3, of The West Wing (series creator Aaron Sorkin, 1999 to 2006), flashing lights, moving cameras, emotional tensions, competing points of focus, and multiple agendas crowd the frames of eleven shots (with only one setup repeating) as they race by in under 30 seconds. But there's only one question that has been asked and answered: Will the president run for re-election? The series makers sustain our attention on that question while reminding us of all the stakes and keeping the question in motion, like a fast-moving soccer ball, around the array of stakeholders. The editor, Bill Johnson, A.C.E., organizes the motion of that ball in play, revealing the president in close-up only when he reveals his answer. Using this kind of classical patterning, even with the very contemporary movement feeling in most episodes, the physical and emotional movement of the West Wing series matches the movement of plot in significance and energizes the viewing audience with concern for the characters as much as for concern with the issues or events.

The process of shaping event rhythm is not just a collection of practical considerations; it is also a storytelling process. It shapes the ebb and flow of tension and release and the synchronization of attention over the whole, and it takes into account the audience's cultural experience and expectations with genre and form. The editor relies on implicit or explicit information about who the audience is for the project when shaping its event rhythm. Movies, like people, are variable in their rhythms. Film rhythms, especially their overall event rhythms, are designed for particular audiences, and an editor needs to know her audience to make the rhythms that will sync up with theirs. In commercially driven cinema, it is implicitly understood by film studio executives and their marketing experts that people within a given target market will share rhythmic propensities—their bodies, paces, energies, attention spans, and cycles of tension and release are different from those of people in another target market. Teenage boys can sink into sync with some rhythms, middle-aged women with others. Rhythms for one target market will of course have some commonalities with rhythms designed for another target market because all spectators have beating hearts, inhalations and exhalations, spans of attention, mirror neurons, and other physiological rhythms that are the “target” of the film's rhythms. But different audiences have different rhythmic propensities, and this includes methods and rates of assimilation of information about events.

Plots are designed differently for different audiences. Their genres and subject matters inherently contain different flows of energy and tension and release. An action film designed for a mass audience might, for example, be about saving the world in a hurry from a cyber terrorist. This is not a plot that can dawdle, reflect, or ruminate. The action must not only continually move forward, but it must do so with enormous energy and conviction, fighting its way through escalating physical and psychological obstacles, under pressure of the threat of imminent collapse of civilization as we know it. On the other hand, for a small-scale drama that is, for example, a psychological study of mourning, the time and energy are treated commensurately with the subject. They are measured and introspective with very few plot events that would require a change of energy, a renewed attack on a problem, or a hasty retreat from danger. These plot examples are not only designed in content for very different audiences, but they are rhythmically shaped for these different audiences’ propensities, and their flow is given a form defined both by their stories and by the feeling states that their audiences seek and expect from these stories.

When I began researching this book, many people asked me if it would include a study of the rhythmic expectations in different cultures. While this is a fascinating area for consideration, it is not included in the book in the end because my purpose is not to say a particular culture has this or that kind of rhythm, but to offer some ideas about what rhythm is and how it is shaped, that can be used effectively for the analysis of any rhythm and applied to the process of shaping any rhythm. Certainly cultures have different rhythmic propensities, and these are shaped by a large number of variables, including the sense of time, space, and the appropriate use of energy that define social interactions, languages, and stories of a culture, the history of storytelling in the culture, and the specific artists that have emerged from the culture and shaped its understanding of what is a good screen story experience. The plots are different—the very idea of what constitutes a plot may be quite different—and the physical, emotional, and event rhythms that could be said to characterize different cultures will demonstrate distinctiveness and diversity, at least for as long as cultures remain diverse. The principles put forward in this book could be used on a case-by-case basis to develop an understanding of the kinds of expectations and synchronizations that different national cinemas create or sustain.

It would also be possible to apply these principles of shaping rhythm to the strictly constructed “restorative three-act structure”¹ found in many Hollywood films. But it is perhaps not necessary to make that analysis in this book, because the rules of shaping these rhythms have been prescribed in many screenwriting manuals.² The points in time at which climaxes, crises, and reversals are supposed to take place in these structures are well known both by the filmmakers and by their audiences. The editor's job is to add freshness to these well-worn structures with their shaping of the flow of emotions, images, and sounds, their feel for the timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing of moments and stories, but not to stretch the structure beyond a point where audience expectations can be met and satisfied. Very often, if an editor is shaping a drama script, the work is not to invent some new pattern of rise and fall of tension and release, but to cut away the extraneous, or build up moments so that the overall shape of event rhythm and plot can conform to the expectations audiences and filmmakers have for a restorative three-act structure. This process of shaping event rhythms to conform to a known pattern of cycles of tension and release is a process of using intuition accrued through the experience of many screen stories to make a film “feel right.”

