FILM STUDIES

 

History of Film Sound

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ClASSIC FILM SOUND TEXTS

Film Editing

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The film editor must know how to tell a story, be politically savvy when working with directors and studio executives, and have a calm and confident demeanor. Millions of dollars of film and the responsibility of guiding the picture through post-production and into theaters rest in the editor's hands. Scenes may have been photographed poorly and performances might have been less than inspired, but a skilled and creative editor can assemble the film so that the audience will never see these imperfections.

To better understand the editing process, imagine you are seated in a movie theater. The lights are dim and credits appear over an establishing shot of a seacoast town in Maine. The title appears on the screen: Blueberry Hill.


After the last credits evaporate, you see a long shot of a vacant summer cottage, then a medium shot of a mysterious-looking man pouring lighter fluid on the grass near the house and striking a match. The grass catches fire; the man flees. The vivid crackling of the fire dissolves into the sound of a young girl's laughter as she packs clothing into a cardboard box and sings along with her CD player.

Who created this scene? The screenwriter, director, cinematographer, actors, lighting designer, sound designer, and, finally, the film editor. Working with the director, the film editor shaped the scene into its final form. After hours and hours of reviewing the unedited film, he created this one-minute scene. The scene appears to take place in a seacoast town in Maine during an autumn afternoon. In truth, little of what the audience sees on screen occurred in Maine, and it certainly was not all filmed in one afternoon.

The actor who played the mysterious man was most likely filmed on a Hollywood set in late summer. The young girl was filmed on a different set in early fall. The establishing shot of the seaside town was filmed months earlier in California, not Maine. The song on the girl's CD and the sounds of the crackling fire were recorded in a studio. But when you see the finished scene, all of the sounds and images work together. They appear to have taken place at one time and in one place. That is the magic of film editing.

Cuts and Transitions: Assembling the Scene

Editors select sounds and images from all the film that has been shot and arrange them to make the movie. They also plan how one shot will best transition to the next. Assembling the opening scene of Blueberry Hill, the editor might choose to begin with a wide shot of the bay, focusing on the white caps and buoys that dot the water. From the shot of the grass catching fire, the editor might decide to dissolve to the girl packing clothes into a box. There are dozens of possible transitions the editor can choose, each of which will create a different feeling.

Editing often begins as soon as film has been shot. Early scenes are assembled for the producer and director to view. Occasionally, the actors will also view these early scenes. Many directors choose not to show actors these edited scenes for fear that they will affect the actors' performance. The first cut of a film, called a "rough cut," takes up to three months to complete. The final cut may take another month to finish. Sometimes the editor works alone, sometimes with the director. The sound designer and music composer join them for the final cut, adding sound effects and the musical score. When the editing is complete and the director and producer have approved the final version of the film, this final cut is sent to a negative matcher. The negative matcher makes a negative of the film that exactly matches the final cut, and the negative is then sent to a film lab where prints are created. These prints eventually end up in theaters.

In the past, editors worked with copies of negatives called "work prints" to plan a film's scenes and transitions. When an editor was satisfied with the final film, he or she would create an edit decision list, a list of each shot in the film and its length. The list would correspond to numbers, called "edge numbers," printed on the edge of the work prints. These numbers helped a negative matcher accurately copy the work print and cut the negatives.

Today most editors use computers or nonlinear digital editing systems to compile a film. This is more efficient, but for the most part, the process is the same. The work prints, complete with edge numbers, are stored in the computer. The editor arranges the work print, and then creates an edit decision list that will be passed on to the negative matcher.

Film Editing Glossary
http://www.zerocut.com/tech/film_terms.html

cut
A visual transition created in editing in which one shot is instantaneously replaced on screen by another.

continuity editing
Editing that creates action that flows smoothly across shots and scenes without jarring visual inconsistencies. Establishes a sense of story for the viewer.

cross cutting
Cutting back and forth quickly between two or more lines of action, indicating they are happening simultaneously.

dissolve
A gradual scene transition. The editor overlaps the end of one shot with the beginning of the next one.

editing
The work of selecting and joining together shots to create a finished film.

errors of continuity
Disruptions in the flow of a scene, such as a failure to match action or the placement of props across shots.

establishing shot
A shot, normally taken from a great distance or from a "bird's eye view," that establishes where the action is about to occur.

eyeline match
The matching of eyelines between two or more characters. For example, if Sam looks to the right in shot A, Jean will look to the left in shot B. This establishes a relationship of proximity and continuity.

