Cutting Rhythms is about rhythm in film editing. It begins with the question: What can be said about the shaping of a film’s rhythm in editing beyond saying “it’s intuitive”? This question leads to an in-depth study of editors’ rhythmic creativity and intuition, the processes and tools editors work through to shape rhythms, and the functions of rhythm in film. Cutting Rhythms covers ideas about what rhythm in film editing is, how it is shaped, and what it is for. Case studies about creating rhythm in films edited by the author and examples of rhythm in a range of other films describe and illustrate practical applications of these ideas.
Cutting Rhythms begins in Chapter 1 by asking about intuition. What kinds of thinking and practice are editors referring to when they say the processes of creating rhythm are “intuitive”? Can the capacity to cut “intuitively” be developed? Cutting Rhythms proposes that it can. It draws on diverse sources of knowledge about intuition, including science, philosophy, education, film theory, and even dance theory to define ways of strengthening, supporting, and refining rhythmic intuition. Chapter 1 describes the editor’s intuition about rhythm as something developed from mindful awareness of the rhythms of the world and the rhythms of one’s own body. These are the sources of the editor’s embodied expertise and implicit intelligence about rhythm, and they are also the triggers that activate the editor’s creativity in cutting rhythms.
Chapter 2 of Cutting Rhythms builds on the ideas in Chapter 1 about physical thinking and movement. It puts forward the notion that editing is a form of choreography, because, like choreographers, what editors do is manipulate the composition of moving images and sounds to shape a meaningful flow. This chapter looks at some of the ways in which choreographers and dancers work with movement and finds that these provide some quite useful crafting tools for shaping a film’s rhythms.
The tools for cutting rhythms are discussed in Chapter 3, which breaks down and defines “timing” and “pacing.” This chapter also introduces “trajectory phrasing,” a term devised to describe some of the key operations an editor performs that are not precisely covered by timing or pacing. “Trajectory phrasing” is what we are doing when choosing different takes of a performance to join together, to create the impression of a single flow of energy and intention. It is a useful way of thinking about some key editing decisions.
Chapter 4 looks at the purposes for which movement in film is shaped into rhythms. It describes the effect of rhythmic cycles of tension and release on the viewer’s mind and body, and the effect of synchronization that a film’s rhythm can have on the rhythms of a viewer.
These four chapters cumulatively propose that: Rhythm in film editing is time, movement, and energy shaped by timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing for the purpose of creating cycles of tension and release.
With that definition in hand, Cutting Rhythms then applies its ideas about intuition, choreographic approaches, and the tools and purposes of rhythm to different types of rhythm that editors encounter. The terms “physical rhythm,” “emotional rhythm,” and “event rhythm” are used as ways of describing kinds of rhythm and some of the approaches that editors might take to work with them.
Finally, Cutting Rhythms offers a series of chapters that address particular editing issues and opportunities. It starts with a chapter on style, looking at the kinds of decisions an editor makes about thematic montage, continuity cutting, collision, and linkage when establishing and sustaining a style. Chapter 10 looks at parallel action, slow motion, and fast motion—things an editor can use to vary the rhythmic texture of a film—how they work best and when they descend into cliché. Chapter 11 looks at one of the editor’s most complex issues and opportunities—collaboration—and playfully describes the intuitive process of collaborating with directors as a “Vulcan Mind Meld.” The book ends with a new idea being developed for the new filmmaking processes that we are being offered by low-cost digital technology. It proposes that we can use a process of “onscreen drafting” to bring an editor’s unique and intuitive “editing thinking” into the filmmaking process much sooner, for much better results.
Cutting Rhythms is written to address editors and filmmakers who are learning their craft and more experienced practitioners who find their work benefits from discussion of their craft. Knowledge about rhythm helps students and editors to shape rhythms and maximize their material’s rhythmic potential. It is also relevant to the screen studies scholar who is interested in the connection of theoretical ideas to practical methods and outcomes. Its purpose is to stimulate ways of thinking and talking about rhythm in film and to understand and deepen rhythmic creativity.