SHAPING THE RHYTHM OF EVENTS

If an editor is working with scripted material and has shaped it according to the script's structure but it does not yet “feel right,” it may be worthwhile for her to think about the cycles of tension and release she is shaping and how they are built around open dramatic questions. A dramatic question is a question with something at stake and an action implied. A dramatic plot will have a number of these questions at play. There will probably be an overarching question of the story; for example, a mystery will pose the question, “Who dunnit?” Within that question there is a series of other questions, often about relationships, motives, and the process of discovery of the answer to the larger question. The energy of these smaller questions is the energy that propels the viewer's interest forward. The editor has some tools available to her for shaping the flow of questions and answers if the plot as written doesn't feel right when cut together. She can, for example, use timing, in the sense of when she puts events in relation to each other, shifting around the sequence in which they unfold to reshape the plot so that questions are posed by events and resolved in a more satisfying flow. She can also employ the tool of the ellipsis, which is strategically pulling out bits of the action that resolve the questions of scenes or events and cutting to a scene in which the answer has been accepted and assimilated by the characters and they are in the process of acting on it. This creative ellipsis on the part of the editor activates the viewer's mind in piecing together the cause-and-effect chain, and this activation has an energizing effect.

Throwing the energy, as discussed in Chapter 7, is an idea about shaping the energy of an emotional exchange into a meaningful cause-and-effect chain that can be repurposed for shaping the large arcs of events in relation to each other. The flow of energy in one scene or sequence has to be “thrown” to the next one so that events feel as though they are in response to one another, and the cause-and-effect chain of the whole holds together. If events are given too much emphasis by duration or by stress accent, they may feel disproportionate to the events which follow them. Similarly, if they whip by too quickly, they may not have the impact needed to make what follows them feel related. The useful question for an editor here is: What is this scene, sequence, or event about? This may at first seem obvious, but the answer is not always so obvious and needs to be considered not just in relation to itself, but in relation to events that preceded and that follow. A scene may appear to be about a car crash, for example, but really be about rebuilding trust between two characters. If the event is cut only for the text and not for the subtext, then events later on, where the trust is at stake, will lose their links in the cause-and-effect chain.

Sometimes scripts are overwritten because things that are in black-and-white print don't have the same energy, impact, or information that is present in sound and moving image. One of my first editing teachers, Sara Bennett, tells a story that neatly sums this up. She had a job where there were ten pages of script setting up a character's social and economic status. On-screen, the ten pages were cut down to one shot of him slamming the door of his Mercedes, which said it all. Directors may easily have the same thing happen when shaping a performance. When the performance is in little bits being shot over hours, days, or weeks, it may be hard to tell when an emotional moment has been stated. Once the editor starts shaping these moments into sequences, though, she can see when an emotional event has already occurred. Leaving in moments in the unfolding of an event that are emotional repeats will dull the impact and break the momentum of the audience attention or interest in what happens next.

The creation of event rhythm relies on knowledge about when and how the spectator has assimilated the import of one event and can use his understanding of that information when assessing the next. If a film meets the requirements of subject matter or form to engage the interest of a particular audience, but that audience is then found to not want to know, to already know, or to not care “what happens next,” then the event rhythm has been misjudged. The editor, in this case, can ask herself: What changes are taking place at a given moment that justify the duration, emphasis, and placement of a particular event? Soviet film director and theorist Vsevolod Pudovkin articulated this principle as early as 1929. His notion of “transference of interest of the intent spectator” applies at the level of shot-to-shot relations and event to event. Just as pulse is the smallest unit of rhythm, it is also, in a way, the largest unit, as the events in a film pulse between posing questions and answering them, between creating tension and releasing it:

If the scenarist can effect in even rhythm the transference of interest of the intent spectator, if he can so construct the elements of increasing interest that the question “What is happening at the other place?” arises and at the same moment the spectator is transferred whither he wishes to go, then the editing thus created can really excite the spectator.³

Since 1929, the methods and rates of assimilation of information by audiences may have changed. Certainly, according to studies done by Barry Salt and by David Bordwell, the average shot lengths in films have been cut in half.⁴ However, the practice of creating the question in the spectator's mind and then simultaneously resolving that question and creating it anew is still salient to the creation of event rhythm.