fade
A visual transition between shots or scenes that appears on screen as a brief interval with no picture. The editor fades one shot to black and then fades in the next. Often used to indicate a change in time and place.

final cut
The finished edit of a film, approved by the director and the producer. This is what the audience sees.

iris
Visible on screen as a circle closing down over or opening up on a shot. Seldom used in contemporary film, but common during the silent era of Hollywood films.

jump cut
A cut that creates a lack of continuity by leaving out parts of the action.

matched cut
A cut joining two shots whose compositional elements match, helping to establish strong continuity of action.

montage
Scenes whose emotional impact and visual design are achieved through the editing together of many brief shots. The shower scene from Psycho is an example of montage editing.

rough cut
The editor's first pass at assembling the shots into a film, before tightening and polishing occurs.

sequence shot
A long take that extends for an entire scene or sequence. It is composed of only one shot with no editing.

shot reverse shot cutting
Usually used for conversation scenes, this technique alternates between over-the-shoulder shots showing each character speaking.

wipe
Visible on screen as a bar travelling across the frame pushing one shot off and pulling the next shot into place. Rarely used in contemporary film, but common in films from the 1930s and 1940s.

EDITING LINKS

http://www.rivalquest.com/edit/nle.html
Dimensions of Film Editing
http://classes.yale.edu/film-analysis/htmfiles/editing.htm
http://imv.au.dk/publikationer/pov/Issue_06/POV_6cnt.html

Continuity Editing
http://www.cybercollege.com/tvp050.htm

Alternatives to Continuity Editing
http://imv.au.dk/publikationer/pov/Issue_06/section_1/artc10.html

POV and Direct Address Editing in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho

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http://www-as.phy.ohiou.edu/~rouzie/569A/body/Shower.htm

Try editing the famous Psycho shower sequence by clicking on the link below


http://www.psychostudio.tv/

(Note: If you are redirected to a different web site after you click on the above link, please try accessing the web site again by this time manually typing in the web URL http://www.psychostudio.tv/  into your browser address bar. Hit the return key and the site will appear)

                                                               Alfred Hitchcock's original Shower
                                                                   Scene from the film"Psycho."


Apocalypse Now and Then A Conversation
With Editor/Sound Designer Walter Murch

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With a filmography consisting of such celebrated films as The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The English Patient, Walter Murch has worked with some of the film industry's most talented directors-and stood alongside each one as an equal collaborator in the success of these films. His careful rendering of image and sound (often simultaneously) proves his definition-and understanding-of cinema goes deep beneath the surface. He displays an unerring ability to capture each movie moment

with honesty and realism; with each gesture displaying a powerful emotion and each sound furthering the story. With eight Oscar nominations to his credit and three wins-including an unprecedented double Oscar in 1996 for editing and sound on The English Patient-no one could argue that Walter Murch is not one of the all-time great masters of his craft.


In this conversation with MM, he talks about the digital revolution that has taken over his craft, the benefits and challenges of having a dual career and how his experiences on Apocalypse came to define his career.


Jennifer Wood (MM): You just released the second edition of your classic editing book, In the Blink of an Eye. There have been a number of changes in your craft since the book's initial release in 1995, most notably the use of digital technology. Previous to 1995, what were your own experiences with digital technology?


Walter Murch (WM): I'd done The Godfather trilogy-which is all three of The Godfather films together. We did that on the Montage system, which was an analog system. It used many, many, copies of VHS tapes all controlled by a computer, but the image itself was analog. I'd done a few music videos using the Avid and I'd done a montage sequence for a film using an Avid. I'd been an interested observer of all of this since the '60s when I saw the first CMX system that was capable of doing five minutes of film at a time in black and white.


MM: But The English Patient was the first feature film you edited digitally?


WM: It actually started out on film and we switched to digital-probably the only time that ever happened-and now, obviously, nobody will ever do that again. It was quite a thing to, in the middle of shooting, switch from one system to another.


MM: You were in California doing the editing at this time. The challenges of learning of a new system coupled with the fact that you were 7,000 miles away from the director, Anthony Minghella, must have been posed a number of challenges.


WM: The learning curve was very steep, which in computer language is very good. I was up and running in a couple days-not operating at maximum efficiency, but operating. Edie Blyman, my assistant, had experience on the Avid so if I had any questions I'd just lean around the corner and ask her.


MM: This may seem like an archaic question, but as someone who's had great success editing both digitally and mechanically, what are the advantages and drawbacks to digital?


