{"id":2346,"date":"2008-05-26T17:53:30","date_gmt":"2008-05-26T22:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=2346"},"modified":"2010-07-23T11:36:16","modified_gmt":"2010-07-23T16:36:16","slug":"some-cuts-i-have-known-and-loved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2008\/05\/26\/some-cuts-i-have-known-and-loved\/","title":{"rendered":"Some cuts I have known and loved"},"content":{"rendered":"

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DB here, belatedly:<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been so busy revising our textbook, Film History: An Introduction<\/em>, for its third edition that we\u2019ve had no time to see new movies, let alone blog on our regular schedule. To those loyal readers who have been checking back occasionally, we say: Thanks for your patience. An entry that should intrigue you is in the works, possibly to be posted very soon.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, here\u2019s an item on a subject I\u2019ve been meaning to slip in at some point. It\u2019s a tribute to cuts I admire.<\/p>\n

Warning: Superb as Eisenstein\u2019s, Ozu\u2019s, and Hitchcock\u2019s cuts are, I\u2019m deliberately leaving them out. Too obvious!<\/p>\n

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Kata<\/em> and cutting<\/strong><\/p>\n

Okay, Kurosawa is an obvious choice too, but I can\u2019t pass up some of the first outstanding cuts I noticed in his work, back when I was projecting movies for my college film society. The cuts occur during the climactic battle of Seven Samurai<\/em> (1954).<\/p>\n

As is well-known, Kurosawa shot the sequence with several cameras using different focal-length lenses. What is less often acknowledged, I think, is the power of certain cuts as they combine with fixed camera positions. In his last films, Kurosawa would rely strongly on long-lens shots that pan over the pageantry of his crowd scenes, but here he exploits static<\/em> frames.<\/p>\n

In the eye of the battle, Kambei fires his arrow in one shot, and a horseman falls victim to his marksmanship in the next. So far, so conventional. But what\u2019s unusual is that we don\u2019t actually see the arrow hit its target. Kambei fires, and Kurosawa cuts to an empty bit of the town square, churned with mud and dimly visible through horses\u2019 legs. Only after an instant does a fallen bandit skid into the telephoto frame.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The same thing happens when Kambei shoots his second arrow: we must wait for the victim to plunge into the frame.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The result, I think, is a sense of exhilarating inevitability. The camera knows that the horseman will fall, and it knows exactly where<\/em>. That\u2019s a way of saying that Kurosawa\u2019s visual narration fulfills our expectation, but with a slight delay. The empty frame prompts us to anticipate that the man will be hit\u2014why else show it?\u2014and we have a moment of suspense in waiting to confirm what we expect. Moreover, the force of Kambei\u2019s arm is given us through a principle of Movie Physics: motion communicated to another body is magnified, not diminished, and the fixed frame allows us to see just how far the bodies are propelled. The arrow must have been Homerically powerful if it sends these men to earth with such impact.<\/p>\n

Most directors would have panned to follow the victim as, wearing the arrow, he tumbled off his horse and hit the ground. This choice would have been natural given the multiple-camera situation. Instead Kurosawa had his camera operators frame the exact spot the stuntman would hit and wait for the action to hurtle into the shot. The patient expertise of Kambei\u2019s marksmanship has its counterpart in the confidence of Kurosawa\u2019s style. (1)<\/p>\n

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The moving image, Mr. Griffith, and us<\/strong><\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Intolerance <\/em>(1916).<\/p>\n

The Musketeer of the Slums is trying to seduce the young man\u2019s wife, the Dear One. He pretends he can retrieve her baby. But his earlier conquest, the Friendless One, has followed him to the tenement, and at the same time the Boy has learned about the Musketeer\u2019s visit. As the Musketeer attacks the Dear One, the Boy bursts in. The two men struggle and the Boy is momentarily knocked out; the Dear One has swooned. So no one sees what really happens next: From the window ledge the Friendless One fires her pistol and downs the gangster. She flees, and the boy believes that he is the killer. He will be charged with the murder.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I admire. Griffith sets the situation up with his usual rapid crosscutting\u2014the Musketeer and the Dear One struggling, the Boy returning, and the Friendless One crawling out on the ledge. When the fight starts, Griffith shows the Friendless One growing wild-eyed at the window. She fires once, and Griffith gives the action to us in three shots: a medium shot of her in profile, a medium-long shot of the pistol at the window (irised so we notice it), and a long-shot of the room, as the Musketeer is hit.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/a>\"\" <\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Griffith repeats the series of shots when the Friendless One fires again.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/a>\"\" <\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This time the Musketeer staggers out to the hall and dies. Neatly, Griffith gives us three more shots, but omits the setup showing the Friendless One. Cut to the curtains again, with her hand waving the pistol, then to another long shot of the room as the gun is tossed in, and finally to a close-up of the pistol landing on the floor.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re looking for a pattern, the pistol in close-up is in effect substituted for the shot of the Friendless One at the start of each cycle. But I\u2019m most interested in the shots of the pistol. The first one at the window goes by at blinding speed\u2014ten frames in the two prints Kristin and I have examined. (2) That works out to a bit more than half a second, if you assume 16 frame per seconds as the projection rate, which was common at the time.<\/p>\n