CREATING STRUCTURE AND RHYTHM SIMULTANEOUSLY

Before the advent of digital nonlinear editing systems, editors were taught to cut “structure first, then rhythm.” Editors working on actual 16mm or 35mm celluloid strips of film had to take care not to mangle the work print by excessive handling. So they would make assemblies of all of the good takes laid end to end. Then choices would be made about which take of a given shot to use. That choice would be loosely cut, or rough cut, into a structure so that the editor and director would then be able to view the structure, or the events that would occur, and the order of the shots that would convey them. The choices made in the refining of the cut (from rough to fine cut) were, in this particular process, the rhythm choices I have discussed under the headings of physical and emotional rhythm. The processes of creating assemblies and rough cuts were considered processes of creating structure. Although these story structure cuts would have event rhythm inherent in the placement of events in relation to one another, that rhythm would not have been refined to include shaping of relative durations or emphases. This would happen in the transition from the rough-cut to the fine-cut stage.

With the advent of digital nonlinear editing technology, editors no longer have to worry about mangling film and can make and unmake and remake edits without harming the actual film print. This freedom to manipulate the precise timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing of shots and cuts has changed the expectations that directors and producers bring to the first screening of a cut. It is now very unusual to make an assembly and rough cut of structure without an articulated rhythm. Instead, the first presentation of a structure will have been given some rhythmic consideration at the level of the individual cut, the scene, the sequence, and the whole. Then, the process is to refine, adjust, or completely change structure and the rhythm of the structure simultaneously. In the contemporary process, the shaping of rhythm is part of the shaping of structure. Throughout the cutting process, from the first cut forward, events are restructured and rhythms are refined simultaneously.

Cutting documentary and cutting scripted drama diverge somewhat in their processes for shaping event rhythm. The bulk of the editor's work on a documentary is in finding and shaping the story at a structural level, whereas, in scripted drama, although an editor may make some pretty radical changes to the way the story unfolds or even what the story is, she is working from a base that has been determined before it is shot. In documentary the shooting may have been determined—that is, decisions would have been made about where to shoot, what events, confrontations, interviews, archival material, and so on to capture—but the story probably has not been finally determined.

The story in a documentary gets written from the raw filmed material. It is made from the response of subjects to questions and unfolding situations being revealed in the process of shooting, not necessarily before it. So the bulk of the cutting time is spent on shaping unscripted material into a structured experience, a story. The editor's first concerns are clarity of perspective, coherence, and creating a compelling experience or convincing set of ideas from the events, images, and sounds of the chaotic real world. This process of structuring material involves figuring out what's in and what's out based on the ideas that the events, images, and sounds convey when juxtaposed. So shaping rhythms is a part of shaping structure. The energy and pace of material will influence what stays in and what goes out as the information gets structured because meaning is understood as much through how information is conveyed as through what facts are given or statements are made. Timing dictates where to place shots, ideas, and the reveals of information in relation to one another. The ordering, weighting, and shaping of the movement, time, and energy of events, ideas, images, and information are part of the process of telling the story. Rhythm is not the whole of the range of concerns editors are grappling with in the documentary cutting process, but it is a substantial influencing factor in the choices editors make about how meaning will be created as story events unfold.

Editing is often compared to sculpting, and the two aspects of the metaphor are debated in this way: Is editing more like chipping away bits of stone to reveal the sculpture or adding bits of clay to construct the sculpture? Because editing is not exactly like sculpting, it is possible to say “both.” The shaping of event rhythm is, in the first instance, like chipping away bits of stone. It is a matter of working with the script and determining where along the spectrum between respecting it absolutely and altering it radically the cut will fall. I have never yet met a script that was a perfected sculpture. All of them, when translated into moving images, require carving to realize the shape within them. As that shape begins to reveal itself, in the contemporary model in which structure and rhythm are formed almost simultaneously, editing becomes more like adding bits of clay, as in using material to soften curves or changes in the story or to heighten emphasis or extend duration. The process of sculpting event rhythms relies on knowledge about the film's audience and its rates and methods of assimilation of events. So the editor continually has to put herself in the audience's position, refreshing her own kinesthetic empathy and antipathy to feel with the rise and fall of the event's cycles of tension and release.

