Update 20 August 2010

 

UNIT TWO-LESSON FOUR: EDITING

Film Editing Great, Walter Murch, at work editing Cold Mountain in London 2003.
Recommendation: See a review of a book on Murch's Editing, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing by Walter Murch.
The foundation of film art is editing. —V. I. Pudovkin 

LESSON FOUR: Assignment List.  Recommended time to complete Lesson Four: 8 hours.  Watch these You-Tube Clips on Editing, including excerpts from The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Making (U.S.A., Wendy Apple, 2004).  Part I is about 10 minutes long; Part II, 4 minutes.  The complete documentary, produced by ACE, American Cinema Editors, is quite excellent and is available on DVD at the MiraCosta College Libraries (Oceanside and San Elijo Campuses); ask the circulation desk if you can't find it.  See also the ACE (American Cinema Editors) website; ACE awards the Eddies for excellence in film and television editing.

WEBLECTURE #4

Cutting Up Time and Space 
Editing Definitions | Editing and Time | Fact-Fiction: Stone's JFK | Frame-Shot-Scene
Montage-Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin | Network and Media Empires |
News Shows and Editing | Recommended Editing Resources

Editing: Manipulation of Time and Space

A film is created and re-created in several stages, the three most critical points of creation being writing, shooting, and editing.  A film is created first in the mind of the writer who transforms the story in the mind's eye into a script on paper; then in the actions of the director, cinematographer, performers, and crew, who transfer what's on paper to celluloid; and then—after the film has been photographed and sound tracks recorded—in the work of the film editor.  Ideally, all three stages of creation are connected in a steady flow back and forth of creation and recreation.

The premier association of film editors in the United States, the American Cinema Editors (or ACE), offers this definition of editing:

What does a film editor do? The following is cited as a more frequent series of activities. However, there may well be exceptions. When the script is first obtained, usually the producer and director agree on a specific interpretation. The film is then shot and when the dailies (sometimes called rushes) are processed, the editor begins his/her job. Ideally, the editor has previously consulted with both the producer and director so that all three persons are aware of the concept, which is desired. The editor then assembles the dailies into a continuity of story as envisioned in the beginning, creating drama and pacing suitable to the type of picture involved. The editor works sequence by sequence, eventually putting the sequences together for the final product. He/she then determines the specific audio and visual effects and music necessary to complete the film. Working closely with persons in each of these departments as well as optical and/or special effects houses, he/she finalizes the film for viewing and approval by the director or producer. This brief information summary is in no way meant to be considered a comprehensive report on either the schedule for job opportunities in the motion picture/television fields or the overall job requirements of a film editor. Instead, it is merely a summary which ace hopes will be of some assistance to those persons requesting information.    (ACE - about editors)

According to Giannetti, editing, at its most basic level, is the joining of one shot with another; that is to say, editing is the assembling and arrangement of shots.  This is, of course, only the basic idea of what a film editor does.  Scenes or situations in film are created in the constructive editing of visual images—so that a filmmaker actually creates new time as well as new space. Where photography, mise-en-scène, and movement are languages used primarily for the manipulation of space, editing is a film language in which time is also manipulated.   Through editing, time can be compressed, expanded, stopped, mixed up, redirected, and distorted. 

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Frame-Shot-Scene-Sequence.  We've already learned about how the filmmaker helps us to see with new eyes by using the camera as an instrument of expression.  The filmmaker uses distances, angles, lighting, lenses, focus, composition, movement, and other techniques and devices available for recording the action—as well as for manipulation, distortion, duplication, and animation to create shots that, when assembled in the editing room and displayed on the screen, enable us to experience the filmic reality. 

• Frame.  A frame is a single, still photograph within a shot; what you see when you pause a film is a frame.  In traditional film, there are 24 separate photographs going through the camera each second (for a 5-minute scene, which is 300 seconds long, there will be 7200 separate frames!).  The word "frame" in the context of editing always refers to an individual picture photograph in a strip of film. 

  • The word "frame" is also used in discussing photographic technique and  to describe parts of a mise-en-scene; in the context of cinematography, a "frame" is a set of of lines that enclose a subject or object being photographed, such as when a character is "framed" by a window.  The "frame" refers to the outlining borders of an image or part of an image.
     

• Shot.  A shot is a strip of celluloid with many still photographs on it, a bit of the film that continues without cuts or interruptions.  A shot is made up of a series of frames, as many as are needed between the time the camera starts rolling ("action") and the camera stops ("cut").  The shot is sometimes considered the basic element of film. Shots can be very short (less than a second) or very long (several minutes); the shorter the shots, the more formalist the editing and the longer the shots (long in terms of time between "action" and "cut"), the more realist the editing.  According to Giannetti, the average length of a shot in mainstream films is about 10-15 seconds long.  A long and complex shot is called a "sequence shot" (see below).
   

• Scene. The editor assembles different, related shots to create a scene. A scene consists of shots that show something happening in a continuous time and space; a scene can be built through connections to a common idea or image.
   

• Sequence. The editor assembles different, related scenes to create a sequence.  A sequence always contains more than one shot, and usually contains more than one scene (very short films may have scenes but no sequences).  A sequence can span different times and/or locations, as long as the dramatic elements and structure are unified, such as by theme. 