Okay, fussy, but I\u2019ve already confessed that I turn into a frame-counter<\/a>, when I get the chance. The second shot of the pistol poking out of the curtains, parallel to the first, is also ten frames long. Griffith seems to have been a frame-counter too.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s most remarkable is that the long-shot of the pistol being flung into the room is even briefer than these closer views\u2014only seven frames long, or less than half a second at 16fps. As a nice touch, the close-up of the pistol landing in the corner is twice that (15 frames).<\/p>\n

In the decades that followed, directors would believe that long shots shouldn\u2019t be cut as fast as close-ups, so the Intolerance<\/em> passage can strike us as a typical Griffith misjudgment. But I admire his willingness to cut long shots so fast. It certainly creates a percussive accent. In case we didn\u2019t catch the story point, the close-up of the pistol hitting the floor clinches it.<\/p>\n

This is the sort of sequence that the Soviet filmmakers probably learned from. They may even have gotten ideas from Griffith’s interspersed black frames (two by my count) before each of the shots of the pistol thrusting out of the curtain. (3)<\/p>\n

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Behind the desk<\/strong><\/p>\n

Speaking of the Russians, one of my favorite cuts in Pudovkin\u2019s movies comes during a confrontation in The End of St. Petersburg<\/em> (1927). The somewhat oafish young worker known only as the Lad, who has sold out his comrades, attacks the boss Lebedev in his office. He seizes the boss and shoves him down, jamming him between his desk and the window. We see the action from one angle and then what seems to be an opposing angle.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Actually, this is a big discontinuity. Using the desk, the telephone, and the window as reference points, we can see that in the first shot, the Lad moves in from the left side of the desk to push the boss down. In the second, he has come in from the right<\/em> side and Lebedev\u2019s head is pointing in the opposite direction. We can see the weirdness of this more clearly if we simply flip one of the frames: now it looks like a consistent change of angle.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Pudovkin has created an impossible event. But the cut gives the strong sense of graphic conflict that the Soviets (not just Eisenstein) sought, creating a kind of visual clatter to underscore the violence of the action. It\u2019s possible that Pudovkin actually flipped a \u201ccorrect\u201d framing to create the disjunction, as some of his contemporaries did. (4)<\/p>\n

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Meg, all aflutter<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pudovkin\u2019s cut reminds us that filmmakers can get away with a lot if they change the angle drastically. It\u2019s harder to spot a cheated element or a mismatch if the new shot makes us reorient ourselves. Why does this happen? That\u2019s a subject for research, as I’ll suggest at the end.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s another tricky item. In Kate & Leopold<\/em> (2001), Kate has brought her time-traveling guest to an audition for a butter commercial. In the studio, he\u2019s behind her as she tries to convince her colleagues to watch him. As she talks, she first watches Leopold in the monitor above them, then swivels to talk to her boyfriend and other suits. The camera positions change 180 degrees.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\" <\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This drastic shift works to prepare us for a remarkable cut a little later. Kate waves her hand, saying she only needs two minutes. She pivots her body, moving her hand downward.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Cut 180 degrees to a setup similar to the one we\u2019ve seen earlier: She drops her hand to her side as she swings to us.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The gesture is smoothly matched. The only trouble is that it’s executed by the wrong hand. In the first shot Kate is wiggling her left hand, but in the second, it\u2019s her right hand that continues the movement and drops to her hip.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think that many people would notice this. Indeed, when I first saw the film, I felt a bump hereabouts, but when I watched it over again on DVD, it looked fine to me. Then I watched it again and saw what was wrong. Even then, I thought I might be hallucinating. It\u2019s one of the trickiest cheats I know of, and it\u2019s beautifully done.<\/p>\n

The real question is: Why don\u2019t we notice it? We usually say, \u201cBecause we\u2019re watching the story and ignore little irregularities.\u201d But that\u2019s not very satisfactory. Why isn\u2019t the wave of Kate\u2019s hand part of the story? We certainly notice it as expressing her attitude\u2014hence as part of the story. And if you didn\u2019t notice the disjunction in my End of St. Petersburg<\/em> example, the same question arises: Isn’t the Lad\u2019s attack on the boss the very story action we’re watching?<\/p>\n

