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The Grammar of Film Editing By (Publisher of www.screenreport.com) Georgia State University Introduction
In the hundred-year history of film there has been ample debate about the ways that the human mind is able to interpret 24 flickering images per second into a narrative nearly indiscernible from reality. The question has been addressed by theorists from fields ranging from linguistics to psychoanalysis to Marxism. Different philosophers from various schools of thought have each tried to claim a piece of the great mystery of filmic perception, all the way to the current day. While film displays a remarkable similarity to reality, it is the interpretation that comes from the differences between film and reality that lead us to perceive film as reality. Thus, the primary instrument for creating Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment,” is film editing (Coleridge, 1907). This paper will examine the literature from different
schools of thought including classical film theory, semiotics, audience, and
communication theory to prove the existence and the effectiveness of the grammar
of the language of History of Editing Early filmmakers quickly discovered the powerful potential of film once it was removed from the static position of being merely a “recording instrument.” In the early 1900s, the two Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, would set up the camera and simply record whatever moved in front of it. This in itself was miraculous. There was no subsequent editing of the film or movement of the camera during the shot. Another Frenchman, Georges Méliès, began to make the first forays into primitive editing techniques, inserting the first titles, developing the first dissolves of one scene into another, and devising double exposure and other “tricks” of film. This was the beginning of true editing, or producing events on film as they would never occur in reality (Millar & Reisz, 1968). Filmmakers continued to refine editing techniques, realizing the freedom that editing provided for true creativity and narrative. Film did not have to be simply a recorder of moving events as they were; it could be used to create whole new events and present stories in ways that could only occur on film. Time, space, and geography could be wholly manipulated to the mind of the director. The crowning event in film editing, and one that has defined film construction and narrative ever since, was the arrival of D.W. Griffith’s film, Birth of a Nation (1915). If Griffith was the artist responsible for this leap in film editing, German psychologist Hugo Munsterberg was the theorist. Munsterberg, who is arguably the father of applied psychology, saw only one film in his life: Birth of a Nation. He was so excited by the exhibit that he immediately wrote the treatise now regarded as one of the classical works in film theory, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (Munsterberg, 1916). This treatise was published the year after Griffith’s film premiered. In The Photoplay, Munsterberg identified the following film “devices,” as he called them, used in Birth of a Nation:
·
Continuity editing – editing that directs the
flow of attention of the viewer, providing a smooth flow of consciousness,
not jarring or interrupting the viewer with the notion that they are watching
a film.
·
Close-up – camera placed near the subject,
which fills the frame and focuses the attention of the viewer.
·
Flashback – a film sequence that recalls
an event that happened in the past, but shows it in the present. Simulates
memory. ·
Cross-cutting – cutting between two lines
of action to show each one happening in real time and then converging. ·
Special effects – reference to visions and
fantasies or dreams possible by manipulating the light or film (Braudy
& Cohen, 1999, p.