  • Sequence v. Sequence Shot:  The terms "sequence" and "sequence shot"  mean two different things.  In the Glossary section of Understanding Movies, Giannetti defines "sequence shot" as "a single lengthy shot, usually involving complex staging and camera movements"  (582, 11th edition).  A "sequence shot" is ONE shot - and there is no editing within one shot.  As I use the term, "sequence" refers to a length of film containing MANY shots, specifically a group of scenes that comprise a major section of the film.  On many DVDs, you have a feature called "scenes" - these so-called "scenes" are usually made up of several scenes, and I think of them as the DVD preparer's idea of the "sequences" in the film.  If the DVD listed all the actual "scenes" in the film, the list for most films would be very long and unmanageable.  It's a little confusing.  I would like to propose another term to avoid the confusion.  So it's OK to use another term that works for you, like "section of the film" instead of "sequence."

A frame is like a word; a shot is like a sentence; a scene is like a paragraph; and a sequence is like a unified group of paragraphs (or like an act in a play).  Arranging these sequences, the editor constructs the movie. 
 

For an example of the differences between shot and scene, watch the video below till about 4:39.  Then read my analysis below.

This video clips almost the whole scene in General Ripper's office when he reveals his scheme to Group Captain Mandrake.  The whole scene lasts about 5 minutes and is made up of 9 shots (I am including a part of the scene that this clip does not show, a short beginning of the scene showing Mandrake coming down the hall and entering the General's office; most of the scene is shown here: 4:39 minutes, 8 shots).  The first shot shown in the video is lengthy both in terms of time and in terms of how much of the setting it takes in (it is a long shot that shows us a lot of the room,  an over-the-shoulder shot showing us the General's back, his desk, a large section of his office all the way back to the doors at the far end and the framed weapons on the far wall, and Group Captain Mandrake in the midground facing the General and challenging his decision to call the code to start a nuclear war). 

• When does a shot begin and end?  When you can tell that something has been cut in or out, that signals the start of a new shot.  Then, when you can tell that something has been cut in or out of what you have been looking at, that begins another shot.  For example, in this scene, most of the cuts are dialogue and reaction shots showing the two characters in the scene: first we're looking at the Ripper and then CUT we're suddenly looking at Mandrake and then CUT we're looking at Ripper again, and so forth. As you learn more about film editing, you will become aware of these cuts in the film, and will gain a greater awareness through knowledge of the editing techniques of the rhythms and meanings of editing.
   

• When does a scene begin and end?  A scene usually begins in a new location or time and ends when the viewer is taken to another location or time.  The scene above takes place primarily in General Ripper's office at Burpleson Air Force Base.  In the scene immediately prior we are in the B-52, the plane carrying the bomb to be dropped in Russia; in the scene immediately following, we go to the War Room (immediately after a brief re-establishing shot, a birds-eye shot of the Pentagon Building, where the War Room is located).

The video above also illustrates two styles of editing discussed by Giannetti: realist and classical.  Where most of the scene uses classical cutting (reaction shots in conversation are typical classical cuts, back and forth between Ripper and Mandrake, with a less than 2-second cut to a closeup of a gun, a moment by which Ripper threatens Mandrake), the first shot in the video is an illustration of realistic editing (realistic editing uses long takes - one way to think of realist editing is to think less editing, longer takes).  This shot lasts almost 3 minutes of the 5-minute scene (counting the part not shown in the video above); in the remaining 2 minutes, there are 8 shots.

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Editing and Time.  As Thomas and Vivian Sobchack write,

Many art forms produce their meaning in time and through duration: dance is movement in time, music is sound in time, drama and prose fiction are actions in time.  The moving image in film is an image in time, and—unlike the experience of looking at painting and sculpture—the experience of viewing a film requires the viewer to be in some way aware of the flow of time.  This flow of time, however, is not a simple thing, for there are several different kinds of time in the cinema.  (An Introduction to Film, 1987)

There are different kinds of time we can talk about in film; three of the most common are shooting time, screen time, and running time.  Shooting time is the time it takes to make, to shoot, the film (the time to set up for camera and lights, building sets, preparing actors, traveling to locations; time when the camera is rolling; time after the film has been shot and footage is collected so director and editor can choose shots for assemblage in the editing room).  Screen time is reel world time, the number of minutes, hours, years, or eons (past, present, and future) of story time world that we experience during the screening.  Running time is reel and real time, the time it takes to go from the start of the first reel to the end of the last; actually, running time is real time for the audience ("seat time"), the time it takes to watch the whole film from start to end (that's right, the end arrives after the credits when the screen goes blank and the sound track turns silent—when the film is completed).  It's always interesting to compare the actual running time with the amount of time we think we've been sitting in the theater.  Movies that we like, movies that engage our attention, always seem to be shorter than they really are; we watch a three-hour movie we love, and it seems like only an hour has passed.  Movies that are on topics we don't care or know about or movies that challenge us to think in new or different ways often seem to take more time that they actually take; a 90-minute movie might seem to be dragging on and on as though it's taking three hours of our time.

