Introduction to Film Studies

1. Introduction to Film Studies Montage

2. Editing Devices • Cheat Cut - in the continuity editing systyem, a cut which presents continuous time from shot to shot but which mismatches the position of figures or objects • The lady on the phone, the wall and the people at dinner table, Meet me in St. Louis

3. Editing Devices • Establishing shots are for identifying the context for a scene by showing the relationship between important figures and their surrounding. Generally they are filmed in long or extreme-long shot at the beginning of a scene. Vertigo

4. Editing Devices • Establishing shot not only introduces the viewer a location, but also determines the spatial relationship in it, very importantly, the axis of action for the 180° rule (system) Vertigo

5. Editing Devices • Cross-cutting – editing that alternates the shots of two or more lines of action taking place in different places but simultaneously. Multiple actions are linked and multiple characters from different shots are associated. Godfather

6. Editing Devices • Cut-in: The change of framing from distant to closer view. In Dancer in the Dark Selma and Bill are having a conversation in his car. An extreme long shot of Bill’s car cut in to the medium long shot of Bill and Selma.

7. Editing Devices • Cut-away – the interruption of a continuous action by inserting a view of something else. The cut-away shot is followed, though not always, by a cut back to the previous action. • The Odessa Steps montage Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin

8. Editing Devices • Jump Cut – editing in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from different camera positions. Through this editing, an action jumps forwards in time. It manipulates the duration of the action.

9. Duration of Time in Editing • Temporal ellipsis – jumping forward in story time by not showing what may have happened between the last action and the next. • In Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, events over a night is eliminated by the shot of the old parents waiting for a train cut to the shot of a railway station in the morning and their son in his office.

10. Duration of Time in Editing • The passage of days is eliminated by using a series of unmatched shots of holiday-makers arriving at the beach town and indicating a holiday season is approaching. • Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws

11. Duration of Time in Editing • One of the boldest graphic matches in cinema history and one of the largest temporal ellipsis. Between the shot of a bone spinning in the air and that of a space station orbiting the earth, two million years has passed in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey

12. Duration of Time in Editing • Story time (the length of time passes in the story) can be prolonged as discourse time (the length of time spent to tell the story) by adding extra shots in the process of editing. • In Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, a fight is greatly extended by including extra shots.

13. Order in Editing • Hiroshima, Mon Amour • Continuity editing typically presents the story events chronologically. The most common (acceptable) violation of this order is flashback. • A man’s hand reminds a woman of her German soldier lover who was shot dead during the war.