Chapter 6
In the late 1920s Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov made a strong argument, in words and through his films, for editing being a means of showing the truth of the movement of the world:
To edit; to wrest, through the camera, whatever is most typical, most useful, from life; to organize the film pieces wrested from life into a meaningful rhythmic visual order, a meaningful visual phrase, an essence of “I see.”1
If one is concerned with physical rhythm, one is concerned, as Vertov proclaims above, with “meaningful rhythmic visual order,” not as a means to something else but as a revelation in and of itself.
“Physical rhythm” is the rhythm created by the editor when she prioritizes the flow of the visible and audible physical movement in the film over other types of movement (such as emotional interactions of characters or larger patterns of events in stories). As we will see when looking at emotional rhythm and event rhythm, both of these types of rhythm crafting also rely on the shaping of the visible and audible, but physical rhythm is made when the visible and audible movement and energy are the primary concern of the sequence, the initiating rhythm.
In physical rhythm, movement patterns create meaning directly. Dance scenes, fight scenes, chase scenes, and action scenes are usually examples of this in narrative film. In abstract films, physical rhythm is often the only kind of rhythm being shaped, as these films are made exclusively of abstract flows of color, line, shape, etc. In physical scenes and abstract films, form and content are one: the spectator is watching the movement patterns, and the movement patterns are the meaning and metaphor.
Shaping physical rhythm means shaping the flow of physical movement’s size, speed, force, direction, and other visible or audible elements across cuts. Cutting choices might be around whether to link or collide arcs of movement, and how to modulate the rise and fall of energy, the rate and concentration of movement, the pulses and cycles of tension and release in the flow of image and sounds.
When shaping physical rhythms, editors intuitively use a range of techniques and approaches. I have given names to four of these approaches, and described them below.
Rechoreographing
Figure 6.1 Frames from Len Lye’s Colour Box (1935). New Zealand filmmaker and “motion artist” Len Lye scratched lines and patterns directly onto the film—he was not using the movement of light, color, and shape to represent anything but the movement of light, color, and shape. Lye’s short, abstract “ballets” are compelling for their surprising and humorous patterns and crafting of physical rhythm.
Directors block or choreograph scenes and sequences to express meaning and convey intentions. But once on camera, blocking and choreography changes. It might be fantastically dynamic or it might be flat and un-dynamic from certain angles. It might take longer than is needed or it might be too quick. The framing might flatten performance. The performances themselves may not have all been equally dynamic. All of these variables come down to one problem: live movement does not simply transfer to the screen, it changes when it is filmed. So the editor may have to rechoreograph the movement in order to return its expressive intentions.
One method of doing this is to redesign the movement phrases using shots that allow one character or image to finish another’s move. In other words, have a movement impulse start in one shot and then continue or complete its trajectory in the next shot. For example, a soldier shoots an arrow in one shot, and in another shot, the arrow plunges into the enemy’s body. Or a wave crests in one shot and crashes in the next. Rechoreographing allows the editor to use the most dynamic bits of each shot and also to lengthen or contract the arc of the movement to make the most effective use of its energy, speed, and direction. The screen can flatten three-dimensional physical movement and rob it of expressive energy, but this technique returns the fullness of that expressive energy.