Here's how Paul Rotha* puts it in his classic text, The Film Till Now:

The material with which the film director works is not "real" in the sense that it is actually recorded time or space, but is a number of pieces of celluloid on which real actions have been recorded.  By altering the relations of these strips, filmic time is constructed. . . .  Between an actual event and the filmic representation of that event on the screen, there is a wide difference; the camera, at the director's or scenarist's bidding, picks out only such significant portions of the event as are necessary for its screen representation. . . .  Suggested by the scenarist, recorded by the camera, created by the director in editing, there comes into being an element peculiar to the cinema—filmic time. . . .  Further. . . it is perfectly possible for the action of a scene to be taken by the camera in several places remote from one another, but when the scene is filmically composed, the various places will appear to be one and the same.  By editing, preconceived in the shooting script, there will have been created filmic space as well as filmic time." (The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema,  353)

To quote Pudovkin: "The film assembles the elements of reality to build from them a new reality proper to itself; and the laws of space and time that, in the sets and footage of the stage are fixed and fast, are in the film entirely altered." (Gollancz' 1929 Pudovkin on Film Technique, quoted in Roth 354)

This knowledge of the manipulation of time and space in the moving-picture world is important.  What the camera decides to point at (or listen to) to comprise the shot, and how the shots are clipped, juxtaposed, and sequenced to create metaphors and other associations in the viewers' minds—this is what shapes the meaning or feeling communicated by the cinematic experience. 

*PAUL ROTHA.  In his Preface to the 1948 edition, Rotha writes:  "Since the manuscript of this book was first written [1929-30], I have at least found out that the more you become involved in making films the less you know about them.  Sometimes I have sat in a cutting-room with film draped round the walls and overflowing the bins and realised [sic] just how little one does know about the infinite possibilities of this wonderful medium, with its magic property of joining image to image and mixing sound to sound" (18).

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Now for a short video on editing in some recent films, or how to judge the best editing Oscar
(you may have to wait until the video loads)

 

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FACT AND FICTION — "FACTION"
OLIVER STONE'S JFK

Take Oliver Stone's JFK (U.S.A., 1991) a docudrama exploring the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.  The documentary aspects of the film aroused so much interest that people argued over the reportage quality, and news shows picked up the story to continue the public dialogue. JFK is a three-hour film, riveting not only for the uncanny performances of its cast (who actually look like the historical figures they depict), but also for the narrative power and editing techniques—its mixing of live footage with actual newsreel to make it all look real, and the subtle insertion of lightning-clever editing to control the audience's interpretation of events and evoke in them rush after rush of emotional intensity. As Roger Ebert writes in his online review of the film,

Stone's film is hypnotically watchable. Leaving aside all of its drama and emotion, it is a masterpiece of film assembly. The writing, the editing, the music, the photography, are all used here in a film of enormous complexity, to weave a persuasive tapestry out of an overwhelming mountain of evidence and testimony. Film students will examine this film in wonder in the years to come, astonished at how much information it contains, how many characters, how many interlocking flashbacks, what skillful interweaving of documentary and fictional footage. The film hurtles for 188 minutes through a sea of information and conjecture, and never falters and never confuses us. (JFK by Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times online 12/20/91)

Another commentator, Richard D. Heffner (American historian and University Professor of Communications and Public Policy at Rutgers), points out that films like JFK are allied with print and news media: they dominate our sense of the past and present.  As a producer and moderator of the public television show Open Mind and chair of the motion picture industry's voluntary film rating system, Heffner suggests that Oliver Stone and the mass media news directors of the country have become the new historians—so convincing are they to their audiences and so determined to show their own versions of history.  Unlike the authors of print histories, however, Heffner notes that media stories about history make use of "mind-boggling special effects."  He argues that Stone's "rapid cuts and purposeful edits, his musical up-beats and down-beats, his endless flashbacks and flash-forwards, all play with our heads, mold our perceptions, so much more effectively than the more linear media ever did."  Heffner lets Stone speak for himself on his ability to move audiences:

What's interesting about the movie is that it's one of the fastest movies. . . .  It's like splinters to the brain.  We have 2,500 cuts in there, I would imagine.  We had 2,000 camera setups.  We're assaulting the senses. . . in a sort of new-wave technique.  We admire MTV editing technique and we make no bones about using it.  We want to. . . get to the subconscious. . . and certainly seduce the viewer into a new perception of the reality. . . [of] what occurred in Texas that day. (Oliver Stone)

The press battle against Stone is itself a document of the evolution from print history written by historians and scholarly journalists dedicated to finding facts and writing them down with a respect for their objective value, to what Heffner calls "faction" (the mix of fact and fiction) disseminated by the new storytellers of the country, primarily film, video, and newsmakers, who "set our national agenda, interpret our national past, determine our national future, just as the scribblers themselves had done until these last sputtering days of the 20th Century."  Those who report history are providing their version of events, and those who read or view or listen to their reports are going to believe the version they are capable of understanding or the version they want to believe.   As Heffner writes, "Film technique goes right to the viewer's brain." (See Richard D. Heffner's article, "Last Gasp of the Gutenbergs," in the Los Angeles Times "Perspective on Communications" column of February 19, 1992).