Methodology: Theory
A survey of recent literature about editing1 shows that the question of rhythm in film editing is rarely addressed as a topic in and of itself. One notable exception is the work by Theo van Leeuwen, who notes in the introduction to Rhythmic Structure of the Film Text that:
There was a time when few works of film theory failed to address the role of rhythm in film … More recently the study of rhythm in film has been all but abandoned. Since the publication of Mitry’s Esthetique et Psychologie du Cinema (1963) little if any original thought has been contributed to the subject.2
Handbooks on editing craft sometimes supply rules about the rhythm-making tools of timing and pacing. These books and interviews with editors may also provide examples of rhythms from specific films, but say that there are no rules for editing rhythms and do not offer any substantial definitions of rhythmic creativity in film editing.
In his book The Technique of Film and Video Editing: Theory and Practice, Ken Dancyger describes rhythm as part of pace, and says, “The rhythm of a film seems to be an individual and intuitive matter.”3 The Technique of Film Editing, by Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar, positions rhythm as an attribute of timing.4 In Film Art, Bordwell and Thompson describe a number of attributes of rhythm in their discussion of the “Rhythmic Relations between shot A and shot B,”5 but most of them are subsumed under the operations I will call pacing as in frequency of cuts. Bordwell and Thompson preface their remarks by saying that “cinematic rhythm as a whole derives not only from editing but from other film techniques as well.” Unlike their discussion, mine is an effort to consider cinematic rhythm as a whole inasmuch as the editor devises its final shape and form. In other words, although I am focused exclusively on editing operations, my question concerns their impact on the larger aspects of cinematic rhythm that they shape. I will define, therefore, a number of considerations the editor has in the affective shaping of cinematic rhythm, and frequency of cuts is only one of those operations.
Don Fairservice, author of Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice, gives a summary view of the literature available on rhythm in film editing when he says:
Any discussion about film editing will inevitably sooner or later raise the matter of rhythm. It tends to be used rather as a compendium word, a sort of catch-all which tends to obscure as much as it reveals about something that is difficult to define.6
Cutting Rhythms avoids putting forward any rules about rhythm or creativity in rhythm. Instead, it articulates some principles of rhythm in film editing as questions that editors, filmmakers, or film studies scholars can ask themselves and of their material in order to expand the scope and sensitivity of their rhythmic intuition. This approach, to articulate questions that editors can ask themselves or ask about their material, is a way of tying theory to the more pragmatic and pressured moments of practice. When working on a film, and someone in the edit suite says “it isn’t right,” “it doesn’t feel right,” or “the rhythm is off,” ideas about rhythm may present possibilities an editor can consider for herself to make it “right.”
Given this practical, craft-based purpose and my interest in connecting theory to practice, I have chosen, primarily, a cognitive approach to my discussion of the properties and processes involved in working with rhythm in film editing.
Cognitivists consider the physiological makeup of humans when they are studying how we understand and are affected by something like film. The underlying principle is that there are certain things hardwired into all human beings, things that are part of our makeup before we are shaped by our particular moment in time or upbringing, such as “the assumption of a three dimensional environment, the assumption that natural light falls from above, and so forth. These contingent universals make possible artistic conventions which seem natural because they accord with norms of human perception.”7
These assumptions are present in most editing practice—we do not spend our time in the editing suite wondering about the nature of being or the universe; rather, we are trying to shape an experience that resonates with the knowledge and beliefs many people hold. The ability to tap into those aspects of human experience that are physiological or deeply ingrained in perception and knowledge is an asset in trying to create resonant stories or experiences. So the discussions between working collaborators about a film project are generally grounded in this cognitive approach, and the cognitive approach will be used as a practical basis from which to work with the vocabulary in the filmmaking process in order to expand and refine it.
In particular, this book seeks to understand rhythm in film editing and the process of creating rhythm “through the physiological and cognitive systems ‘hardwired’ into all human beings.”8 Cutting Rhythms makes numerous references to “physical thinking.” By taking this approach, I follow, to some extent, the great Soviet director and montage theorist Sergei Eisenstein, who believed that “in its fullest manifestation, cognition becomes kinaesthetic.”9 In other words, deep knowledge is not just something you know, but something you are and you feel. In saying that the mind is physical and the body thinks, I am not making any comment about what else the mind may be, if anything. There is no revelation about consciousness or Consciousness, and no material versus extra-material value judgment implied. I don’t know what else the mind may be, or how else it may function, and I do not intend to address that question. My ideas rely on the evidence that the mind is a physiological entity as well as, despite, without regard for, and without implication of, anything else it may or may not be. And given that the mind is physical and the body thinks, I am developing an idea about cutting rhythms that looks at the way an editor shapes the flow of a film as a unified action of mind, emotion, and body.