WM: As a complete system-meaning you shoot a film and 10 months later you have the film in theaters-it takes about the same time now as it did then. Our schedules haven't really changed that much. It takes a certain amount of organizational and human resources to get film into the Avid. Once it's in there and cataloged and databased, then certain parts of the editing can go much faster, but then you have to get it out at the other end and that also takes a certain amount of time. When you're editing film alone, you look at dailies and you can come right back to the room and start editing the very footage that you just looked at. And as soon as you've edited it, you can take it immediately to a screening room and look at it. In other words, there's always a lag with the Avid because the film needs to be telecined and then digitized before you can cut it. And then once having cut it, if you want to look at it in a projection room, you have to conform the film. So certain parts of the process-the part that I concern myself with-move much faster if you're working in a completely digital world. But if you look at the whole system from the outside, there isn't really that much of a gain.


Because we have to operate simultaneously in the digital world and in the analog world, we hire just as many, if not more, people. The advantage, of course, is great flexibility-in the middle of a cut you can suddenly switch from reel six to reel four and then go to reel five and jump around, You can save those versions and then create a whole other version. You can go instantly where the spirit wills you, whereas with film, once you've started on editing a reel you really have to stick to that and get it done; it doesn't make any sense to jump around. You can follow your creative impulses with digital, as there's less furniture to move around.


I was always a believer in following that little voice that whispered 'why don't you try it this way?' It just meant in the old days that I had to push furniture around to do it, and it took a little more time to file the trims and to put away all those rolls and bring in the rolls for the next reel, but I would do it. The disadvantage of digital systems, from a creative point of view, is that it is so effective at random access that it inhibits the browsing that you had to do by necessity if you were editing on a KEM or a Steenbeck. By browsing I mean putting up a 10-minute roll of film and scanning down through the roll to find something that you wanted. Invariably, when I would do that in the old days, I would find three or four other things that would flick by that would be different or in some cases better than the very thing that I was looking for.


MM: Do you think that it's a good idea, then, for those who are just starting out in the craft to learn to edit mechanically, then advance to digital?


WM: Probably not. It is a disadvantage, but there are so many other advantages to digital and the whole purpose of being young and starting a new technology is that you're going to discover things that I never knew. So if it happens that you edit a film normally, it's not a bad experience to have under your belt. On the other hand, the wind is blowing so irrevocably in the digital direction, I think you just have to be aware that the creative process should push you in directions not necessarily that you want to go but that you need to go. Doing what you want is not always the best thing. What I've done to compensate is come up with techniques such as printing a frame or two or three from every setup and mounting those on boards and putting those boards up on the walls of my room as I cut a film. In a sense, that compensates for the lack of browsing because I'm browsing with my eyes over these images always. They're always saying 'Don't forget about me.'


Eventually, we will find the digital solution to my problem. But it's a fairly deep problem because it relates to the way images are played on a computer. When you thread up a roll of film on the KEM and run at high speed, you're actually seeing every frame of the film as it goes by very fast, whereas if you ask any of the digital systems to go fast, they do it by deleting material. If you want it to go 10 times normal speed, it will show you one frame out of every 10, so you're just not seeing 90 percent of the material. It's a very different kind of experience-and not a pleasant one for me at least. That's why I don't browse so much in the digital world-it just isn't as rich an experience.

Movie analysis: The aspect of conflict in Apocalypse Now

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Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) was one of the first Hollywood films to tackle the immense subject of Vietnam, and has from its initial release (and in fact even before its release) always been controversial. Its use of violence is not particularly graphic by today's standards but it is more the ambiguity and ambivalence with