• Recommended Websites: JFK by Roger Ebert  ||  Academy award-winning director Oliver Stone talks with UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler about Vietnam, his movies, and the art of cinema; at this site, you can click to a 26-minute video of the interview with Oliver Stone. || Oliver Stone at the BAFTA 2006 David Lean Lecture (a Google video, ~32 mins, the intro takes ~5, and includes a comment about the effect of a scene in JFK)

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THEORY AND EXPERIMENT:
SERGEI EISENSTEIN'S BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN

Kino-Eye is the overcoming of time, a visual bond between chronologically separated phenomena.  KinoEye is concentration and decomposition of time.  Kino-Eye is the opportunity to see the processes of life in any chronological order and at any speed.
—Dziga Vertov

Giannetti discusses D. W. Griffith's development of rapid cutting, cross-cutting and parallel-editing techniques to propel the narrative in his great film epic, Intolerance.  He also discusses the great Soviet filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, who learned much from Griffith.  In this lesson, you are encouraged to study Sergei Eisenstein's masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin, and the editing technique called "Soviet montage" or "thematic montage." Potemkin tells a story of revolt against oppression, and Eisenstein's editing techniques not only illustrate his pride in the Soviet revolution against the brutal Czarist regime, but also persuade the watcher to feel his revolutionary fervor.  Potemkin is an experiment in revolutionary art and improvised production (Eisenstein's rapid-cutting montage style was shaped, in large part, by a scarcity of film stock available to him in 1925).  It is a film that asserts, "A new society demands a new vision; a revolution requires a revolutionary way of unfolding its story."  

The story in Battleship Potemkin is based on an actual historical occurrence (a 1905 mutiny of sailors against their Czarist officers), but it is a dramatization of an event, not a document of the event itself.  Eisenstein manipulates the facts of the story to express his own revolutionary and artistic perspective, to communicate his own perspective on the truth of what happened and what it means.  He sets the story in the port of Odessa and shows that the people of Odessa join the mutinous sailors in their quest for dignity, freedom from oppression, and maggotless meat. Aimed at a mass audience of illiterate citizens, Potemkin shows that the brute power of oppressive government can be confronted by ordinary people.  It also shows that that despite the goodness and courage of ordinary people, they can be cut down mercilessly as though they were worthless criminals when an oppressive State controls the military.  The Odessa Steps sequence, considered the most brutal civilian massacre on film, is edited to both compress and expand time so that the viewer cannot help identifying with the innocent victims of the slaughter—children, old men and women, even a baby in its carriage, trampled like insects under the heavy black boots of the Czarist regime. 

 
Eisenstein's Odessa Steps Sequence (~7.5 mins) from Battleship Potemkin
 

Released in 1925, Potemkin was considered by many viewers of the time to be a natural thriller.  It remains, for many film historians and film lovers, one of the greatest films ever made.  As film critic Stanley Kauffman puts it,

With the very opening moments of Potemkin, we know we are in the presence of something new, and the miracle is that we know it every time we see the film.  The waves beat at the shore, the lookouts converse, the ship steams across the sea, and all this is modeled with an energy, controlled yet urgent, that bursts at us.   Then, when we cut to the crew's quarters and we move among the slung hammocks, we know we are in the hands of an artist who sees the difference between naturalism and realism.  The scene of the sleeping sailors is accurate enough, yet Eisenstein sees the arabesques that the hammocks form, and he uses these graceful, intersecting curves as a contrast to the turbulence of the waves earlier and the mutiny that is to come.   Shortly thereafter, he uses the swinging of the suspended tables in the mess hall in the same way—another moment of irrepressible grace in iron surroundings.

Fiercely, electrically, the film charges forward into the confrontation between officers and men, the action caught in flashes that simultaneously anatomize and unify it—in Eisenstein's double aim to show things as they are yet make us see them as never before. . . .  Few can see this relatively short picture—five reels, eighty-six minutes—without being catapulted into an experience that is stunning in itself and illuminating much that followed in film history."   (from Kauffman's Living Images, 1973; reprinted in Leo Braudy's Great Film Directors, 1978.   pp. 241, 237)

• Recommended Websites: For more information, see this Website on Eisenstein's Potemkin [heavy on graphics].

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"NEWS": EDITING AND THE PURSUIT OF "TRUTH"
ALL-MONICA-ALL-THE-TIME?

Understanding that the photographic image is constructed and altered, according to the bias or desire of the one making or interpreting the visual information, through editing as well as through photography and other techniques, is particularly important when viewing or reviewing television newscasts and news "documentaries"—which purport to tell the "real" story, and give us just the "facts."

Take the flurry of news accounts and news "shows" related to the Starr report released in the fall of 1998, particularly on stations like MSNBC, or what came to be called by communications people, "The All-Monica All-the-Time" network, a term I learned from Kathleen Hall Jamieson***, Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania—and arguably the most incisive analyst of media living today.  Jamieson observes that depending on which show you watch, which anchor you like, and which point of view of politics and the President you bring to a particular news story—you see and hear a different story.  You have a different experience of reality.  You come out believing a different version of truth. 

