LoBrutto,"Invisible" or "Visible" Editing

LoBrutto uses examples from the films “All That Jazz” and “Spartacus” to explain the difference between “Invisible” and “Visible” editing. He discusses the difference between these two styles of editing, as well as how these styles can be achieved through different kinds of cuts.

Invisible Editing:

“Invisible editing can be accomplished in numerous ways utilizing match-cut principles, variations of which have been used in countless films.” The article uses example from “The Jazz Singer” to highlight how by seamlessly meshing the cuts, using the technique of match-cuts, creates a sense of continuity for the audience. The action flows together so that audiences aren’t aware of the editing occurring. This is accomplished through match-cut editing, which occurs when actions flow together. By blending some element of the previous shot with the next, either through sound or visuals, the sense of continuity is carried over, despite the action now taking place in a new scene. When conducted visually usually an action, motion, or scene is carried over to the next. As an example, a scene of a pipe dripping water might cut to a scene of coffee dripping into a cup. The action of liquid dripping is carried over, even if the liquid and location of that liquid is not.

Visible Editing:

“Visible editing is simply a cut of which the audience is aware. It makes itself known. It is like being woken up from a deep sleep by a crash or a loud yell.” As LoBrutto describes it through his analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus,” visible editing is achieved most often when jump cuts are used. A jump cut is the kind of cut that occurs in the middle of an action. Generally in film, actions are carried through until they are completed and then the editor switches to the next shot. However, when jump cuts are used, the usual flow of action and continuity is disrupted, creating a sense of unease and panic in the viewer. As an example, a jump cut might occur when someone goes to take a bite into a doughnut, and the action abruptly cuts to a beach. The actions don’t follow and don’t make sense in that order.

Source: http://wam.wikia.com/wiki/LoBrutto,%22Invisible%22_or_%22Visible%22_Editing

Parallel Editing

Parallel editing (cross cutting) is the technique of alternating two or more scenes that often happen simultaneously but in different locations. If the scenes are simultaneous, they occasionally culminate in a single place, where the relevant parties confront each other.

Film Historian’s Insight

Also known as cross cutting, parallel editing gained prominence with Edwin S. Porter in his acclaimed movie The Great Train Robbery (1903). In this early picture, cross cutting is used to show what occurs in two different places but not much else. Though Porter didn’t use the technique to its full potential, he was responsible for introducing the concept to the American cinema, allowing others to build on it.

In The Lonedale Operator (1911), D. W. Griffith further develops the technique by using parallel editing to provoke suspense. This picture tells the story of a young girl who substitutes her dad as a train station’s telegraph operator during payroll day. When robbers try ransacking the place, the young girls locks herself in the telegraph room, where she asks for help. Cross cutting shows the three relevant parties to the plot: (1) the frightened girl, (2) the robbers trying to break in, and (3) the approaching posse.

Source: http://www.elementsofcinema.com/editing/parallel-editing/

Montage

Probably one of the first theorists of film and cinema was Lev Kuleshov, who brought new insight into the world of motion graphics. He conducted his own study group named the “Kuleshov workshop”, attracting the more radical and innovative film students. In this workshop they experimented with combining the expressionless face of a man, with various other shots, such as a plate of soup, a girl in a coffin or a woman on a sofa. They discovered that when the expressionless face of the man was sequenced with each of these different shots, each sequence established a different meaning towards the viewer. This is now known as the “Kuleshov Effect”.

Other forms of montage editing are outlined in Herbert Zettl’s book “Sight Sound Motion, Applied Media Aesthetics”. In chapter 18 he focuses on: Visual Narrative: The Syntax of Complexity Editing. He describes complexity editing as the selection and the sequencing of specific shots, processing a story, with its emotions. Underpinning what people do, what drives them to do it, and how they feel about what they do. Unlike Continuity Editing, which is editing methods and principles laid out to produce consistent and sensible perceptions, Complexity editing may very well cut between cameras that are positioned on opposite sides. This may be to show the inner confusion of a troubled person, or to induce other purposeful meanings from the audience.

He refers to montage editing to be the juxtaposition of two or more separate events, that when shown together, combine into a new and more intense overall representation.

Montage methods:

- Analytical Montage
- Idea-Associative Montage
- Comparison Montage
- Collision Montage 

Analytical Montage

In analytical montage editing, the editor observes an event for structural and thematic elements, and collects these essential elements to create a more intensified version. This method is broken down into two types, which are sequential and sectional.