Figure 6.2 Battle scenes such as this one from Lord of the Rings, Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003) may be choreographed in real life to unfold in real time, but they are rechoreographed in editing to make the most dynamic use of movement, energy, and time. In shot (a) the editor, Jamie Selkirk, has chosen to show us the peak of the movement curve as a warrior is slain. We don’t see him fall to the ground, though; instead the editor cuts to a complementary movement in shot (b) that picks up the arc of the first shot’s movement trajectory and shifts it in another direction, moving our eye to another action in the battle. [Photo credit: New Line Cinema, WingNut Films]
Physical Storytelling
This method involves asking the question: What is a particular movement communicating in emotional or narrative terms? When cutting a dance scene or a fight scene, for example, ask yourself or the director: Where are we now in the movement’s “story”? Where have we come from? The answers guide the direction of the editing. If the fight starts between equally matched opponents, you may start by looking for shots in which their movement energy in the frame is equally strong. If one fighter then gets the advantage, it is important to know where in the movement story that happens, on this punch or that fall, or this jab or that stumble; otherwise, you risk emphasizing the wrong energy for telling the physical story. It is possible to shape the movement of time and energy in physical rhythm to tell innumerable different physical stories, and it is often the case that the editor changes the story or how it unfolds, because particular shots have more impact, beauty, or energy and so the physical story she cuts unfolds differently from that which may originally have been intended. This is an excellent way of working, and is very common, but not the only way. It can also be creatively stimulating to get the director to tell you the movement’s story. Either knowing the director’s version of the story in movement quality/energy terms, or building a version of the physical story based on what the material is asking for, informs decisions about how long to stay with things, how quickly to build or to establish them, and where their development is leading.
Dancing Edits
As discussed in Chapter 2, editing is a form of choreography. An edit is a way of limiting or shaping the flow of movement, creating a smooth connection or a shock. The edit is the join in movement arcs or the accent that creates a phrase. To “dance the edits” means to use the edit point as an expressive element of the physical action. This approach uses the cut as an element in the dynamic of the sequence. In this
Figure 6.3 Editor Thelma Schoonmaker and Director Martin Scorsese had a different physical story for each of the many fight scenes in Raging Bull (1980), and each is cut accordingly, to be a pure physical expression of what is going on narratively and dramatically. [Photo credit: United Artists; The Kobal Collection]
approach, the movement phrases, experiences, and actions are created with the cuts, which are themselves part of the action, part of the storytelling, part of the dance.
Figure 6.4 Audiences sometimes complain that in dance films like Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2001), the editing is too fast or there are too many close-ups, so that they can’t “see the choreography.” No one would ever say this about a fight scene or a chase scene. That’s because the choreography of these cinematic scenes is always created in the editing, and has been since the earliest days of cinema. Fred Astaire would not let directors edit his dance scenes because the entire rhythmic composition within them was created by him and his dancing partner. Without in any way diminishing the greatness of Fred Astaire, it is possible to say that cinema has other things to offer in an experience of physical movement than just recording the dancer’s moves. In contemporary dance film, it is not that you are missing the “dance” by seeing only one dancer or one body part or by seeing a rapid hit–hit–hit of cuts. This is a screen dance, whose ultimate choreographic form is created with the cuts. What you see in the moves, the shots, and the cuts is, cumulatively, the action or the dance, not a version of the action all cut up. In these four shots from Chicago, Editor Martin Walsh makes a dance by editing together four moves into a rhythmically coherent phrase. [Photo credit: Miramax, The Producer’s Circle, Storyline Entertainment]
Singing the Rhythm
During the cutting process, movement trajectories shaped by cuts can “sound” in the editor’s head. This phenomenon draws on a kind of synesthesia that I think a lot of editors have. As the editor Tom Haneke says, “I hear spaces.”2 This may also be one reason editing is so often compared with music. The movements “sound” in editors’ heads (bodies), with their timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing making a kind of song. It is very hard to vocalize this song, and I’m not much of a singer. So when I say “sing,” I often mean just tuning my awareness to the song in my head. I sing my cuts, too, not just the movements in a given shot, but the phrases that I make with edits, listening to breath, intensities, tensions, and releases of the flow of energy, time, space, and movement to see if I’ve hit a false note. It is not just because my background is in dance that I also “dance” as I cut. I have heard other editors speak of this phenomenon, too, wherein they notice their head, shoulders, eyebrows, blinks, or breaths moving sympathetically with the movement phrases being cut together, tracking their rise and fall of energy, and noting their punctuation points with a short sharp nod.3 Singing the rhythm is an embodied manifestation of thinking rhythmically as described in Chapter 1. It is tuning one’s own physical rhythms to the rhythms being perceived in the rushes, and it is a process at work in every single rhythmic decision I make.
