1 “Uses of Cutting” from The Cinema as Art (p77-89) Ralph Stephenson & Jean R. Debrix

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“Uses of Cutting” from The Cinema as Art (p77-89)

Ralph Stephenson & Jean R. Debrix

… [W]e consider now the purposes for which cutting can be used by the film-maker. In the first

place it enables him to change the scene as the story requires, to further the action and to provide

variety. It corresponds more or less to changes of setting or scenery in the theatre although in the cinema

the changes can be far more frequent. This is the most important and obvious use of cutting.

A second function of cutting- exercised in practice at the same time as the first - is to eliminate

unwanted material. All the narrative arts generally condense the events of real life. It is only exceptionally

that they either retain everything within a restricted space and time, or expand and dwell on it. Normally

a film will cut from a shot of a man catching a train to one of him having lunch in the dining-car, arriving

with bags at a house, answering the question 'Did you have a good trip?', keeping a prearranged

appointment abroad, or simply strolling in a strange town- in every case omitting much that would be

there in reality but is not significant for the story. This elimination takes place in the early stages; the

script-writer selects the significant scenes in space and time for his purpose and only these are filmed.

Besides the selection and compression in the initial script there is further paring down during the making

of the picture. For every shot a little more than the minimum will be taken and the exact length

determined when the film is edited. Most shots will be repeated and the best of the 'takes' selected.

Thus more film is always exposed than appears in the final version. The proportion of film shot to film

projected is known as 'cutting ratio' and no ideal figure can be laid down. With one director it may be 6

to 1, with another only 3 to I, yet both may obtain equally good results. This sort of trial and error is

common to all the arts. Cecil Benton is said to take many photographs of a subject, Cartier-Bresson

only a few. One painter will do dozens of sketches for a painting, another will paint it without a single

draft. Robert Louis Stevenson was said to have written almost without correction. Honore de Balzac

wrote draft after draft, each a mass of alterations. It is the final result which matters. In principle the

finished picture should present what is significant, have the right pace, cultivate economy of means, yet

not make it impossible for the intended audience to follow.

Thirdly, cutting can be used to build up a picture of an object, an action, or a person, by taking

them from different aspects. By doing this it can give a very full picture with great economy, perhaps

bringing out various traits which can be contrasted, or combined, with emphasis on particular features.

For instance in Last Tango in Paris the camera introducing us to Marlon Brando shows his rather

flamboyant coat, peers at his wrinkles, at the bags under his eyes, at his morose expression. Again in the

tango dance scene, the camera cuts from shot to shot of legs at odd angles, of couples frozen in

grotesque stances making them both beautiful and ridiculous. Because of cutting, the cinema can show

actors' faces large enough to let us see their expression in every detail. It can show contrasting

expressions turn and turn about in the shot and countershot of conversation.

Cutting also enables the camera to follow a glance or a gesture and reveal its meaning; or it may

be used to follow a person moving. Thus, like camera movement, it allows action over a wider field to

be shown in the closest detail.

Cutting may make space seem larger. Half-a-dozen shots of a prison-cell from half-a-dozen

different points of view, seen in succession, will give a mental impression of much greater amplitude than

looking round the actual cell from inside it. The camera can give a powerful impression of a crowded

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party, of a jostling crowd, of packed traffic through cutting together shots which by themselves would

be unimpressive.

Again, cutting can create space affinities which do not really exist. We see the hero of a film

struggling in a river that is racing faster and faster, then we cut to a shot of a huge waterfall with a body

going over the falls. The racing stream and the waterfall may be entirely different rivers, the shots may be

taken at entirely different times and the body going over the falls may be a dummy- but the audience

accepts absolutely without question the relationships of place and time which the director has suggested

by cutting them together. When we see two men struggling on a parapet and then a shot looking fifty

storeys down to the street, we are firmly convinced that the two men are on top of the building. There is

an example in an Argentine film, The Sad Young Men, directed by Rodolfo Kuhn, of space affinity

used for anticlimax which shows how strongly expectations can be aroused. Three young men are

driving from the town to join three girls who are waiting for them in their seaside bungalow. We see

shots of the young men in a car, then a shot of the girls in the bungalow expecting them. Then at the

bungalow there comes a knock and the girls crowd to the door. The caller turns out to be a strange

young man, one of a rival trio (not the ones we have been led to expect by the previous cutting), and the

anticlimactic effect, which is remarkably strong, indicates how powerful an association the previous

juxtaposition of shots has built up.