REINTEGRATING RHYTHMS

In most productions, physical, emotional, and event rhythms are all three at work, all the time, to create the movement and energy of the film, realized in time. The physical moves emotions, the emotional moves events, and the events move visually and aurally. In this way, the rhythm of the film is experienced as a whole, greater than the sum of its parts.

Delineating distinctions between kinds of rhythm is useful as a method for understanding aspects of the whole. Separating physical, emotional, and event rhythms is a way of talking about strands of rhythm that may always, or at any given point, be present in any two shots. One place where the distinctions can be useful is when an editor needs to know what dominates the movie she is cutting: What kind of movie is it? What kind of sequence or scene or cut? What are its priorities? The questions that each kind of rhythm poses can be asked of the raw material. The answers will point clearly to the film's priorities. But the awareness that at any given point all three kinds of rhythm may be present will be helpful in making the cut that much more subtle and articulate in its rhythms.

A film is like a living body in that it has physical movement, emotional movement, and changes in circumstances or events all occurring, balancing, being assimilated, and working in a cause-and-effect relationship with one another almost all of the time. The editor, who shapes the film's rhythms by using knowledge of the rhythms of the world and the rhythms of her own body, knows that there is not much life in a film without all three rhythms counterpointing, energizing, and shaping each other. To shape rhythms with a balance of physical movement, emotions, and events, intuitive editors draw on their own internal balancing act of physical, emotional, and event rhythms. The particular approaches to each kind of rhythm discussed herein can be employed at moments when a production clearly prioritizes one kind of rhythm, as, for example, Thursday's Fictions does in the “Now” scene or The Hours does in the scene between Toni Collette and Julianne More. But once physical rhythms and emotional rhythms are shaped in a given passage, they still need to be integrated into the rhythm of the whole.

The shaping of event rhythm takes into account the aspects of physical and emotional rhythm that audiences respond to and weaves them into an integrated, rhythmically articulated structure. Accomplished storytellers will set up these rhythmic patterns from the outset. The openings of their films establish time, place, characters, and dramatic questions; they also establish the rhythm to be developed, the feeling of the story that will unfold. The following case studies focus on the beginnings of two films and how they set up the films’ overall event rhythm. From the openings, we can tell that each film has a radically different rhythm because, although they are both stories of Italian mobsters in America, they are told from radically different perspectives and are set in radically different worlds. Each one's rhythm is an integrated experience of the movement of images, sounds, and emotions that conveys the significance of events in a direct and immediate way, letting us feel something's impact and move on to what happens next. These patterns of time, movement, and energy are established in the first minutes and then developed and woven over the whole of the structure to convey the story rhythmically.

CASE STUDY: THE GODFATHER (FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, 1972)

The core rhythm of The Godfather is stated in the first shot, established in the first scene, developed in the first sequence, and consistently maintained as a storytelling element conveying the themes and attitudes of the film. There is another countering rhythm in the film that is set up in the second scene and appears at intervals throughout the film until, 2½ hours later, in one of the most famous scenes in editing history, the two rhythmic qualities are intercut to bring the film to a climactic and complete realization.

The first shot of the film is a 2½ minute pull back from the face of a middle-aged Italian man, Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto), telling a harrowing story of his daughter's abuse at the hands of callous young American boys. The shot slowly reveals the silhouette of the Godfather (Marlon Brando), who is listening. The physical movement of time and energy in this shot starts out being concentrated in Bonasera's face and eyes as he states his beliefs (beliefs that set up one of the central tensions of the film, the tension between the new life and ways of America and those of Sicily, the old country). But as the frame widens out and pulls away from Bonasera's face, the darkness around him becomes more engulfing, his expressions less visible, his stature and energy diminishes, until the silhouette of the Godfather fills a third or more of the frame. The stillness creates physical tension by holding the question of who will disturb this physical space and energy with movement and how.