which it treats its subject matter that has aroused such strong reactions, particularly the way in which it encourages us to sympathise with the American soldiers even as they commit heinous crimes. Apocalypse Now is based, however loosely, on Joseph Conrad's famous novella Heart of Darkness (1899). It is interesting to note that both have received their share of controversy and that this controversy seems to reflect the times more than the piece of art itself. For instance, Heart of Darkness was not considered racist when it was first published, but was more widely considered so only after the African critic Achebe proclaimed Conrad a "bloody racist" (Armstrong, p. xvii) in the 1970s a decade noted for its immense cultural change. This argument was based on the way in which the story's protagonist and narrator, Marlow, speaks of the natives, undoubtedly presenting them as ignorant and backward. However, it has been just as passionately counter-argued by Paul B. Armstrong (p. xvii) that this racism is merely that of Marlow and not of Conrad, and indeed was a deliberate ploy of Conrad's to illustrate the negative effects of imperialism. Much of Heart of Darkness is based on Conrad's personal experiences in the Congo, and his horror at what he saw there. After his novella's publication, he worked closely with Roger Casement (a British diplomat and anti-colonial activist) and one of his letters to Casement clearly illustrates his views:   You cannot doubt that I form the warmest wishes for your success. It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which seventy years ago has put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds tolerates the Congo State to day. It is as if the moral clock has been put back many hours in 1903, seventy five years or so after the abolition of the slave trade (because it was cruel) there exists in Africa a Congo State, created by the act of European Powers where ruthless systematic cruelty towards the blacks is the basis of administration, and bad faith towards all other states the basis of commercial policy. (Armstrong, p. 190)   Where the central theme of Heart of Darkness (politically, at least) is that of imperialism, the central theme of Apocalypse Now must be war, and specifically the Vietnam war. Apart from the setting, the one major difference between the two is the protagonist's mission. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow does not have a mission strictly speaking. He simply goes to the Congo of his own volition (having fantasised about it in his youth) with the idea of working at an ivory trading-post. In Apocalypse Now, however, Willard is sent on a mission to kill Colonel Kurtz. This fact carries with it an inherent political weight the US Army is actively out to kill its own men, and thus the madness of the Vietnam war is there for us to see. As the film goes on it becomes apparent that this is not so black and white because, while Kurtz is operating outside the army's command and killing people mercilessly (though he proclaims there to be good reasoning behind it), the same can be said of the US Army itself. Coppola plays very ambiguously with this, with the result that at times we are made to empathise with the soldiers, and at others we question them. This effect is best demonstrated in the famous helicopter attack sequence, wherein Captain Kilgore attacks innocent Vietnamese civilians with the aim of clearing a beach to surf on. When the helicopters begin their flight, we see them flying loftily in the sky, rising from behind the trees. Slow, dreamlike music is playing and the balletic way in which the scene is shot makes them appear almost like gods or angels. This grand portrayal is intercut with (and undercut by) the short snippets of dialogue on the helicopter, as when Kilgore talks about how he prefers heavier surfboards. These naturalistic conversations, contrasted with sometimes unusual film techniques (excessive use of dissolves, for instance), serves to lend the film a deep feel of surrealism. As Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries begins to play, we as an audience get caught up with the soldiers' excitement, as of course we don't yet know how brutal they will be. It is interesting to note that Coppola chose this particular piece of music deliberately, because of its associations with Nazi Germany. Wagner was used by Hitler almost as the official musician of his regime, partly because Wagner himself showed tendencies towards anti-Semitism and other such far right views, albeit before the turn of the century so not to Hitler's extremes. From a filmic perspective, the use of Wagner with shots of helicopters is a reference to Leni Riefenstahl's  notorious biopic of Hitler (Triumph of the Will, 1935) in which a similar ploy is used to portray the Luftwaffe as glorious and almost holy.     It is clear that we are seeing this from a strictly American perspective until suddenly the music stops and we cut to the Vietnamese civilians. As they notice the helicopters approaching in the distance, we are made to empathise with them. The rest of the sequence relies on the constant shifting of perspective between the Vietnamese and the Americans for its power. As Marsha Kinder notes: "Significantly it's from this [the helicopter's] perspective that we see the first wounded American, a black man screaming in agony, and the destruction of the rescue helicopter by a grenade thrown by a young Vietnamese woman, with whom we were just sympathising. By now our sympathies are split, and we are forced to see that for an American in Vietnam there was no way of escaping the moral quicksand." (p. 19, Kinder) Although the perspective does constantly change, the story of the scene is undoubtedly told from an American point of view, in that the only characters we see are American, and the Vietnamese are just presented as victims but not in a three-dimensional way (as I shall discuss in more detail later). This is inherently problematic as it can be said that we are encouraged to empathise with the Americans to the extent that we want them to kill the Vietnamese. This is true to some degree.
But the intention is not that we as an audience come out of the sequence agreeing with the killing of innocent civilians on the contrary, it is to make us uncomfortable with having empathised with the soldiers in the first place. As Coppola says: "The most important thing I wanted to do in the making of Apocalypse Now was to create a film experience that would give its audience a sense of the horror, the madness, the sensuousness and the moral dilemma of the Vietnam war." (Kinder, p. 13) What more effective way is there of making us feel this than by putting us in the position of the American soldiers, and causing us to reflect on the madness necessary to do what they did? The ways in which Apocalypse Now differs from Heart of Darkness are interesting and at times enlightening with regards to the film's representation of conflict. There are strong references to the detective genre, without straying into film noir; as Veronica Geng observes, Willard "talks in the easy ironies, the sin-city similes, the weary, laconic, why-am-I-even-bothering-to-tel l-you language of the pulp private eye" (p. 429, Hellmann). In the opening scene, there's "a cigarette stuck to his lip, under a rotating ceiling fan [] obligatory revolver on the rumpled bedsheets. This guy is not Marlow. He is a parody maybe a self-created one of Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's L.A. private eye" (p. 429, Hellmann). These private-eye elements (most strikingly Willard's narration), once they are seen as such, transform the film into a black comedy with overtones of pulp literature (p. 430, Hellmann) in that although the events we see purport to be real, there is a certain ironic distance that allows us to put the proceedings in a different perspective. In detective films the detective is shown as being in stark contrast to the murderer, but in Heart of Darkness (and consequently Apocalypse Now) the hero recognises a part of himself within Kurtz. As Hellmann says, "while the hard-boiled formula posits an individual integrity as an alternative to a corrupt society, Conrad's novella implies a universal darkness in man" (p. 431, Hellmann). If we agree with Geng and Hellmann's view that the film is influenced by the detective genre, and that the detective genre in film form represents a kind of American ideology (ultimately corruption is defeated by justice), then it can be said that Apocalypse Now, in its subversion of the detective genre, is making a criticism of America itself. Perhaps one of the most striking points about Apocalypse Now is that all the authority figures in the film are mad to some degree or an other, and this seems to be ignored or taken for granted by the soldiers. There is the U.S. Government who started the war in the first place (and put Willard on his mission), but more obviously there are the figures of Kilgore, Willard and Kurtz. Kilgore's madness is shown from a distance; that is, we know that no normal person would kill civilians so that he is able to surf, or that they would love the smell of napalm in the morning but his madness is not shown introspectively. The effect of this is that we don't relate to him as a human being in the way that we do with Willard, and he ends up being a symbol of the U.S. Army leadership he has a strong bond with his soldiers, but he has no compassion for the Vietnamese, perceiving all of them as enemies. The madness of Willard and Kurtz, on the other hand, is shown introspectively. Through Willard's narration, we are drawn into his mind and are encouraged to put ourselves in his position.