In sum, when creating physical rhythm, editors often contend with the movement patterns visible in the raw material by rechoreographing. They find out the intentions of the director or the story and practice physical storytelling. They exploit the possibilities for using a cut as a form of movement, for example, as a link or a collision, with dancing edits. And editors tap directly into their own innate rhythms by singing the rhythm.
What follows is a brief analysis of the ways in which I used rechoreographing, physical storytelling, and dancing edits to cut a dance scene in the Physical TV Company production of Thursday’s Fictions (Richard James Allen, 2006). As noted above, singing the rhythm is happening all the time.
Case Study: “Now” Scene from Thursday’s Fictions
Physical TV Company productions are stories told by the body. Dance and storytelling are integrated, and there are moments when the whole story is carried by the physical. The final dance scene in Thursday’s Fictions is one of these moments.
The dance scene at the end of Thursday’s Fictions is a roughly 12-minute sustained movement sequence. Because this particular dance scene was always intended to be realized on the screen and not on the stage, its problems and possibilities are similar to those presented by many physical scenes: the movement has exciting moments, but its overall shape must be constructed in editing to give it direction, flow, cycles of tension and release, and a rhythm to which the spectator can synchronize. This particular scene had some inherent shape, as would, for example, a choreographed fight scene or sex scene, but the editing challenge was not to realize that precise shape, but rather to find the rhythm that expressed its intention.
At the beginning of the sequence (Fig. 6.5), the character Wednesday (Richard James Allen) has just asserted himself forcefully to save the trunk full of dances from Saturday (Emma Canalese, voiced by Mêmé Thorne). Shaken, and barely recovered from his exertion, he opens the trunk, thinking the dances will come flooding out.
But the trunk is empty (Fig. 6.6).
Stunned, Wednesday moves tentatively out of his safe, warmly lit corner, into the cavernous, gray room where all of the furniture left over from his father’s life is scattered about, covered in drop cloths (Fig. 6.7).
The dance sequence begins when Wednesday starts to uncover the furniture and realizes that under each cloth is not a piece of furniture but a dancer, frozen and lifeless (Fig. 6.8).
Figure 6.5 Wednesday (Richard James Allen) shouts Saturday (Emma Canalese) out of his house. [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Simon Chapman]
Figure 6.6 Wednesday opens the trunk. [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Simon Chapman]
Figure 6.7 Drop cloth-covered furnishings in Wednesday’s house. [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Simon Chapman]
Figure 6.8 Wednesday pulls drop cloths from the frozen, lifeless dancers. [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Simon Chapman]
The movement journey of the scene is from frozen lifelessness to floating freedom. It does not move in a straight line; its trajectory moves forward in three waves, and each of these waves needed a rhythmic cycle of tension and release within the cycle of the whole dance.
The dancing starts with Wednesday doing an “unfreezing” solo (Fig. 6.9).
The physical storytelling in Wednesday’s opening solo, after all of the drop sheets are off, is that, like the dancers but in his own way, Wednesday is frozen, too. He reels and catches himself and then performs a series of gestures that move from a Frankenstein-like circling of his arms to a flowing, generous hand gesture. In the cut, I worked to create the feeling that sometimes Wednesday was moving and sometimes he was being moved by the energy and atmosphere around him. There is a 70-second tracking shot that leaves his movement and returns to it, de-emphasizing the effect of his movement and stressing the stillness in the room and the dancers. This long tracking shot is beautiful, and beauty is one of the reasons the dances need to live.
Figure 6.9 Wednesday moves creakily, unfreezing. [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Simon Chapman]
But it is dead beauty. The long time that it goes on for creates desperation for changes, dynamic variations, and movement. Getting the audience to want and value these things seemed like a good idea because these things are about to be served to them in spades. Coming out of the tracking shot, the stress and trajectory connections of the cuts are the start of the character’s physical transformation. The cuts here obey the rules of continuity cutting, but just barely, so they feel magical, and this begins to lead to the next bit of physical storytelling in the dance.