Consider the alternative. If director James Mangold had matched the left hand, it would have to cross the center of the frame as Kate pivots, shifting from screen left to screen right before landing at her hip. It would have been ostentatious and somewhat graceless, and perhaps that<\/em> would have been distracting. So the mismatch is perhaps a line of least resistance, a compromise–as so many stylistic choices are.<\/p>\n

In addition, Kristin suggests that our pickup is made easier by the placement and action of the hand. In both shots it’s quite central and moving in the same direction at the same rate, so that it’s easy to read as a graphically continuous element across the cut.<\/p>\n

Perhaps too the fact that we\u2019re switching our position 180 degrees leads us to expect, wrongly, the sort of reversal we get here\u2014the way that we think our reflection in a mirror is the way we really look. And of course the earlier 180-degree switch, in which no mismatch occurs, probably serves to prime us for the shift in orientation this provides.<\/p>\n

Mangold doesn\u2019t mention the cut in his director\u2019s commentary on the Kate & Leopold<\/em> DVD, but when I asked him he said: “I think of shots as blocks, like legos or words. I don’t want them to resolve–come to an end. . . . Movement cuts work as long as the action is somewhat similar. The tough continuity cuts when you have a mismatch are the still ones.” Even if the mismatch here was accidental, it works very well. More generally, like other mismatches this one obliges us to think about what we see and what we don\u2019t see when we watch a movie.<\/p>\n

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Hawks\u2019 eyes<\/strong><\/p>\n

Among the many pleasures of Howard Hawks\u2019 movies are their lovely matches on action. Of course his editors had a lot to do with this, but Hawks clearly had to provide the right footage so that it could be precisely matched. Bringing Up Baby<\/em> (1938) yields a crisp cut as Susan, perched on the constable\u2019s desk, strikes a match. (I show the cuts from a 16mm print; enough of this video stuff.)<\/p>\n

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Here Hawks seems to rely on what\u2019s been called the two-frame rule: If you\u2019re going to match on action, overlap the action by two frames to show a bit of the action again. This allows the audience time to absorb the fact of the cut and then to see the action as continuous. But Hawks could be quite cavalier about his matches as well. The golfing scene from Bringing Up Baby<\/em> is full of wild cuts.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The caddies advance and recede, Susan and David are caught in different postures, and at some cuts they\u2019re striding across different parts of the course. These cuts have a swagger about them, as if Hawks is daring us to spot his outrageous cheats. How many of us do?<\/p>\n

All these trompe l\u2019oeil<\/em> effects can be studied psychologically, and prominent researchers who have tested such effects in the laboratory are attending our 11-14 June meeting of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image<\/strong>. Dan Levin studies discontinuities in film from the standpoint of \u201cinattentional blindness\u201d; here<\/a> he\u2019s interviewed by Errol Morris. Barry Hughes<\/a> of Arizona State University at Tempe has probed the two-frame rule, and he\u2019s talking in Madison as well. Go here<\/a> for more information; I\u2019ve plugged the event previously here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Next time, we expect: Secrets of film restoration.<\/p>\n

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(1) Kurosawa has prepared us for this passage when Kikuchiyo\u2019s sword attacks the bandits earlier in the sequence. There too a shot of his flailing stroke is followed, after a pause on a patch of mud, by a falling horseman. But the calm deliberateness of Kambei\u2019s drawing of his bow enhances the sense of inevitability, I think. Kiku does his damage through furious energy, but Kambei hits his mark thanks to a mature warrior’s almost contemplative precision.<\/p>\n

(2) Forget checking these frame counts on DVD. I get several different counts, depending on the player I use. For reasons discussed here<\/a>, DVDs don\u2019t preserve the original film frames, and in a fast-cut passage you can lose any sense of how many frames the shot lasted.<\/p>\n

(3) By the way, Griffith died on 23 July 1948, my first birthday.<\/p>\n

(4) For more on this extraordinary movie\u2019s use of discontinuity editing, see Vance Kepley, Jr., The End of St. Petersburg<\/em> (London: Tauris, 2003).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DB here, belatedly: We\u2019ve been so busy revising our textbook, Film History: An Introduction, for its third edition that we\u2019ve had no time to see new movies, let alone blog on our regular schedule. To those loyal readers who have been checking back occasionally, we say: Thanks for your patience. An entry that should intrigue […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,67,70,92,2,1,12,5,58,111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-directors-griffith","category-directors-hawks","category-directors-kurosawa-akira","category-directors-mangold","category-film-art","category-film-comments","category-film-history","category-film-technique","category-technique-editing","category-national-cinemas-russia-and-ussr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2346"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9326,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346\/revisions\/9326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}