The emotional rhythm in this shot is in the tension between the movement of Bonasera's voice, his cadence of outrage, counterpointed by the movement of the camera away from him, pulling back evenly, dispassionately. It is as though Bonasera is throwing his emotional energy into a growing void. This handling of emotion is also thematic for The Godfather. The shaping of the time, movement, and energy of emotion in this shot speaks directly to the spectator about how emotion is handled in this world: the outrages and blood feuds are kept at a distance, handled deliberately; they are “just business,” not personal (Fig. 8.2).

The first scene of the Godfather is an event that will be repeated four more times in the first sequence: someone will come into the Godfather's office and ask him for a favor, which, on this day of his daughter's wedding, he cannot refuse. Each time the supplicant achieves his objective, but so does the Godfather, who makes a business of placing others under obligation to him. The rhythm of this first scene—stately, controlled, sustained, void of any physical or emotional violence—establishes one of the two initiating rhythms that work in counterpoint to each other to make the overall event rhythm of the film.

FIGURE 8.2

Amid somber colors and stately movements Bonasera whispers his request into the Godfather's (Marlon Brando's) ear. [Photo credit: Paramount; The Kobal Collection]

The other rhythmic quality of the film is established in the second scene, the scene of the Godfather's daughter's wedding party (Fig. 8.3). This buoyant party is filled with effusive gestures, bright colors, crowded, busy frames, and movement in all directions. The brightly jagged physical movement of people, voices, patterns of leaves and dresses, and songs are the meaning, just as, later in the film, the bright, jagged movement of extreme violence will carry the meaning of the physical energy that disrupts and punctuates the dispassionate rhythm of the other transactions.

FIGURE 8.3

Al Martino and Talia Shire in the raucous movement of bright colors and sounds in the wedding party scene of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972). [Photo credit: Paramount; The Kobal Collection]

The first and second scenes of The Godfather establish the pattern that the event rhythm of the film will have: grave deliberation occasionally jarred by energetic outbursts. In the climactic scene, known as the Baptism Scene, the two qualities are brought together. The stately, composed shots of a Catholic baptism in a cavernous church, a holy place of exalted worship, are intercut with the sudden, shocking brutal murders of five of the Godfather's enemies. By pulling the sound of the liturgy and the church music across the shots of the murders, the editors William Reynolds, A.C.E., and Peter Zinner, A.C.E., impress the stately, sanctifying sounds of the family's beliefs across the images of the horror they are committing. By timing the cuts to convey the clear culpability and knowledge the Godfather has of the violence he is perpetrating, and slicing through the peaceful baptism with countering thrusts of the ferocious energy of vengeance, the editors create a masterful dance back and forth that encapsulates the meaning of the film: the clash is what shapes the character of a man destined to be a powerful “Godfather.”

In The Godfather, as in all great films, physical, emotional, and event rhythms are integrated. Together they are the shape of time, movement, and energy that express the meaning of the film. In The Godfather the shaping of the rhythm creates our understanding, at an immediate, visceral level, of the grave and ceremonial world in which honor and family sanctify, contextualize, even justify the chaotic and jarring acts of extreme violence that both disrupt and fuel it.

CASE STUDY: GOODFELLAS (MARTIN SCORSESE, 1990)

The two driving forces that structure the events of the entire film Goodfellas are set up in the first scene: a murder and a lifelong desire. The first is the murder. A guy in a trunk is stabbed and shot. We don't know who he is or why he is being killed so cold-bloodedly until an hour or so later, and we don't know the consequences of that murder until yet another hour after that. By organizing the story events in this way, to play out at intervals over the whole film, the writers, Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese, and the editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, create a story arc that functions the way that pillars might function in a building, supporting the roof at regular intervals but not cluttering the space between them. They also start off the film with a blast of physical activity and an insight into the emotions of this story.

When the guy in the trunk is well and truly dead, having been stabbed nine times and then shot four times, the narrator and central character of the story, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), steps forward to close the trunk as his voice-over tells us, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” This introduces the film's other through-line of events: the story of Henry Hill's life and his rise and fall in the underworld. The voice-over is ironic. The killing is ignominious; there is nothing great or even courageous about it. Is this what young Henry, even from childhood, aspired to? Henry's statement is punctuated by another irony: a freeze-frame on him looking detached but slightly dazed (Fig. 8.4). Freeze-frames are a convention often used in cheaply produced dramas. In soap operas they hang in the air, directing the audience to sustain the emotion and recognize the importance of an event. But in Goodfellas, the freeze-frames emphasize the ignominious. They place weight and significance by stilling the constant motion and creating an accent. But the accent is almost random, resting on off-key compositions, occurring mid-action rather than at the climax or resolution, offering us a chance to examine something in detail in such a way as to actually undercut its potential importance. They freeze emotion and action and let us look at it dispassionately, make our own judgments about the lives it is framing: Are they fast, fun, and sexy, or meaningless, immoral, and nasty? Or both?