Sequential Analytical Montage

This montage method condenses an event by breaking it up according to time, to tell a shorthand story of how events transpired over time. One of the main features of analytical montage is that the main event is often implied but not otherwise made explicit, leaving it up to the viewer to imagine.

Sectional Analytical Montage

As opposed to seeing progression of an event over time, sectional montage isolates a section of an event or moment. It is achieved by producing a shot that establishes the context and sets the tone. The following sectional pieces add to this, going into greater depth. 

Idea-Associative Montage

The idea-associative montage brings together two disassociated events to create a third principle concept. Similarly to the analytical montage, idea-associative montage has two types, comparison and collision. 

Comparison Montage

This montage type compares two or more similar themes, however, combines them in a manner that expresses them differently. 

Ex: Two shots are representing the same theme, with the man and the dog both looking into the public bin. However, while the two events are similar, the comparison conveys how the man is living a dog’s life, scrapping over food. Highlighting the idea of desperation and the social degradation of the poor. 

Collision Montage

This montage type clashes two similar, but opposing events to reinforce a basic feeling. An example would be a montage that juxtaposes a man eating out of a bin, in contrast to a man sitting at a table eating a buffet of food. It is a powerful and insightful type, yet a conspicuous one, which can both enlighten or involve the viewer sensitively. 

Below is a montage edit that I have constructed, which applies some of the montage types described.

Eisenstein was a brief student of Kuleshov and was a pioneer in the usage of montage editing, arguing that it was the essence of cinema. His work on cinema came from an intellectual viewpoint, developing theories to communicate abstract ideas in a new and modern way. 

These are Eisenstein’s 5 methods of montage:

- Metric
- Rhythmic
- Tonal
- Over-tonal
- Intellectual 

EISENSTEIN’S FIVE TYPES OF MONTAGE

Sergei Eisenstein talks about five different methods of montage throughout his work. These varieties of montage build one upon the other so the “higher” forms also include the approaches of the “simpler” varieties. These are the five:

Metric - Where the editing follows a specific number of frames, this is based purely on the physical nature of time, cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening within the image. The reason for this is to get an emotional reaction from the audience.

Rhythmic - The cutting happens for the sake of continuity. This creates visual continuity but it may also be used in order to keep with the pace of the film. A good example of this is the the legendary car/train chase scene in The French Connection.

Tonal - A tonal montage uses the emotional meaning of the shots. Not just manipulating the temporal length of the cuts or its rhythmical characteristics. The point of this is to elicit a reaction that is more complex than Rhythmic and Metric. An example of this is in one of Eisenstein’s fllms called Battleship Potemkin where the character ‘Vakulinchuk’ dies.

Overtonal/Associational - An accumulation of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage to synthesise its effect on the audience for an even more abstract and complicated effect.

Intellectual - Uses a combination of shots from outside the film in order to create a meaning. A good example of this would be the scene from apocalypse now where Klutz is being executed. They mix in shots of a water buffalo being slaughtered.

Source: http://www.dompaul.co.uk/blogs/25-11-14/25-11-2014.html

The 4 "P's" of Mise en Scene

Point of View - the perspective that the camera and director give us on a character, location, or object. Two common camera angles are the low angle (tilt-up) and the high angle (tilt down). Neither perspective is neutral nor does the implication of using such a shot help the audience construct meaning.

High angle - implies weakness, vulnerability, loss of power

Low angle - or tilt-up conveys power and authority

Posture - Posture or body language are key clues in reading a character's mood and reaction. Watch closely at the way that the character acts and reacts physically to others or the environment around them. This can give clues to how the character is dealing with inner struggles and may foreshadow upcoming events.

Example: arms and legs crossed suggest a restrained temperament, while arms out and in motion suggests a more impulsive disposition.

Props - When everyday items are shown from a privileged perspective, it serves as a message form the director "This is important; I am telling you something here!" Composing the frame to include props gives special attention to what might be overlooked in a wider context.

Position - Position refers to the placement within the frame in relationship to other elements. Examples…

Above or Below - placement of a character above or below (on a staircase or in a building) another character is a common positioning tool within a scene.

Personal Space - a tight space can make one feel claustrophobic while an open space can make one feel abandoned.

