Editing Trends and Culture

Sometime ago as part of research I was doing into trends in cinema production I was directed to a website called http://cinemetrics.lv/ which sort to collate raw data about the average length of shots through the history of cinema. Using a custom tool it allowed for a mathematical dataset to be compiled of how many cuts and how long those cuts were during the course of a feature film. What results is a very interesting set of graphs dealing with editing trends over the past century.

Before one even looks at the graphs it be expected that most would speculate that the hollywood/mtv editing aesthetic of ever shorter shots mashed together is the dominant discourse trend; the reliance on pure montage over spatial staging. And such speculation would be correct.



Of particular note is the divergence in the 60s and 70s between US and European films where continental filmmakers embraced the long take. This coincides with the impact of the French New Wave and the Cahiers critics who championed Auteur cinema and the ‘reality’ of spatial cinematic staging in long-take over overt montage of short takes. As we wind into the 80s and 90s we see the influence of Hollywood dominate and the graph lines for European and US cinema draw not only closer together but to decidedly shorter shot lengths.

So what if the future? Will shot lengths continue to be crunched into faster and faster cutting and in a chicken and egg scenario drive and be driven by viewer expectations of visual language? Or will the graph change again and steer back to longer takes and deeper staging?

Cinema is a techno cultural art and as such the art is inextricably tied to the technology; an advance in image acquisition changes the art and method of the acquiring.

I see two technology based connections here - one that may indicate the trend towards faster cutting from the 90s to now and the other sign posting a possible future change of direction back toward long take.

To see what technology may have contributed to a culture of shorter takes and emphasis on montage we have to look at what new filmmaking technologies arose during that period. Similarly to see where trends arise its prudent to look not at what established filmmakers were doing but rather at what young independent aspiring filmmakers were doing; its these who will shape future trends by the processes they engage in their infancy.

The obvious technology of the mid to late 90s that had profound impact on the thinking of filmmakers is of course DV. Low cost cameras shooting to cheap digital tape and able to be edited on a laptop. DV didn’t invent the indie filmmaker - 8 and 16mm had long since established the viability of non-studio filmmaking - but it did pry its doors open to the masses.

But like any format DV had a particular look and feel - the first was an overly smooth motion derived from interlaced sensors at 50i or 60i in opposition to the progressive image of film at 24. The second was that due to very small sensor sizes and low cost optics DV cameras invariably had very deep depth of field.

Despite the bang-for-buck quality of DV both these factors gave DV an aesthetic connection in look and feel to TV news and documentary rather than the narrative filmmaking aesthetic of film audiences had long been schooled in.

There is no doubt that DV was (and is) embraced, even the traditionally conservative broadcast sector utilized DV as a viable acquisition format. But the inherently deep depth of field of DV directly prompted the pursuit of what became known as the ‘film look’. The single most asked question by every DV filmmaker was (and is) how to achieve the ‘film look’ and the most obvious and specific means of doing this was (and is) to emulate shallow depth of field (by way of lens adapters, shallow staging, close-ups and various techniques mechanical or otherwise.

This overt emphasis on shallow focus had an instant association with the long established language of feature film. Because traditionally only expensive cameras shooting with large receptors (ie 35mm film cells) could produce shallow focus there was a perceived direct connection between production values and shallow depth of field. By proxy shallow DOF equals hi quality, deep DOF equals lo quality.

I see this blinkered perspective with my students, they are terrified of the video-look. Of course they can rarely actually quantify what the ‘video look’ is outside of the singularity of avoiding ‘deep focus’ t all costs. A decade and a half of DV has bread a conundrum - on one hand they are whole heartedly digital natives and by and large don’t really understand the impetus to use an archaic process of shooting on celluloid. However by the same token they are of course aspiring professional filmmakers and so seek proactively to have their work seen in that light. As such shallow focus, rack focusing, blurred backgrounds are the sure-fire ticket to that acceptance.

(This is of course in defiance of the glories of deep focus cinema of the 40s and 50s most notably Citizen Kane)

Of course student filmmakers from the outset of the DV era grow up to be the next generation of professional filmmakers. As such they carry with them the aesthetic impetus of their formative years. The technical mechanics of shallow focus images bias a particular cinema aesthetic and visual language. Greatly restricted and narrow bands of focus force the filmmaker to compose in layers rather than depth and such ‘washing line’ composition interspersed with occasional rack focus makes for a rather 2dimensional compositional form; a for that must then rely on cutting and montage to construct spatial relationships rather than deep focus staging.

The tenuous, though still rather compelling, argument I would subsequently wish to paint is that a generation of filmmakers rising out of the populous DV era have concertedly pushed (or been pushed) to favour montage by way of avoiding an aesthetic connection to the great mass of deep focus amateur DV content.

Of course this blaming of DV (or more particularly the desire to avoid visual aesthetics of DV) for the editing culture of the short take is not definitive. It exists as one contributing factor amid a host of elements. But it is one worth consideration of its unexpected and unintended impact on cinema composition and editing aesthetics.

So as to the future; will the trend plotted on the graph continue or is there a technological development that may push the pendulum back and have us see long-take staging return to the dominant cinema discourse?

I’d venture that one particular technology and cinematic construct may push cinema back toward long take; the virtual camera.

A construct of 3D environments, CGI and compositing the virtual camera is a metaphysical point in space that serves as the viewer perspective point over a computer genrated scene. Whilst obviously at home in animation the virtual camera is a regular construct in live action. Witness David Fincher’s Fight Club with single shots that traverse the city, Panic Room with cameras that move through walls and voyeuristically explore the house, Lord of the Rings which very often flies the viewer in single takes across vast distances and TV title sequences such as that from Carnivale that involve a single ‘shot’ moving in and out of tarot card images and Angles in America where a single shot traverses North America from San Francisco to New York.

By virtue of its non-physicality the virtual camera can function in filming a scene with infinite movement - through walls, into impossible spaces, over vast distances. The very nature of the virtual camera is to sustain the continuity of the image. Without a physical need to ‘cut’ to depict an event on the other side of a wall, for example, the virtual camera can simply ‘fly’ there.

I’d venture its possible that, as the virtual camera becomes a more common place mechanism in filmmaking we will see it employed more and more regularly as a standard shooting technique rather than a special effect.

There are firm precedents for this notion of specific technological advances delivering profound shifts in cinema aesthetics. In the 1940’s Kodak developed faster film stocks, this allowed cinematographers to shoot with a closed down aperture and subsequently with a deep depth of field. The deep focus, long-take cinema so expertly utilized in Citizen Kane is a direct result of this technical advance. We may speculate that the virtual camera may deliver a similar shift in staging techniques and a move away from quick cutting to longer takes.

We may also hope in a non technical mode that filmmakers simply get over their hang ups about the digital film look and embrace a greater diversity of compositional techniques that have been neglected, because cinema is going to get mighty dull if we stay the course with shallow DOF, short take, quick cut, master/shot/reverse montage coverage.