What wakes the dancers from their frozen, lifeless state? In the script Wednesday’s warming warms them. His feeling stirs theirs. When he starts to move more fluidly, his energy spreads around the room and awakens the dancers’ movement energy. But, in rough cut screenings, this bit of story wasn’t coming across because the screen flattened the movement energy. So we rechoreographed. I found and cut in shots that could be juxtaposed to look as though one movement caused the next. This was a matter of gauging the timing and trajectory phrasing of the juxtapositions. I rechoregraphed the order of movements and used select parts of the gestures rather than whole gestures to create the impression that Wednesday’s movements stirred the dancers back to life.
For example: Wednesday throwing his body creates a current of air that stirs the dancers’ skirts, then their hands, then their breath. We did this to make the connection physically visible. His movement trajectory stirs them (Fig. 6.10).
Then the dancers start their movement journey by breathing. The question here was how much breathing is needed to make that point? In the original choreography you could see the whole room come alive in just three long, visible inhalations and exhalations. (The movement exaggerates and shapes the in and out of the breath.) I thought at first I needed to go around the room to each dancer and see her take her breath, to show the breaths of each dancer awakening. (We have to stay close to feel breath—moving to a wide shot to show them all breathing just reads as bland.) But once we had the “stirring/waking” working better, we found we needed far fewer breaths—in fact, it was now back to the original three. Inhale in one shot, exhale in the next—I rechoreographed so that the dancers finished one another’s breaths.
Figure 6.10 Wednesday also throws one of the drop cloths he has removed to try to stir the air around the dancers. [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Simon Chapman]
In the next moments the dancers come shuddering to life in a sequence that stops and starts haltingly. The same problem occurs as with the breaths—when you see the whole room live, you see that only three dancers are moving, and it looks like a little spike that shudders to a stop. The whole group has not yet coordinated, but the little spikes spark once, twice, three times around the room. But if we go out to the wide shot to see the three moving dancers isolated in a still room, their spike has no spark. The solution here was in rechoreographing to get the feeling intended. Instead of a whole room going still for 1 second, we ended up prolonging the stillnesses by cutting around the room on the dancers so that the beginning of each movement spike, coming out of stillness, can be seen. The movement story is that the spikes spark around until, by the third one, everyone takes off (Fig. 6.11).
Figure 6.11 Dancers Terri Herlings and Linda Ridgway begin to catch the spark of life and disperse it around the room. [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Simon Chapman]
A sequence follows in which the dancers’ energy is a bit frenetic, all over the place (Fig. 6.12). The physical storytelling is that they are coming to life awkwardly, struggling to break the ice and to get coordinated. To make this visible onscreen, we use a lot of dancing edits. We have gestures colliding, only peaks of energy being used, no full movement arcs until they stop.
In the next sequence, high-energy twists, leaps, spins, and dives are cut together with respect for screen direction and energy, not real time (rechoreographing). This montage of individual gestures travels first from screen right to screen left (Fig. 6.13a), then back from left to right (Fig. 6.13b), as the dance did. In the live dance this happens three times. In the cut it occurs only once, but the dancing edits create far greater intensity of juxtaposed movements. The composition of a series of short stabs, each one triggering the next, makes the same feeling as was on stage but through a different approach.
Figure 6.12 The dancers’ moves and energy go wild. [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Simon Chapman]
Figure 6.13 Leaps and twists cut together to create a flow. [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Simon Chapman]
As pioneering dance film maker Amy Greenfield says:
Filmdance energy is produced through editing as well as the camera. Movements can be shortened, interrupted, and put together in such a way as to heighten the perception of energy. An extreme example of such an energy is obtained by interrupting movement at its climax.4
At 11½ minutes into the scene comes the penultimate sequence of the dance (Fig. 6.14). Called the “tribal” sequence, it is designed to emphasize the peak of unity and power of the group, as it reaches the climax of the dance’s story. The dancers have come fully to life. They have explored different configurations of fractured movements; of solos, duets, and trios; and now they finally come together in a unison of powerful downward stomps and elongated stretches. The visual rhythm is complicated by the fact that the whole group starts the beat and keeps the beat, but individuals split off to dance in counterpoint and then return. Given the complexities of the physical rhythms and their importance to the physical story, I sang this one out loud as I cut, making sure I knew where the downbeat was on each cycle of stomping, stretching, and circling. I stretched the beat sometimes, which worked better visually but created difficulties for the composer. The downbeat then became a discussion point between myself; the director/choreographer, Richard James Allen; and the composer, Michael Yezerski. Michael was eventually able to find a continuous and urgent rhythmic pattern through this climactic section.