This associative function of cutting is discussed further under montage. It can be used for stunts

as when we see Harold Lloyd clinging to the hand of a clock on the face of a building. It can be used

quite mundanely to reduce the cost of a movie by, say, taking a few shots of a real schloss in Germany

itself then combining them with shots of studio-built walls or less authentic locations nearer home. It can

be used for contrast humorously, dramatically or with bitterness as for example in Solanas's The Hour

of the Furnaces, which intercuts shots of cattle being slaughtered with women's glossy advertisements.

Another brutal contrast is in The Godfather, when scenes of an infant being baptized in church are

intercut with the bloody murder of the Mafia's enemies. It can be used like a figure of speech in writing,

a simile, a metaphor, a visual pun. In Harry Watt's war documentary Squadron 992 one sequence

opens with poachers setting a terrier on to catch a hare. The sound of planes is heard and we see a

Spitfire chasing a German bomber. The parallel action is intercut until the terrier catches the hare and

bomber is shot down. The sequence is telling and the meaning perfectly plain.

One can understand that the 'invisible' cuts of narrative will be readily accepted by viewers who

are generally quite unaware of them, but how about other cases? When used for transitions they have a

function in the film, and similarly in the case of the magical or supernatural which is part of its style. They

thus form artistic conventions and are accepted as such. Also in the cinema the photographic

reproduction of reality, the emotional impact of the images, the pace of the action, the setting and sense

of occasion, all combine to lower our critical sense. The whole question of reality and artistic creation is

further discussed in the last chapter.

It should be noted that, in the real world, vision is controlled by attention, but in the cinema it is

the other way round: attention is controlled by vision. In everyday life we see what we attend to; in the

cinema we attend to what we see- that is, what the film director chooses to show us. In fact in a dozen

different ways (not only by cutting, but by camera movement, by setting, by lighting, by movement of

actors, by composition, by colour, and so on) it is part of the film-maker's art to determine what the

viewer will see. This is the difference between art end reality, mentioned at the end of Chapter One: that

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art sets out to influence its audience. This is not to say that the spectator is merely passive: the

spectator's considerable contribution in artistic communication is discussed later. But montage, with the

close-up as its full fortissimo, is a tremendously powerful means of expression and can exercise an

almost hypnotic power over an audience. We cannot escape the insistent close-ups of the cinema: the

hands of Lillian Gish in Intolerance; the shattered glasses and face streaming with blood of the woman

in the Odessa steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin; the ragged feet of the prisoners-of-war in

Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai; the fingers of the dying Harry Lime in The Third Man as they

gradually slip from the grating of the sewer.

CAMERA MOVEMENT

Russian directors in the great era of montage avoided camera movements because, it was said,

they tended to remind the spectator of the presence of the camera. It must be supposed that they did so

largely because camera movements were something out of the ordinary. Nowadays when they are used

so freely in almost every film, the audience takes them for granted and is more likely to get an artificial

impression from films like Ozu's Early Autumn or Tokyo Story, in which camera movements are

entirely avoided. It is an impression which Ozu deliberately cultivated, as does Shengayala in Pirosmani

where the static style suits the subject - a primitive Georgian painter. From an objective point of view,

cutting is just as artificial as camera movement, and in some ways camera movement is closer to our

experience of real space than constant cutting from one shot to another. Certainly camera movement

can give an emotional effect very different from shot-change. When the camera at the end of Black

Orpheus (directed by Marcel Camus) pans upward from the sad mortality of the lovers, dead upon the

rocks, to finish on the eternal loveliness Rio's hills and sky and seas- when, in the first part of Antonioni's

L'avventura, the camera lifts from the scurrying human ants searching the island for the missing girl to

brood on the majesty of the approaching storm- when, at the end of L'avventura, we lift our eyes from

the unfaithful lover and the betrayed girl, from the contemplation of human limitation and weakness to

the massive strength of a distant, snow-covered mountain-in each of these three cases it would not have

been possible to get exactly the same effect by cutting from one image to the other. Because it is

continuous, the panning is able to say: here is this, there is that - so different, yet they belong to the same

world.