FIGURE 8.4

In Goodfellas the first introduction to the protagonist Henry Hill is as a slightly dazed man, buffeted by events, but also complicit in them, as he helps out with a routine murder and stays on track with his lifelong ambition to be a gangster.

The film's first freeze-frame, accompanied by the raucous trumpet of an upbeat jazz song, plays with the conventional use of the freeze-frame, using its implication that this is a significant moment, to place emphasis on the ordinariness of Henry closing the trunk and the coolness of being a thug. It indicates that anything could be significant in this world, and the insignificant, the closing of the trunk, can be given as much weight and emphasis as murder.

The details of this scene are important because they set up the physical and emotional cadences that are repeated in macro by the rhythm of events throughout the film.

In Goodfellas murder is not more or less important than pasta. The film is not about the Godfather or the boss of a Mafia gang, who is the still center of the whirlwind of death and life around him. It is about the guys who do the boss's bidding, the guys who are in the vortex, flailing, swinging, drinking, laughing, cooking, killing, and never ratting on their friends. These guys are in constant motion, and the weight and gravity of events in their lives are not measured by the same standards as the weight and seriousness of events in other people's lives. This lack of moral compass is a central theme of the film, which is expressed (as it is in all great films) as much through the form of the telling as through the information being told.

The rhythm of Goodfellas is characterized by fluid and continuous motion and the ironic counterweighting of events in life with events of crime and death. Some of the most startling, momentous scenes of the film are of ordinary events, such as entering a club by the back door or telling a funny story around the dinner table. These events are accented in the unfolding of the film by the physical or emotional movement within them.

The scene in which Henry and his girlfriend (Lorraine Bracco) enter the Copacabana (a popular and exclusive nightclub in New York in the 1960s) through the back way is told entirely in one dizzying, sweeping glorious steadicam shot, which, through its intricately choreographed time, movement, and energy, synchronizes us with the girlfriend. We share her physical experience of being dazzled and swept up in the glamour of the back-alley life.

The scene in which Henry's friend Tommy (Joe Pesci) tells a funny story and then lashes out at Henry for laughing is filled with an extraordinary tension and fear about Tommy's paranoia and ability to turn on his friends. Nothing much happens in this scene; it turns out Tommy was just teasing Henry. But the emotional tension it creates colors the rest of Tommy's story so that, later, when Tommy casually shoots a waiter and kills him, there is very little fuss—it's just Tommy being Tommy.

The event rhythms in Goodfellas build to a cataclysmic sequence in which humor, motion, trivia, and passion bang into each other across hard cuts of stinging rock-and-roll music, perpetual cocaine-induced manic movement, and the basso continuo of paranoia, embodied in a helicopter buzzing overhead, following Henry through his harried day.

The sequence starts with a title card announcing the date and time: May 11, 1980, 6:55 AM. Rock and roll slides in under the title. There's a cut to a close-up of cocaine being inhaled, guns being dropped into a paper bag, and on the next shot the lead guitar kicks in as Henry exits his quiet, brick-fronted suburban home, wiping the traces of coke from his nose. The combination of music, camera moves, and cuts that follow in the next four shots set up the whirlwind ride that's coming over the next 10 minutes:

Close-up of paper bag full of guns into the trunk, fast pan up to Henry's squinting up at the sky;

Cut to helicopter flying between the trees;

Cut back to a quick pan past Henry, glimpse the bag, the trunk slams down;

Wide shot tracks in on Henry as he hurries into the car;

Jump cut, he's driving and smoking.

Then in comes the relatively laconic voice-over, counterpointing the wildly erratic movement of the cuts, and adding a layer of irony. “I was going to be busy all day . . . .” Henry explains he has to sell guns, pick up his brother, deal drugs, and cook the pasta sauce.