400). Clearly, these are still primary elements in film construction or editing. Munsterberg was able to isolate these devices through his one observation of Griffith’s film. In his zeal to define the qualities of the edited film, Munsterberg says, “The photoplay tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely, space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion” (Braudy & Cohen, 1999, p. 402). About this same time, the Russian filmmaker and teacher Lev Kuleshov documented the differences between Soviet film and American film in 1916, saying, “Russian film was constructed of several very lengthy shots photographed from a single position.” He went on to compare that to an American film that “consisted of a large number of short shots filmed from various positions” (Kuleshov, p. 46). This in essence, describes the evolution of film editing in a nutshell. Kuleshov became a major proponent of film editing and formulated the famous “Kuleshov Effect,” which proved that the juxtaposition of separate images would influence the comprehension of their meaning, in effect, create an entirely new meaning. Kuleshov believed that this “interrelationship of shots” was “the basic means that produces the impact of cinematography on the viewer” (Ibid, 1916, p. 46). Kuleshov went on to say, “The content of the shots in itself is not so important as is the joining of two shots of different content and the method of their connection and their alternation” (1916, p. 47). This “method of their connection and their alteration,” which is the essence of film editing, was Kuleshov’s primary interest. This early montage theory was absorbed by Kuleshov’s student, Sergei Eisenstein, who is now revered for his contributions to film, specifically the theory of montage. Eisenstein’s montage was more violent than Kuleshov’s; it was a collision of images that gave birth to a new idea in the mind of the viewer. The collision was carefully constructed by the director to manipulate the mind of the viewer, which in turn, illustrated the importance of the editing process that took place after the film was shot (Eisenstein, 1949). Montage is the first and central building block of film editing. Today we refer to montage simply as “cuts” and while it is the most basic instrument in the toolbox of the modern film editor, it is only one of an unlimited number of ways in which the editor, in Kuleshov’s words: “takes the viewer as if by the scruff of his neck, and let’s say, thrusts him under a locomotive and forces him to see from that point of view: thrusts him into an airplane and forces him to see the landscape from the air, makes him whirl with the propeller and see the landscape through the whirling propeller” (Kuleshov, 1916, p. 59). Is Film
Language? If we are to consider the question of grammar in film, we must first ask the question that contemporary film theorist Christian Metz is so familiar with: Is film language? To answer this question, we must traverse into the land of semiotics fathered by Ferdinand de Saussure (coincidentally around the same time that Munsterberg and Kuleshov were formulating their film theories). Saussure, who had no interest in narrative but is more concerned with mechanics and structure (not unlike the formalist Lumière filmmakers), would have no problem pronouncing that film was neither language nor langue (a sign system). Nonetheless, the term “film language,” according to Metz, “gradually assumed a place in the special vocabulary of film theoreticians and aestheticians” (Metz, 1992, p.168). For example, Kuleshov said, “The shot should act as a sign, as a letter of the alphabet, so that you can instantly read it, and so that for the viewer what is expressed in the given shot will be utterly clear” (Kuleshov, 1929, p. 63). He went on to say that, “Each separate shot must act as each letter in a word” (Ibid, 1929, p. 63). Thus, Kuleshov introduced the concept of semiotics and film as language long before semiotics was a subject for discussion in film theory. Other theorists have also used the analogy. Eisenstein compared the structure of Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation to the writings of John Milton, Charles Dickens, and Walt Whitman in his essay “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today” (Millar & Reisz, 1968, p. 27). Pipolo describes the “cinematic vocabulary” as: “long shots and long takes over close-ups and editing; slow, exploratory pans and tracks; intertitles throughout to precisely fix the dates and places of the action; black leader interspersed between scenes often concealing extraordinary elisions in the progress of events” (Pipolo, 2000). Modern film editor, Wohl, bluntly states that “The metaphor works for film because film is a language, and the editor—even more than the director or the cinematographer—must be a poet” (2000, p. 31). So despite Saussure’s protests, film as a language has
found a place of its own, in the editing world at least. Saussure’s argument
against film as a language was that it had no unit that could be broken down
to the level of a word. He believed that every shot, which was the smallest
unit of meaning or “syntagma” of a film, existed at the level of a sentence.
Semiotics was a system devised for the study of language since Saussure believed
that language constituted the best and most sophisticated use of signs as
meaning. However, by Saussure’s own definition, language is a “system of signs
that express ideas only in relation to each other” (Silverman, 1983, p. 6).