It is the same with a tracking-shot, which starts off with a general scene and steadily moves so

as to concentrate on a particular person or thing of dramatic importance. While cutting to a close-up

works suddenly and dramatically surprises us, the tracking-shot takes us by the hand and leads us to the

heart of the drama. There is a gradual selective process, progressive elimination of unnecessary

elements, until finally only the essential central element remains. Cutting may be regarded as the spatial

equivalent of a sudden leap of thought or feeling: tracking as the spatial expression of a gradual growth

of ideas or emotion. Tracking can work up to a focus of attention and slowly and fully emphasize the

key point of a drama. In The General Line when the moujiks are gathered round the separator,

Eisenstein uses a slow forward tracking-shot to express their wonder at the magic of the thing, its

gradual invasion of their consciousness, a physical projection of their curiosity and expectation.

But camera movement, although it is more natural than cutting, is still very far from reality. When

we turn our head there is not the same finality, not the same evenness of pace, as when we turn the

camera. In nature our attention bounds, stops, goes on, goes back - it is more flexible, more spontane-

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ous, above all, it is unconscious. Also, in reality both what is to come and what has just been left are

there simultaneously; there is no edge to our attention. In a panning-shot what is to come is unknown,

what is left behind is decisively gone. As with cutting, so with camera movements - in the cinema there is

constant 'material creation and annihilation of space and what it contains’.

Again, camera movement gives rise to transference effects. We have already discussed these in

connection with tracking-shots. They can be present just as strongly in panning-shots. To someone

watching a vertical panning-shot of a building from the ground floor to the roof, it may seem as if the

building is sinking into the earth, while a lateral panning-shot may make it seem as if the landscape for

some mysterious reason is moving in the opposite direction. In everyday life when we turn our head so

that the landscape moves, the muscular and the visual sensations form a habitual total experience to

which we are accustomed, and we know by experience what is happening. In the cinema we miss the

feeling of muscular movement - we know we have not turned our head and, therefore, the movement

must be elsewhere. By going repeatedly to the cinema, viewers become accustomed to making that

automatic distinction between the space world which the characters of the film inhabit (the screen) and

the space world they are sitting in (the auditorium), but an unsophisticated spectator has the feeling that

he is in the same world as that which appears on the screen.

To illustrate the strength of visual habits it is worth mentioning a fairground illusion called 'The

Crazy Cottage' which depends on transference. It consists of a small lightly-constructed room, fixed to

revolve round a pole which runs horizontally through it. There is a bench fixed along the pole on which a

dozen people can sit. To all appearances the room is furnished normally but everything (carpet, table,

vase, flowers, plates, cup, books, pictures, etc.) is invisibly fastened or stuck down. When the people

have been seated on the bench and, to complete the illusion, strapped in, the box of a room is rocked

by machinery. For the people on the bench, habituated all their life to the stability of the rooms they live

in, there is complete transference of movement. It is they on the bench who seem to move, and they lean

this way and that to maintain an imaginary balance, cling to the bench and to each other, and scream

with fear and excitement. In the climax the room is turned completely upside down, and the people feel

as if they are hanging, heads down, from the ceiling.

In the cinema, transference can occur, even for those used to watching films, when the

movement of the camera is an unusual one. In the early part of The Ghost that Never Returns, made

by the Russian director, Abram Room, we see repeated shots of a block of prison cells photographed

quite normally from in front. Then, when a riot occurs in the prison, we are shown the same block

beginning to tilt sideways several times, and nearly falling over. We know that it is really the camera

which is being moved, but it looks as if the building is being pushed over and upset, as it were, by the

riot inside. The same effect is obtained by a swirling movement of the camera to express fainting or

vertigo. In Michael Cacoyannis's Electra, there is a particularly effective shot of Irene Papas who, in a

great wave of grief, falls on the grave ft her father, Agamemnon. At the same time she utters a great

moaning cry, the camera makes a sweeping movement, and the whole earth seems to reel. Again, we

have instances of a defect in the cinema's rendering of reality being turned to artistic advantage.