Figure 6.14 Unison energy for the first time in the dance. [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Simon Chapman]
The physical storytelling of the last section, known as the final float, is that the dancers, their beauty, breath, life, energy, and movement are all dissolving into one another (Fig. 6.15). The final digital effect returns the dancers to their state of light, but out of the trunk, where they can shine.
Figure 6.15 Dancers dissolve into one another—an editing device functioning narratively. [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Simon Chapman]
Figure 6.16 Dance becoming light. [Photo credit: The Physical TV Company; Simon Chapman/Mark Woszczalski]
Music, Sound, and Physical Rhythm
Dances in musicals are cut using the music to which they were choreographed, but the final 12-minute dance scene of Thursday’s Fictions was choreographed in silence, with the dancers creating a strongly rhythmical bond between themselves to keep in time. It was done this way on purpose. One of the core principles of Physical TV Company productions is that rhythm in the final film is created in the edit suite. The composers I work with don’t like temp music because it boxes them into a corner when the director gets attached to it. I don’t like it because it defeats the point of the whole exercise. If you cut according to some external rhythm, what happens to the rhythms inherent in the movement? And what happens to the rhythms the editor sees, imagines, or dreams of bringing into being by the choreography of cuts? They get no opportunity to exist, never mind be brought to life.
Some physical scenes will very often benefit from the use of temp music, particularly if they have no choreographed shape and the editor has to invent the structure of the rhythm. In this case editors may use some music to help them find a first cut or direction, but they are wary of letting the music impose too much of itself on the images and will strip the music out periodically to check that the visual flow has integrity without the music.
Much more important than temp music for physical scenes are temp sound effects. Much of the rise and fall of emphasis and energy in an action, fight, or chase sequence is carried on the sound. So, the editor is wise to have a cache of punches, whooshes, thuds, and crashes handy to indicate the punctuation marks she intends to have in the phrasing of the movement of image and sound through the scene.
Summary
Working with the physical movement of dance in Thursday’s Fictions gave me the opportunity to work directly on shaping physical rhythms. In this case, rhythmically complete phrases of movement were devised by the choreographer, but the timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing of any movement are always somewhat altered when movement is framed and captured by a camera. Therefore, the editor’s job is to re-create not the precise choreography, but the feeling of the original choreography. The same is generally true of most scenes in which physical rhythms dominate. Chases and fights, for example, must have their rhythms created in editing to feel like chases and fights. This involves shaping the relative timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing of movement. I have named the processes I use to accomplish the shaping of physical rhythm: rechoreographing, physical storytelling, dancing edits, and singing the rhythm. Each of these is a name for a method of activating my intuitive rhythmic thinking in service of the choreographic shaping of physical rhythm. To some extent, because the visible and audible movement of a film is the material the editor uses to shape any rhythms, these same processes occur in the cutting of emotional and event rhythms, too.
The next chapter will look at emotional rhythm and articulate some ideas about seeing and shaping the movement of emotions in the physical movement of performers.
Endnotes
1. Vertov, D., Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, pp. xxv–xxvi.
2. Tom Haneke, quoted in Oldham, G., First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors, p. 44.
3. In the documentary about editors and their processes, The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing (Wendy Apple, 2004), there is a sequence in which Walter Murch demonstrates his version of singing the edits. He says he edits standing up to feel “sprung” and able to “hit the cut with my knees bent … this allows me to internalize the rhythms, the visual rhythms of what is happening.”
4. Greenfield, A., “Filmdance: Space, time and energy,” in the Filmdance Catalogue, p. 6.