At some news stations, broadcasters were permitted to report sexual information with snickers and to focus on information, allegations, and innuendoes that disrespected and demeaned President Bill Clinton.  It was harder to find a similar mainstream broadcast program slanting the opposite way with equal invective or similar quantity and quality of air time.  And while Public Television Stations generally provide excellent service in rational and well-rounded presentation of news stories (presenting varying positions on debatable issues rather than giving only one side), there was a dearth of such programs in the general field of television news covering Starr's Report and Impeachment story—much less the following winter's Impeachment Trial story.   For alternatives to the pronouncements and interpretations of the mainstream media, with its conservative slant (or as Cornell West puts it, its "allegiance to the corporate structure of greed in America"), you must go to the academic sources, the smaller presses and special journals in print, or the Internet.  In short whether you are Republican or Democrat (or neither), whether you are politically or morally right-wing or left-wing or centrist (or none of the above), it's not hard to see that the news shows present information about politics and morality according to the bias of the newscaster or station owner who controls what gets reported, when it gets reported, where it gets reported, and how it gets reported and interpreted.

The news "camera" captures an event in a few snippets of words and images.  The news reporter intends or pretends to be engaged in a search for truth and a reporting of fact.  At key moments in an interview or "report" session, graphic displays will cut in and out to verify or illustrate the point being made.  But in many cases, the news reporter is merely a reader—or worse, another pundit, without credentials, disseminating opinion and calling it fact, presenting invective or innuendo and calling it logic or evidence (this is particularly true of the new tabloid news station, Fox).

In any case, what we encounter and experience is news that is not a record of reality itself, but a record of mediated (i.e. manipulated) reality.  Our sense of the relative authenticity of this mediated experience is a function of verbal, auditory, and visual content and technique.

Take the infamous videotaped deposition of President Clinton.  It took little time to send it out to the television stations, and less time for them to run it in full or in snippets.  And what did many of us do?   Eyes locked on our television screens, we listened to the story, a kind of dramatic monologue (we saw only President Clinton, but we heard the questions of his interrogators as well as his responses to their questions).  Some of us took in the whole thing—all four hours of it.  Four hours of very long takes, medium shots, eye-level shots, no manipulating angles, camera unmoving—the camera eye functioning for us as a metaphor for just "being there," face to face with a human being who just happens to be a lawyer, who happens to be the President of the United States, who happens to be the recipient of a relentless cascade of invasive and personal questions that would make many of us blush.  We see a man caught with his pants down (literally) trying to pull them back on again and maintain his dignity.  It is very difficult to sit there face to face with the man and not feel his pain.

It's on videotape, meaning we can see it again and again.   (Some of it we saw again and again during the televised parts of the Senate Impeachment Trial.)  There he is before us again, President Clinton, answering the same questions over and over.  We see a political person we may like or dislike for political or moral reasons, but we cannot escape seeing the human being who happens to be a politician.  The man himself, the mere man, trying to answer questions in his own way.  Is it the skill of the performer himself that captures our hearts?  Is it the length of the takes and the realist photography and mise-en-scène that make us feel the authenticity of this moment in a man's life as an authentic moment in our lives too?   If we listen to a man in a room for four hours, we cannot walk away without a new sense of his personhood and his dignity.

This is the power of the medium when it exploits the techniques of the realist; it makes us feel the  intimacy and veracity of the filmed situation.  In the four-hour video, there is minimal editing—cutting away only to allow for breaks in the four-hour interrogation.  This is a realist technique.   It shows us a continuous action.  The longer the take is held, the more we sense the reality of time passing, and the more we come to "know" the person being filmed. 

A formalist would tell the story by manipulating camera shots, angles, movement, and by "cutting up" the film, using shorter takes so that the sequence could be altered and reconstructed in the editing room. Such manipulation of the film materials to convey a particular opinion or feeling is the mark of formalism in photography, mise-en-scène, movement, and editing.  This is the usual technique on news programs, which specialize in sound bites and fairly rapid jump cutting—and the requisite techniques of the House of Representatives' managers and White House lawyers arguing their separate cases for truth. 

The realist, on the other hand, treats the camera as a neutral recorder, and allows the story to unfold as if in real time and space, focusing on the real human being there in front of the camera eye, the man, the mere man capable of telling his own story and capable of evoking genuine emotions.

For the realist, and for this four-hour videotape of President Clinton, film time and our actual time begin to match up—and that helps us to feel the veracity of the experience, the personhood of the one telling the story.   Indeed, many people anticipating (even desiring) a negative experience of President Clinton ended up feeling empathy for him.  When we are provided with that much continuous, matching time, on an eye-level with a person being filmed, we feel they have opened up a part of their lives to us, that we in turn have given them a part of ours.  As a result, a friendship offer has been given and received (only friends share their secrets, don't they?)—and if not friendship, then an appeal to our sympathies, a request for our help in the repair of a broken human being.   Many who viewed the four-hour videotape got closer to Bill Clinton as a human being, not playing a role, but being himself.  They may have liked or disliked that human being—but it was hard to shake the experience of his personhood and thus hard not to identify with him.  That is the effect of realism in photography, mise-en-scène, movement, and editing. 

As for formalism, you can analyze the effect of cutting away from the videotape (made on August 17, 1998) to show President Clinton making a live address to the assembled ambassadors of the United Nations on the problem of global terrorism; you can discuss the effects of cutting away momentarily from the four-hour video to show him receiving, live, a lengthy standing ovation from members of the U.N.  In analyzing the effects created by the chosen clips and juxtapositioning of shots, we come to understand that the image of Americans abroad is also created by the mass media.  Judgments about you and me are made when people from other parts of the world watch our news casters on international television.   People from Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, from South America, Canada, and the Pacific Island groups—they learn about what's important to Americans by attending to the content of the news shows we air, and by measuring the relative duration of various shots on the news. How much time is given to each story?  How many words?   How many pictures?  In what depth?  Describe and quantify the air time content, and you know what's important to Americans.