Another departure from reality is that in tracking-shots, especially forward tracking-shots, which

are often elevated above the ground, there is a strange sense of dream-like power. The camera can be

moved in ways which are denied us in real life. There are vertical tracking-shots up the face of a building

(in Renoir's La Chienne), or cliff. There is the opening of Wilder's The Lost Weekend, when the

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camera moves smoothly over the skyscrapers of New York to finish at the window of a flat where a

flask of whisky is hanging. One of the earliest and most celebrated of tracking-shots is at the beginning

of Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924). The shot begins in the street, moves in at the spacious hotel

entrance past the lordly doorman (Emil Jannings) and finishes in the manager's office. Another is in

Renoir’s La Grande Illusion where the camera moves round von Rauffenstein's room picking out the

objects which typify his Prussian, aristocratic background (the part is played by von Stroheim) - riding-

whip, gloves, perfume, and so on. The result in the one case is quite unlike someone walking into a

hotel, and in the other case unlike someone going into a room and examining the objects in it - but both

are undeniably effective.

When watching a film, we are not intended, necessarily, to take camera movements as realistic.

Panning-shots, for instance used in conversation as an alternative to cross-cutting (shot and counter-

shot), have something of the function of inverted commas. The camera follows the conversation like a

tennis rally and animates the scene. Moreover, by showing speakers in turn either while speaking or -

more effective still - while listening, it adds immeasurably to the dramatic effect of the words. Panning

may act as a conjunction between elements as in the examples from Black Orpheus and L'avventura

already quoted. In La Marie du port, Marcel Carne starts with a close-up of a cake, which two hands

take to put on the table. The camera follows the movement panning, and ends by framing the guests at

the table who are introduced differently, and with more stress on the symbol of the festive cake, than

they would have been by cutting. In Lumet's The Offence, about a policeman obsessed by the sex and

violence he has to deal with in his work, the camera shows beautiful spring flowers in a wood, then lifts

up to a half-clothed woman's body dangling from a tree. In Last Tango in Paris when the lovers have

left their rendezvous, the camera stresses their separateness by fixing first on Marlon Brando walking off

at street level then panning up to Maria Schneider going up a ramp at a higher level, then panning up still

further to a metro crossing high up, which may be taken to represent the impersonal, uncaring city back-

ground. The optical liaison created by panning works in time as well as in space. The camera leaves a

scene, pans up to the sky and comes down again to another time and place – or to the same place after

a lapse of time.

Panning movements may have an entirely subjective effect. In Christian-Jaque's Boule de suif

(1946), there are a great many panning-shots when the villagers are discussing the imminent arrival of

the Germans. The camera swings continually, catching in its movement replies, expressions, and

attitudes, and expressing in visual terms the confusion of the people, and the wildness of their decisions.

A striking example of a subjective tracking-shot is in de Sica's Umberto D, where the old man, almost

at the end of his tether, looks out of the window. With a sudden forward movement - a zoom-shot - of

the camera, the stones of the pavement rush up at us. We get a vivid expression of the old man's thought

- merely a thought - of suicide. In Bertolucci's Prima della rivoluzione there is striking use of a

backward zoom-shot. A woman (Adriana Asti) has had a deep, passionate affair with her good-looking

nephew, broken it off, and come back to find him engaged m a rich, aristocratic girl. From the stalls of

the grand opera house her eyes search for him in one of the boxes with his fiancee. The pulling back of

the lens when they see each other is quite violent, and expresses strongly the surge of emotion that is

felt. In Sweet Charity, when the bedazzled heroine goes to a night-club with her favourite film star, a

series of sharp zoom-shots, forwards and backwards, accompanied by the song 'Who is she?' express

the curiosity spiced with envy and malice of the other people there. In Brief Encounter (director, David

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Lean), when the heroine nearly commits suicide and leans towards the rails as the express train comes

in, there is a light spiral movement of the camera which expresses her feeling of giddiness. Then, like

slaps on her cheek, we see the lighted windows of the train flicker across her face while the draught of

the train blows her hair, cuts her breath, and brings her back to reason. In Sternberg's The Blue Angel,

Emil Jannings, dismissed and disgraced, sits in despair in his empty class-room gazing on nothing. The

camera draws back foot by foot as if following his gaze, as if measuring the void he sees before him. In

Cocteau's Les Parents terribles when Sophie, feeling she has lost her son, is stealing out of the

drawing-room where her husband, her sister, and her son, Mic, are gathered round Mic's resplendent

young fiancee, the camera backs away with her, expressing her withdrawal from a world she feels has

rejected her. In this case the lighting (light and gay on the group, sombre and tragic on Sophie)

reinforces the effect.

