To launch this column, I’ll write about three cuts from three movies. Two of them are bravura cuts, stand-outs in the history of editing. The third is smaller, less noticeable, but its impact on the future of editing may be just as great.
The first cut is from Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). It breaks the very famous four-minute-plus long take that opens the film. Just to remind you: The opening shot begins with a bomb being planted in the car of a local big-shot driving with his girlfriend. The camera travels through the honky-tonk border town, moving between this car and just-married Susie (Janet Leigh) and Mike (Charleton Heston) walking to the border. After they all pass from Mexico into the US, the car moves off-screen and Susie and Mike share a private moment.
They kiss:
look toward the sound
and in a split-edit POV cut, the film cuts to what they hear: the bomb exploding.
It’s a cut to match the spectacular opening long take. Sex and violence, two primary motifs of American cinema, are joined by this cut, and their intersections are explored through the course of the film.
The border that’s just been crossed isn’t just the line separating two countries, but also the thin line between the law and corruption in the film’s criminal investigations and the equally thin line between the "legalized sex" of matrimony and "transgressive sex" of prostitution, extramarital relations, and the violence implied in the Grandi gang’s motel "party."
And remember, this first cut is not between two neutral events: the kiss followed by the explosion. The explosion is shown from Mike’s and Susie’s point of view; they are somehow connected to this violence. Both characters become personally embroiled in the seedy world they enter. Susie, who has such a straight-laced façade, plays into the hands of Grandi, the local gang leader, and his band of grotesque hoodlums and druggies. She acts the ignorant, provocative fool in response to their weird taunts. And while Mike is portrayed as an incorruptible cop, his drive to save his wife from the clutches of Grandi’s gang threatens his objectivity, drawing a clear parallel between him and the corrupt (but formerly law-abiding) police chief, Hank Quinlan (Welles).
The cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) is from a bone thrown in the air
to the starship
The bone is thrown into the air by a primate on the cusp of becoming human, cut to a starship about to launch a post-human species. The cut essentially elides all of human history, cutting from pre-human to post-human life.
It’s a simple continuity cut, cutting on movement, one of the basic techniques in classic Hollywood editing. However, instead of its conventional function, maintaining space/time continuity across the cut (for example, using it to cut from a medium shot of a person getting out of a chair to a wider shot of him standing), the continuity cut here crosses millennia. The use of slow-motion as well as the elegant nineteenth-century waltz enhances the magic of the moment. (For a similar use of continuity cutting, see M (Fritz Lang, 1931): continuity of gesture joins intercut scenes between the police and underworld as they meet in their respective conference rooms to discuss the threat posed by the rogue child murderer.)
The third example I want to discuss is actually not a single cut but a series. It’s the jump cuts during two car rides in Godard’s Breathless (A bout de soufflé,1960). (If you watch on a DVD, the two scenes are on tracks 7 and 14.) Godard probably achieved the effect by extracting frames from a long take of the car ride.
These jump cuts are one of many techniques Godard uses to break free from the studio style of post-WWII European film. He takes the camera into the streets, is comfortable with scenes that ramble, and includes self-conscious references to other films, especially American film. The jump cuts add rhythm to essentially static shots. They are playful and jazzy, a nice visual complement to the jazz on the sound track.
So there you have the cuts, all great moments in the history of film. They avoid, in one way or another, the traditional "invisible" edits of so much of American films of the 30’s through the 50’s (no judgment is intended, just observation). Two of the films, Touch of Evil and Breathless, are on the edge of a new era in film; 2001 is firmly entrenched.
Touch of Evil stills courtesy of Universal Studios; Breathless stills courtesy of Fox Lorber; 2001: A Space stills courtesy of Warner Home Video.
Post by Ellen Feldman