A SIDEBAR. Kathleen Hall Jamieson says, "Great discourse has always been reduced to a central phrase or central line. . . . If I say `I have a dream,' you know what I'm talking about. The great speeches historically have a statement that digests their meaning. [Today's sound bites] have almost become a parody of what the digestive speeches are meant to do. One could build a whole speech whose ultimate argument would be no new taxes, but Bush never did that. The problem is these fragments of discourse that were once rich and stood for a whole argument are now simply telegraphic moments that lack larger meaning"   (The Oregonian; 15 November, 1992; L5). If you ever get a chance to hear Jamieson speak or read her writing, you'll be glad you did. 

• Recommended Website: For more information on Kathleen Hall Jamieson, go to the Jamieson Page

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Network (U.S.A., Sidney Lumet, 1976)

"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more!"—one of the most famous lines in modern film history—comes from Network (U.S.A., Sidney Lumet, 1976), a film about the commodification of the news.  Network depicts the transformation of a news show into an entertainment program whose sole purpose is to amuse and therefore generate desire to buy products advertised both in and around the "news" stories.  The film defines news as a commodity to be created and sold for the purpose of earning ratings to keep the Network's managers in business and its owners in power and profit.  A news anchor, Howard Beale (played by the great Peter Finch, who won an Academy Award posthumously for his stellar performance) refuses to play this game.  Beale manages to shake up his audience and get them "mad as hell" so they won't "take it any more"—and then he gets used up in the end by the Network that literally kills him to pump up ratings for a terrorist-guerilla game show.  In short, the Network uses Beale as a commodity to improve their ratings. 

Beale's rant is not only against his superiors, but also against a benumbed and cowered audience sucking up television news as entertainment while corporations voracious for power and greedy for profit gain control over the lives of ordinary people.  He rants against an audience of unthinking, idle sheep for believing that TV is the truth and that their own lives are the illusions. Network shows us Beale losing his own control over his sanity; we witness his mental breakdown on the air, we are disgusted that the network bosses label it entertainment, and we are stunned that the audience goes along with the media bosses' scheme.  

As Gregory Dorr puts it in his article for DVD Journal:

The saddest character in Network. . .is the TV viewer. For them (us), Beale doesn't unleash a genuine revolution of emotion, but rather sparks a trend of "rage." His catechism becomes catch phrases, and his delusional fainting spells at the end of every broadcast are met with applause. Unlike Schumacher, who fights against the devolution of his life into a sordid "TV movie," the audience passively accepts it all like hypnotic stimulation, and just as passively moves on to the next bright light and loud noise like clapping zombies. (http://www.dvdjournal.com/reviews/network.html - not available as of 02/08/08)

In Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay, Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), who plays the corporate mogul, makes the following speech to Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the man whose battle cry against the machine had been, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"  With the intensity of an evangelist preaching fire and brimstone, Jensen delivers this speech to stop Beale's attack on the power of the corporation:

"You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petrodollars. Electrodollars. Multidollars. Reichmarks, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet.

"That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? . . .

"You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont and Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of today. . . . We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations inexorably determined by the immutable laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale."

Note:  FAYE DUNAWAY carried away the Best Actor Oscar for her performance in the film, and the Oscar for Best Writing  of a Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen was awarded to Paddy Chayefsky.  Network was also a nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editor, and Best Cinematographer of the year.  It's #66 on AFI's "Top 100 Films" list.  Note: I use the word "actor" to designate both male and female actors. 

• Recommended Website: See Tim Dirk's 100 Best for a review of the film.

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Relevance of Paddy Chayefsky's Network Today. 
 [Note: Embedded links are recommended sources of additional information.]

Network is a savage satire whose vision of the evolution of the broadcast news is uncomfortably close to the reality now of course, as it has become more and more obvious to those who monitor the media for fairness, balance, and accuracy.  Studies comparing responses of people watching all four hours of the Clinton videotape with those of people watching only the clips picked out and interpreted for them by the news stations show the effect of manipulative image gathering, editing, and editorializing on the experience of viewers and their subsequent understanding of news events and issues.  American mainstream news shows today are increasingly emotional, polemic, and commercial.  Watch the news anchor plug the station's show later in the day, or listen to the reporter plug the corporate owner's new product in the guise of a news story.  Check out a documentary that interrogates the "fair and balanced" claims of the Fox News Channel:  Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (U.S.A., Robert Greenwald, 2004).  Note the trivialization of the news at all the mainstream channels, where the antics and foibles of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears get air time that should be spent on more serious matters, such as secret deals in the highest places of power, backroom agreements that shape, and that may threaten, both our political and economic health as a representative democracy. 