The time of day appears on the screen at irregular points in the recount of Henry's day; it has an objective, distanced quality, as though labeling the evidence as in a police report, but so erratically it would mock any jury's desire for an orderly, clear, evidentiary report of the events leading to Henry's arrest. And what exactly is relevant as Henry hurtles toward his demise?

8:05 AM: Gun sale unsuccessful, Henry hatches a new plan and narrowly avoids a car accident. The series of preposterously repeating cuts from his foot on the brakes to his face as he screeches to a halt is entirely in subjective time—this is what it feels like to Henry, not necessarily the facts of what really happened.

8:45 AM: He picks up his brother, gets forced into having a checkup, the doctor is jovial, but Henry is sweating. He pops a calming Valium but the rock and roll is screaming. Voice-over: “Now my plan was . . .”

11:30 AM: Henry has yet another new plan; he's creating dinner and a sense of order, but at least one of these isn't going so well.

About 4 minutes into the sequence, 12:30, 1:30, and 3:30 all appear in 30 seconds of screen time, highlighting the sense that time is erratic, careening past wildly and then sticking on a detail. Music cuts in and out suddenly but exultantly, emphasizing the energy and anarchy of the movement through the day. The hard-driving rock and roll gives flow, direction, and energy to an action and then deserts it abruptly, only to slam in at another moment, another screech of tires or hit of cocaine.

Two minutes later, it's 6:30 and Henry is running out of the house again. “I told my brother to keep an eye on the stove. All day long the poor guy's been watching helicopters and tomato sauce. See, I had to get over to Sandy's, mix the stuff once, and then get back to the gravy.” The “stuff,” of course, is the cocaine, not the sauce, but even though one can get you arrested and thrown in jail for life and the other cannot, they both have to be stirred.

Fifteen seconds later, it's 8:30 PM, more coke, a complicated love affair, and back in time for dinner, which, suddenly (at 10:45 PM, the on-screen time tells us) is ending. Henry doesn't look happy; nothing's amounted to much, the family is annoying to be with, and he has to get on the road to get rid of the coke. Leaving the house, Henry is arrested.

This climactic sequence, as with the Baptism Scene in The Godfather, brings together the rhythms of the whole film and their meanings to create a sense that Henry's destiny is defined by the way he lives, and the rhythms of his life have spun out of his control. These rhythms have sucked us in, too, so we feel with them how fun it is to be constantly in motion, fleeting, dodging, ducking, and sliding over precipices to land on our feet. We're with Henry on his wild ride, exulting in the spin and whirl as long as it stays in motion, reflecting only when we're forced to see the consequences, the debris left in the dust by the tornado of this kind of life.

SUMMARY

Physical rhythm creates tension by posing the question of win or lose, catch or escape, or, at an even more subliminal level, by creating a pattern that the spectator participates in and wants to see fulfilled. Emotional rhythm creates tension or questions at the level of every cut. Each throw of a character's emotional energy, each emotional maneuver he tries, is a question being asked: What will be the response or the emotional effect of this action? Event rhythm is working at the level of the scene, the sequence, or the whole film. Each scene is a question in a drama: Will the character achieve his objective or be thwarted? It is actually impossible to separate the experience of event rhythm from the experiences of physical and emotional rhythm because the three kinds of rhythm are cumulative. Event rhythm is the flow of both the physical and the emotional through scenes, sequences, and structures that release information in a way that supports and conveys the sensations and emotions of the film.

ENDNOTES

1. Dancyger, K., and Rush, J., Alternative Scriptwriting, Writing Beyond the Rules, p. 16

2. The 1988 book How to Write a Movie in 21 Days by Viki King (Harper & Row, New York) not only proposes that the structure of a film has a very definite, required rhythm for its unfolding, but that a writer also has a rhythm for writing it. This book was recommended to me by my first film teacher, Pablo Frasconi, who warned that although it may be possible to write a film in 21 days, they would have to be 21 very good days, and these good days, may be just as likely occur over a period of three years as three weeks, which illustrates the difference in requirements on the internal rhythms of the editor to those of a writer! For a diagrammatic layout of the rhythm of events prescribed by King, see p. 40.

3. Pudovkin, V., “Film technique,” reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, p. 87.

4. See Bordwell, D., “Intensified continuity: Visual style in contemporary American film—Critical essay,” Film Quarterly, p. 16.