Subjectivity may go further. Following the camera, the spectator may move like a sick man, or a

runner, or lie may trip, fall, be jostled, trodden on; he may become a rolling stone, a flying arrow, a

diving aeroplane, a striking axe, a bird, a top, a projectile. The theme of The Hill is a brutal punishment

camp where men are given literally killing fatigues, climbing up and down a steep hill in blazing sun in full

kit with gas-masks on. To express their agony the director Sidney Lumet includes shots taken through

the eye-pieces of a gas-mask with an unsteady camera. Edgar Anstey in Granton Trawler used shots

in which the camera had fallen over with its mechanism still running and recorded nightmare gyrations of

deck, masts, and flying clouds, to convey the intensity of a violent storm. In Napoleon, Abel Gance had

his cameras thrown as snowballs, fired as cannon-balls, dropped from a cliff into the sea, fixed to the

saddle of a cantering horse, and mounted on a swinging platform during a scene of a stormy meeting of

the Convention during the French Revolution, to give the scene the movement of a raging sea. Pudovkin

used a mobile camera in the fight scenes of Storm Over Asia. Gustav Machaty in Extase fixed a

camera to the pick of a peasant tilling the fields. As Balazs says, the film can show not only a drunk man

reeling along the street but the distorted reeling houses he sees with his drunken eye. And his subjective

vision is reproduced by the film with objective reality.

As equipment has improved with more efficient dollies, cranes etc., camera movements have

become more fluent and expansive. Shooting from helicopters (a balloon was used by Griffith) has

become more common. In au exciting sequence in Frankenheimer's Grand Prix airborne cameras

follow racing cars along the precipitous roads of the Corniche to the finish at Monte Carlo. Another

example is the exploration by police helicopter of the terrorists’ farmhouse hideout in Chabrol's Nada.

The increased flexibility can be used either to heighten realism and involve us more fully in subjective

experience, or more readily to present unusual movement. The following examples can be added to

those already given.

In Robert Mulligan's Up the Down Staircase, right at the start the viewer, accompanying a new

school-mistress, has to fight his way up a wide staircase, stemming the vociferous downward torrent of

children until, exhausted physically and emotionally, she arrives in the quiet of an empty classroom. In

Costa Gavras's Z, about a courageous liberal politician (Yves Montand) who is struck down and killed

after a political meeting, the camera looks down on the crowd from the meeting-hall, then moves among

the excited throng with a strong feeling of involvement, of violence, jostling, of imminent danger. Then

when he has been fatally clubbed, the swaying movement and blurred focus carry us with him on his last

journey. Swaying camera movements and blurred colour are used in Tony Richardson's Dead Cert to

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express the feelings of a doped jockey trying to complete a race. In Ken Russell's Billion Dollar Brain,

when Michael Caine struggles on the bed with a girl spy who has just tried to stab him, the whole room

rocks violently. In another of Ken Russell's films, Women in Love, there is a tracking-shot in which the

camera moves back in front of a pit-owner's vintagc car as it drives slowly through a crowd of miners.

One feels both the hostility of the workers and the pit-owner's hard obstinacy. Hitchcock is celebrated

for his camera movements and there is an unusual one in Frenzy. The story involves a murderer who

lives in a flat near Covent Garden. We have already seen one woman strangled by him in horribly close

detail, A second time would be too much, and as the murderer ushers his second victim into the flat the

door shuts and the camera tracks back, down the stairs, out of the front door and into the street as if

from something it cannot bear to look at. It then pans up to the window of the flat, and cuts to a comedy

scene with the detective sadly preparing to tackle his wife's attempt at French cooking.

The comments and examples given show that camera movement can (though in each case with a

difference in flavour) perform functions similar to cutting - scene changing; elimination of unwanted

material; building up a picture; creating by juxtaposition affinities and contrasts. Like cutting, camera

movement can also enrich and amplify the spatial qualities of a scene. However, though it may be used

for longer individual scenes, there is no use of camera movement comparable with the continuous

invisible cutting of film narrative. Thus cutting remains the central, indispensable technique of movie-

making. Many films have been made without a single camera movement, but (except for Rope,

mentioned in the next chapter, the early 5-minute Lumière actualities and short 'underground'

experiments) none have been made without cutting.