The cognitive approach is effective in making my arguments accessible to practitioners; however, there is an anomaly in this approach for my particular topic. The study of rhythm is a study of something that is not, or is not primarily, apprehended cognitively. Dictionary definitions of the word “rhythm” frequently emphasize that “rhythm is a felt phenomenon.”10 This quality of being felt and created through feeling is a substantial thread in my overall inquiry. It is this quality that causes rhythmic creativity to be characterized as subjective and ineffable in writings on the craft of editing. It is also this quality that finds expansive, sympathetic discussion in the phenomenological and Deleuzian approaches to the study of cinema. For more information on this approach to understanding film, readers may find it interesting to go directly to the source and read Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, in which they will find a discussion of “the sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic” from another perspective.11
However, through an analysis of the shaping of “the sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective” into rhythms through various procedures and for particular purposes, Cutting Rhythms makes the case that, although rhythm is a felt phenomenon, it is not just felt. Creativity in rhythm and spectators’ expectations about rhythm are also learned, and the process of creating and learning rhythms can be described.
Cutting Rhythms draws on recent discoveries in neuroscience to explain the actual physical processes of experiencing and creating rhythm. In particular, it draws on ideas about the functioning of mirror neurons in the recognition of intentional movement. By describing the processes through which the brain apprehends rhythm and phenomenological theories of the ways that living bodies have kinaesthetic empathy with movement they perceive, Cutting Rhythms develops a model of a thinking body, a body that gathers, stores, and retrieves information about rhythm and uses it strategically—in other words, a body that thinks, but does so primarily through a directly physical, experiential process.
I make use of work by the philosophers, scientists, and various scholars, However, my objective is not to “create new concepts” or to “alter our modes of thinking about time and movement,”12 but to engage in what Bordwell and Carroll describe as “problem driven research.”13 The problem is to find a way to describe the materials, processes, and purposes of rhythm and modes of physically thinking about rhythm so that rhythmic creativity in film editing can be understood and extended.
Methodology: Practice
A substantial portion of my research into rhythm is necessarily practical. I have edited a number of short dramas, short and longer form documentaries, and the occasional educational or promotional video. Each of these has provided insights into the editing process. I have made observations and notes about each project I’ve worked on, so all of them have had an impact, in some way, on this book. By integrating theory with practice, testing my own and others’ ideas against the practical experience of cutting to discover and articulate knowledge about rhythm, my intention has been to produce a set of ideas that are useful to practitioners and that may also provide useful ideas for other inquiries.
Endnotes
1. In Editing: The Art of the Expressive, Valerie Orpen discusses various kinds of books available on editing, saying, “The existing literature on editing can be divided into three categories: textbooks or general studies on film, either solely on editing or with a section on editing; editor’s handbooks; and interviews with editors, which include autobiographies, transcripts of lectures, essays, anthologies of interviews and individual interviews in periodicals.” See Orpen, V., Film Editing: The Art of the Expressive, p. 10. My literature survey includes texts in all three categories.
2. Van Leeuwen, T., “Rhythmic structure of the film text,” in Discourse and Communication: New Approaches to Analysis of Mass Media Discourse and Communication, p. 216.
3. Dancyger, K., The Technique of Film and Video Editing: Theory and Practice, pp. 307–315.
4. Reisz, K., and Millar, G., The Technique of Film Editing, pp. 246–247.
5. Bordwell, D., and Thompson, K., Film Art: An Introduction, pp. 278–280
6. Fairservice, D., Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice, p. 273.
7. Bordwell, D., and Carroll, N., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, p. xvi.
8. Stam, R., Film Theory: An Introduction, p. 236.
9. Bordwell, D., The Cinema of Eisenstein, p. 125.
10. Brogan, T.V.F., “Rhythm,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 1068.
11. Deleuze, G., Cinema 2: The Time Image, p. 29.
12. Wartenburg, T.E., and Curran, A., The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Text and Readings, p. 7.
13. Bordwell, D., and Carroll, N., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, p. xvii.