An Example:  Consider the response of networks and major cable news stations to the Crandall Canyon mine disasters in August 2007.  From the first reports, the focus was on efforts to rescue the six miners buried in a collapse.  Details of these rescue efforts—along with reports on how the co-workers, friends, and family members were reacting—were repeated day after day, leaving little or no air time for reporting on the disaster record of mine companies like Murray Energy Company, much less any analysis of their political and financial backers who have fought against and violated laws that would have protected the lives of those men.  Over and over, news stations replayed statements by Richard Stickler, head of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), focused on the details of the rescue operation, leaving little or no air time to report on history of safety violations by Murray Energy Company, much less about why both Democrats and Republicans in Congress refused to accept the appointment of  Mr. Stickler as head of MSHA in 2006.  (An article in the Washington Post begins, "The Senate sent Richard Stickler' s nomination to become the top U.S. mine-safety official back to the White House twice. Widows and relatives of dead miners pleaded that he not be given the job. Stickler lacked the support of lawmakers from key mining states, and some newspaper editorials criticized him as an industry insider."  An interesting analysis can also be found at journalism.com.)  Instead, Mr. Stickler and Robert Murray, part owner of the Murray Energy Company that owns Crandall Canyon, got almost all the talking-head air time. 

Those like me, who watched the mainstream network and cable news on television, were left with with the impression that this was a natural disaster, that it was a natural earthquake that caused the collapse of the mine, because Mr. Murray kept saying "The mountain is alive."  Those like me, who checked with print and Internet sources—such as the University of Utah Seismograph Stations and the UC Berkeley Seismology Center—learned that the mine collapse actually caused the earthquake, not the other way around.  I couldn't get the whole picture from the mainstream news programs, not because they never reported anything about these things, but because these reports were edited to be secondary to the emotional story of the rescue.  I didn't get a more complete picture from a mainstream television channel until ten days after the initial mine collapse (when MSNBC reported the disaster in all its ugly detail), and it came not from a regular nightly news program but from a news commentary and entertainment program.  Times like this I wonder if young people who tell me they get their news as satire or comedy, in programs like the Daily Show with Jon Stewart or the Colbert Report, are turned off because mainstream news stations are not delivering a fair, balanced, accurate picture—have these young men and women given up hope that such a picture can be delivered as news over the mainstream airwaves? 

• Recommended, for further information and updates: The U.S. Department of Labor (mine safety and health administration - pro-management) || AFL-CIO (pro-working-class/labor)

George Gerbner, former 25-year dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer researcher on the influence of visual media on viewers' perception of the world, wrote that "who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behavior.  It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community.  Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell."  After 30 years of analysis of media content and viewing habits, he concluded that the higher the number of hours watching the conventional highly violent media, a person has a "heightened sense of living in a 'mean world' of violence and danger.  Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard postures. . . .  They may accept and even welcom repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities.  That is the deeper problem of violence-laden" television and film" (Obituary article by Myrna Oliver, Los Angeles Times, 29 December 2005, B8).

Chayefsky's film is even more relevant today than when it was released because now only a handful of for-profit corporations own licenses to control the airways that belong to all the people, so the information being disseminated becomes narrower and narrower in scope and more and more corporatist in ideology.  Have we sold out to the corporate ideology of consumerism, as Chayefsky's Network suggested we could?  Or are we just waiting for our cue: Fade in?  Fade out?  Jump cut? Dissolve?  Wipe?

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What's all this got to do with film editing? 

A great deal.  News programs may not even get the whole story to begin with because the news directors can't or don't hire enough investigative reporters to get it right and write it fairly and accurately. Good journalism is difficult, time-consuming, expensive; and in a corporation where profits are valued above all else, news staff are expendable.  Alternatively, the information is there; but the news director (or some higher up) cuts it from the broadcast—so some information, sometimes vital information, is edited out of the script before it even becomes useable footage for the program.  In that respect, it's all about the editing—what goes in, how much goes in, what gets cut, how much gets cut, and what images, words, and other sounds are juxtaposed.   (Check out this You-Tube expose, "Fox Edits a Democrat To Make Him Look Worse" or this one "Fox News Bias Is Hilarious").

So what is "real" given the way editing techniques can manipulate what we see and hear on screen, especially now since the advances in the technology of digital editing?  In early August 2008, we all ooohed and aaaahed at the remarkable fireworks display over the Bird's Nest in Beijing, China, during the televised presentation of the beautiful and amazing opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics.  Only later was it revealed that part of the display was a trick of digital editing; and what a remarkable feat of editing that was: the special effects were so seamlessly inserted into the spectacle that they looked real!  That still is something to oooh and aaah over, no?

Here's the point:  Whether it's a news program we view as a regular source of information or it's a film or television program we have just seen for our edification or entertainment, we need to realize that the editing is a primary shaper of our understanding about what is real and what is not, what is true and what is not, what is important and what is not.

Get out your handkerchiefs and stand by.  Film at 11. . . .

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Recommended: More Websites and information about Media Ownership:

• Who's telling the truth?  Should we use Wikipedia?  See Steven Colbert on Wikiality (July 2006 video ~4 mins).  Or Steven Colbert on Wikilobbying (Jan. 2007 video ~3 mins)
• For links to good film editing sites, see Editing Resources. 
• See also a listing of Films with Great Editing.
• Here's a listing of "recommended sites" in this Weblecture: AFL-CIO and The U.S. Department of Labor | Eisenstein's Potemkin | In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing by Walter Murch | JFK by Roger Ebert | Jamieson Page | Oliver Stone at BAFTA, about JFK |  Oliver Stone  Vietnam and movies |   Tim Dirk's 100 Best on the movie Network
• In this week's forum, you have a recommendation to this link, which I highly recommend if you want clips from recent films analyzed by a working film director/editor: How Does Oscar Award Best Editing
• See the "Note on Media Ownership" in the box below below.