This sounds remarkably like Eisenstein’s definition of montage, which says
“meaning is not inherent in any one shot but is created by the juxtaposition
of shots” (Sobchak, 1980, p. 105.) Metz later concludes that film can be considered to
be a language “to the extent that it orders signifying elements within ordered
arrangements different from those of spoken idioms” (1992, p. 177). Given that
definition, let’s progress to the grammar of the language of film. The Grammar of Film
·
The study of how words
and their component parts combine to form sentences. ·
The study of structural
relationships in language or in a language, sometimes including pronunciation,
meaning, and linguistic history. ·
The system of
inflections, syntax, and word formation of a language. ·
The system of rules
implicit in a language, viewed as a mechanism for generating all sentences
possible in that language. Armed with this concrete, if broad, definition of
grammar, we can now discern what is the grammar of the language of film. Since film is not a language of words, but rather a nonverbal language of images, we must make an appropriate substitution for “words” and “sentences” in the above definitions. Saussure and Metz both agree that there is no minimum filmic unit that corresponds to a “word.” Therefore, each considers that the smallest unit in film may be the shot. But Metz adds: “One cannot conclude, however, that every minimum filmic segment is a shot. Besides shots, there are other minimum segments, optical devices—various dissolves, wipes, and so on—that can be defined as visual but not photographic elements.” (Metz, 1992, p. 177) If we assume that the shot begins at the level of a sentence, then the shot must consist of a number of items roughly analogous to phrases, punctuation, syntax, and inflections, so that perhaps a shot can be diagrammed as precisely as a sentence. (Indeed, anyone who has ever seen a shooting script knows that a shot must be diagrammed as precisely as a sentence.) Wohl says, “In cinematic language, sentences are constructed in a noun-verb-noun-verb arrangement and are punctuated with fades, freeze frames, and other graphical elements” (2002, p. 31) . Metz seems to agree with Wohl, saying that the optical devices he observed function as a kind of punctuation: ”The expression ‘filmic punctuation,’ which use has ratified, must not make us forget that optical procedures separate large, complex statements and thus correspond to the articulations of the literary narrative (with its pages and paragraphs, for example, whereas actual punctuation—that is to say, typographical punctuation—separates sentences (period, exclamation mark, question mark, semicolon), and clauses (comma, semicolon, dash, possibly even ‘verbal bases,’ with or without characteristics (apostrophe, or dash, between two ‘words,’ and so on)” (Metz, 1992, pp. 177-178). For
example, if you consider some basic film grammar elements (or optical devices
as Metz refers to them) to be shots, camera angles, camera movements, and
transitions then each element could have the following modifiers: (Wohl, 2002,
pp. 31-79) ·
Shots - close-up, medium, medium
close-up, full, master, single, two-shot, reverse, point-of-view (POV),
over-the-shoulder (OTS) ·
Camera movement - static, fluid, hand-held,
dolly, pan, tilt, tracking, zoom, or crane ·
Camera angle - high-angle, low-angle,
Dutch angle, or overhead ·
Transition – dissolve, fade, cut, jump
cut, match action cut Perhaps our biggest clue to the existence of grammar
in film lies in the acknowledgement of film as narrative. Metz points to the
work of early filmmakers including Méliès and Porter in “inventing” the optical
devices he refers to above, but he credits Griffith with their use in creating
the first film narrative. Referring to Birth of a Nation, Metz says,
“Thus, it was in a single motion that the cinema became narrative and took over
some of the attributes of a language” (Metz, 1992, p.170). He went on to say,
“Had the cinema not become thoroughly narrative, its grammar would undoubtedly
be entirely different (and would perhaps not even exist)” (Ibid, p. 88). Bazin identified potential
grammatical elements of the language of film when he discussed the following
film techniques as useful for recording reality, (the primary purpose of film
in his opinion):
Bazin
called “deep focus,” or the judicious use of depth-of-field, “a dialectical
step forward in the history of film language” (Braudy & Cohen, 1999, p.
48). Wohl identifies what he calls the
“rules of film grammar.” He says, ’While the language [of film] is still
growing and evolving, quite a few of the basic rules have remained surprisingly
consistent over the years” (Wohl, 2002, p. 69). He identifies the rules as
follows:
(Wohl, 2002, pp.69-81). Of course, like most rules, these rules can occasionally
be broken, sometimes intentionally to display the effect of editing. Other film
editors would undoubtedly add or subtract to this list with their own rules.