 Although he is verging on madness to begin with, we can still relate to him because he is able for a long time to put a quite rational perspective on the proceedings. For instance, he questions the logic of killing Kurtz when Kurtz wasn't doing anything too different to what the Americans were doing, except that they were doing it "officially". In fact throughout the film he continues to question everything from the nature of his task, through the war itself, and finally Kurtz. As the film goes on, Willard finds himself understanding Kurtz more and more. Kurtz then becomes a kind of extreme version of Willard what Willard might have been had he carried his thoughts through to actuality.

The fact that we are made to empathise (to a degree) with Willard and Kurtz is in stark contrast to the representation of the Vietnamese. It can be said that the Vietnamese are shown as one-dimensional. However it is more accurate to say that they are zero-dimensional because when they are shown we don't see any personality, we simply see a natural reaction: fear, and then defence. This can be considered a problematic aspect of the film's representation of conflict, as it doesn't show the war in a completely objective manner. But it is only problematic if the audience was expecting a documentary on the Vietnam war. As soon as we see the famous opening sequence, which "dissolves all boundaries between inner and outer experience, between past, present and future," (p. 14, Kinder) it is obvious that this is not the case or the intention. What Coppola did intend, however, was a psychologically realistic portrayal of what went on in the mind of an American in Vietnam, and Willard, being halfway between a soldier and a secret agent, was perfectly placed for this. To be consistent in this exploration, it would be pointless and wrong to show the Vietnamese in an introspective or three-dimensional way, as this would undermine the very point of the film that is, we are no longer strictly seeing the American point-of-view. To show the war fully from both angles would be a task too immense even for Apocalypse Now. There can be no doubt that Apocalypse Now's representation of conflict is problematic, but it is my opinion that this was deliberate. Its constant shifting of perspective and its jarring difference between Willard's narration and his actions (we are genuinely shocked when he shoots the Vietnamese woman on the boat, yet his narration tries to maintain some semblance of sanity) leave us permanently on the edge of our moral seats. This approach causes us to imagine more vividly how we would be affected by the conflict than in a strictly objective portrayal, which would teach us more about the cultural and political aspects of the war, but concentrate less on the psychology. As a result I think a Vietnam veteran would certainly have more of a connection with this film than with the best documentary one could make.