A NOTE ON MEDIA OWNERSHIP: NEWS.  Although many of us get our news via Internet these days, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press reports that the percentage of people watching TV news is up, and the amount of time they spend watching that news is also up.  Who determines what news we get on those airways?  Who's in charge of choosing and editing the information we get?  Who juxtaposes stories, edits in and out?  In other words, who tells us what is important locally, nationally, internationally?  Find the answers by identifying the ones who have bought and now own the licenses to use our public airwaves.  Who owns our news?  Major for-profit corporations.  According to the Annual Report on American Journalism, the State of the News Media 2007, completed by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the three major networks are owned by 3 major corporations:  CBS (e.g., the Evening News with Katie Couric, 60 Minutes) is owned by the CBS Corporation  (formed in a 2005 split of the Viacom Corporation, which now owns MTV and Comedy Central), which also owns 194 local affiliates and the website www.cbsnews.com ABC (e.g. World News Tonight with Charles Gibson, 20/20) is owned by the Walt Disney Company,  which also owns 65 local affiliates and the website www.abcnews.com. NBC (e.g., Nightly News with Brian Williams, Today, Meet the Press, Dateline) is owned by General Electric Corporation, which also owns 248 local affiliates and the website www.nbc.com. In December 2009, GE agreed to sell 51% of its interest in NBC to Comcast; stay tuned to the news for information on the ownership of NBC. Other major news outlets outside of radio, print media, and internet, are the cable stations.  According to the same annual report, these cable stations are also owned by major corporations: MSNBC (opinion journalism with liberal shows like Keith Obermann's Countdown and Chris Matthews' Hardball, and programs hosted by conservatives like Tucker Carlson (whose show lasted a few seasons) and Joe Scarborough, www.msnbc.com), like NBC above, is owned by General Electric Corporation (Microsoft left its co-ownership); and CNBC  is owned by General Electric Corporation. The Fox News (FBC, Fox Broadcasting Company, with programs hosted by Chris Wallace, Brit Hume, Neil Cavuto, Bill O'Reilly, Hannity, Glenn Beck—online at www.foxnews.com/), which in 2006 celebrated its 10-year anniversary, is owned by News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch is chair, and with his family owns about 38.5% of the corporation; and 7% is owned by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia).  Fox owns 241 local affiliates.  Journalism schools and ethics analysts question News Corp.'s recent $1 million contribution to the Republican Governors Association. CNN (with shows hosted by Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Larry King, www.cnn.com), a 24/7 news station , was created and owned by Ted Turner, and began its coverage with the 1991 Gulf War; it is now owned by Time Warner Corporation, and is known as the "Time Warner: Turner Broadcasting" section. A NOTE ON PUBLIC OWNERSHIP: NEWS.  The only news program in which the American public has some real ownership is Jim Lehrer's The News Hour on PBS (the Public Broadcasting System - see www.pbs.org/newshour).  Interestingly it is also the only major news program in the United States that is currently increasing the size of its news staff and increasing the amount of time and resources allocated to foreign policy and overseas coverage.  (See State of the News Media 2007.)  The biggest single source of funding for PBS, a private, non-profit media enterprise owned and operated by 348 public member stations in the U.S., is membership contributions to local stations; some funding, and regulation to ensure the public nature of the entities, comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a private non-profit corporation created by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and funded by the federal government.  PBS also produces and distributes public radio programs through National Public Radio (NPR).  A NOTE ON FOR-PROFIT CORPORATE OWNERSHIP: MOVIES.  Six major for-profit corporations also own the major movie studios.  Five of these you've seen above already: Viacom (e.g., Paramount, Dream Works), Walt Disney (e.g., Buena Vista, Walt Disney/Touchstone, Pixar, Miramax), General Electric (e.g., Universal, Focus), News Corporation (e.g., 20th Century-Fox, Fox Searchlight), and Time Warner (e.g., Warner Bros, New Line, HBO, Castle Rock).  The sixth is  Sony Corporation (e.g., Sony Pictures, Columbia Pictures, MGM/UA, TriStar).  As more and more of the movie business gets eaten up by huge corporations, it is looking like the major studios may be going the way of the dinosaur.  Comcast, which owns part of MGM, the Metro Goldwyn Mayer studio, is vying to be a major player in the movie studio business; as of March 2010, it looks like it may become the new owner (50% or more interest) of General Electric, and its studios and media ownership (NBC).

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UNIT ONE: Lesson 1: Photography | Lesson 2: Mise-en-Scene | Lesson 3: Movement | Lesson 4: Editing | Lesson 5: Sound
Video Locator | IMDb |

Created 27 July 1998.  Revised 20 August 2010
Gloria Floren, Letters Department, MiraCosta College, One Barnard Drive, Oceanside, California 92056.
Contents Copyright 1998-2010 Gloria L. Floren. All rights reserved. U.S.A.
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