But this is a good example of the types of film grammar rules that have
developed over the last hundred years along with the language of film. The Effects of Film Grammar. If film is language, and grammar is the link that
allows us to read or perceive the story being communicated by a series of
separate shots, then how is it that viewers have learned to interpret the
grammar of film? There are no classes in school that correspond to “Film
Grammar 101,” or “Understanding the Grammar of Film.” Katz said, “What we know
least about is the psychology and sociology of the viewing experience itself”
(Katz, 1996, p. 9). Katz inquires how much effort is required by viewers to
interpret the images presented on television or film screen. The field of
cognitive psychology has inserted itself into the debate loudly in recent
years, insisting that visual perception is “a product of an array of high-order
cognitive activities” (Naaman, 2002). If we consider the narrative distance between each
separate shot as a gap, then the grammar of film becomes the bridges between
those gaps necessary for comprehension. Logue & Miller state that “All
forms of communication, even face-to-face dialogue, are marked by such gaps;
and message-senders and message-receivers alike must concern themselves with
‘negotiating’ or crossing them” (Logue & Miller, 1996, p. 366). While they
argue that most “gaps” in communication are bridged by “signs or semiotics,” I
would argue that in film, gaps are bridged by signs that constitute film
grammar, and the skilled use of that grammar by the film editor. Logue &
Miller would also agree with that when they say, ”What makes
communication, we would argue, are the media that bridge these gaps, namely,
signs of various types that transport meanings across spatio-temporal distances
and serve also to reduce or close interpretative distances” (Ibid, p. 368). Branigan (cited by Naaman) says that
viewers watching a film are really watching four different films at the same
time: 1) a celluloid strip of material; 2) a projected image with recorded
sound; 3) a coherent event in three-dimensional space; 4) a story we remember
as we reconstruct the shots we have seen (Naaman, 2002). This fascinating
description gives us a hint of the complexity of the viewing experience and
makes us wonder again at the ease with which comprehension occurs. Naaman
calls this “the phenomenon of ignoring editing with a scene—which implies
spatial and often temporal skips—in favor of accepting the dramatic unity
the scene conveys” (Naaman, 2002). The mind, through repetitious exposure
to films, or through the high-order cognitive process, is able to assimilate
the edits implicit in the grammar of film and form its own narrative. This
is of course, if the edits have been applied by a skilled editor in compliance
with the rules of film grammar, which have evolved through trial and error
throughout the history of film editing. One misplaced jump cut can confuse
a viewer and displace the “suspension of disbelief” necessary for film narrative
comprehension, just as one misplaced modifier or incorrect pronoun in speech
or text will alert the listener or reader that perhaps what they are hearing
or reading is nonsense. Metz said: “The cinematic institution is not just the cinema
industry…it is also the mental machinery—another industry—which spectators
‘accustomed to the cinema’ have internalized historically and which has adapted
them to the consumption of films” (1975, p.2). Here he is saying that viewers have learned to
interpret films simply by the process of watching films over time. We have
learned the grammar of film, through repeated viewing of good grammar, and
similarly, we recognize “bad film grammar” when we become disoriented or
distracted in a film. “What happened?” we may ask when a crucial grammatical
element has been left out. The mind strives to make sense of what it is presented
with on screen. In a study of how capable children are of interpreting montage, researchers “counted 311 cuts, 56 pans, 10 zooms, and 4 fades” in a single television episode, for an average of 8.1 “cinematic techniques per minute” (Smith, Anderson & Fischer, 1985). In another episode, they counted 556 cuts, 118 pans, 38 zooms, 6 freeze frames, and 63 dolly shots—681 cinematic techniques, or 16.7 cinematic techniques per minute. Viewers have to absorb all this in addition to the dialogue, setting, sound and other elements that make up a film. According to the Smith, Anderson & Fischer, “There is a common belief that such ‘film literacy ‘ is gradually acquired” (1985). While studies disagree, this 1985 study found that “substantial comprehension of montage is already established in the preschool years.” They concluded that, “There should be little doubt that as children’s knowledge
of the world increases, their comprehension of montage continues to develop,
eventually encompassing appreciation of sophisticated symbolism and aesthetic
devices” (Smith, et al, 1985). Conclusion
This paper has investigated
the visual elements that can be said to comprise the grammar of film editing.
Since the beginning of film making, certain devices have been recognized as
having definable properties analogous to grammar, i.e., cross-cutting, montage,
mise-en-scene, and flashback. The visual elements that make up film grammar
are what give film the power to communicate effectively. Audiences unconsciously
recognize and interpret these elements in making sense of a film narrative.
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