Fantasy theory and the mobile gaze

The concept of a more mobile gaze was explored by Elizabeth Cowie in her article 'Fantasia' (1984), in which she drew on Laplanche and Pontalis's influential essay of 1964, 'Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality'. Laplanche and Pontalis established three original fantasies - original in that each fantasy explains an aspect of the 'origin' of the subject. The 'primal scene pictures the origin of the individual; fantasies of seduction, the origin and upsurge of sexuality; fantasies of castration, the origin of the difference between the sexes' (1964/ 1986:19). These fantasies - entertained by the child - explain or provide answers to three crucial questions: Who am I?' 'Why do I desire?' Why am I different?' The concept of primal fantasies is also much more fluid than the notion of fantasy permitted by apparatus theory, which inevitably and mechanistically returns to the Oedipal fantasy. The primal fantasies run through the individual's waking and sleeping life, through conscious and unconscious desires. Laplanche and Pontalis also argued that fantasy is a staging of desire, a form of mise-en-scène. Further, the position of the subject is not static in that positions of sexual identification are not fixed. The subject engaged in the activity of fantasizing can adopt multiple positions, identifying across gender, time, and space.

Cowie argued that the importance of fantasy as a setting, a scene, is crucial because it enables film to be viewed as fantasy, as representing the mise-en-scene of desire. Similarly, the film spectator is free to assume mobile, shifting modes of identification- as Cowie demonstrated in her analysis of Now Voyager (USA, 1942) and The Reckless Moment (USA, 1949). Fantasy theory has also been used productively in relation to science fiction and horror-genres in which evidence of the fantastic is particularly strong.

Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998

The Oedipal heroine

Drawing on Freud's theory of the libido and the female Oedipal trajectory, feminists extended Mulvey's application of the theory to argue for a bisexual gaze. Perhaps the spectator did not identify in a monolithic, rigid manner with his or her gender counterpart, but actually alternated between masculine-active and feminine-passive positions, depending on the codes of identification at work in the film text.

In a reading of Hitchcock's Rebecca (USA, 1940), Tania Modleski (1982) argued that when the daughter goes through the Oedipus complex - although she gives up her original desire for her mother, whom she blames for not giving her a penis, and turns to the father as her love object - she never fully relinquishes her first love. Freud also argued that the girl child, unlike the boy, is predisposed towards bisexuality. The girl's love for the mother, although repressed, still exists. In Rebecca the unnamed heroine experiences great difficulty in moulding herself to appeal to the man's desire. When she most imagines she has achieved this aim, the narrative reveals that she is 'still attached to the "mother", still acting out the desire for the mother's approbation' (1982: 38). Recently, the notion of the female Oedipal trajectory has been invoked in a series of articles published in Screen (1995) on Jane Campion's The Piano (New Zealand, 1993), which suggests that these debates are still of great relevance to film theory.

Other work raised related issues. In The Desire to Desire (1987), Mary Ann Doane turned her attention to the 'woman's film' and the issue of female spectatorship. Janet Bergstrom, in 'Enunciation and Sexual Difference' (1979), questioned the premise that the spectator was male, while Annette Kuhn, in The Power of the Image (1985), explored cross-dressing, bisexuality, and the spectator in relation to the film Some Like it Hot (USA, 1959).

Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998

Developments in psychoanalysis, feminism, and film

Mulvey's use of psychoanalytic theory to examine the way in which the patriarchal unconscious influenced film form led to heated debates and a plethora' of articles from post-structuralist feminists. Theorists such as Joan Copjec (1982), Jacqueline Rose (1980), and Constance Penley (1985) argued that apparatus theory, regardless of whether or not it took questions of gender into account, was part of a long tradition in Western thought whereby masculinity is positioned as the norm, thus denying the possibility of a place for woman. They argued that there was no space for the discussion of female spectatorship in apparatusbased theories of the cinema. Responses to Mulvey's theory of spectatorship followed four main lines: one approach was to examine the female Oedipal trajectory; another approach, known as fantasy theory, drew on Freud's theory of the primal scene to explore the possibility of a fluid, mobile or bisexual gaze; a third concentrated on the representation of masculinity and masochism; and a fourth approach, based on Julia Kristeva's (1986) theory of the 'abject maternal figure' and on Freud's theory of castration, argued that the image of the terrifying, overpowering woman in the horror film and suspense thriller unsettles prior notions of woman as the passive object of a castrating male gaze.

Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998