Bartlomiej Dziadosz on the Meaning of a Cut 26 October 2018
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ON THE MEANING OF A CUT: TOWARDS A THEORY OF EDITING Bartłomiej Dziadosz A dissertation submitted to the Department of English and Humanities in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Birkbeck, University of London October 2018 Abstract I confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own and the work of other persons is appropriately acknowledged. This thesis looks at a variety of discourses about film editing in order to explore the possibility, on the one hand, of drawing connections between them, and on the other, of addressing some of their problematic aspects. Some forms of fragmentation existed from the very beginnings of the history of the moving image, and the thesis argues that forms of editorial control were executed by early exhibitors, film pioneers, writers, and directors, as well as by a fully- fledged film editor. This historical reconstruction of how the profession of editor evolved sheds light on the specific aspects of their work. Following on from that, it is proposed that models of editing fall under two broad paradigms: of montage and continuity. These are not meant to be mutually exclusive categories, but rather umbrella terms for co-existing approaches that are governed by different principles. A re-evaluation of the concept of découpage complements this perspective. It is argued that reinstituting this notion, with its many variants, can help us think separately about issues of film form normally addressed at earlier stages of production, and conceptually distinct from the tasks of an editor. Their specificity, it is suggested, can be examined more productively by honing in on a very narrow set of procedures used in editing. The spiral model of editing proposed here is an intervention that addresses a common issue with theorising editing, the fact that the scope of the activity cuts across a number of categories related to film form. Using historical, theoretical, and pragmatic lenses, the thesis offers a new elucidation of what it is we mean when we talk about editing. 1 Table of Contents List of figures 3 Introduction 4 Methodology 13 I. From fragmentation to editing Early fragmentation 16 First Cuts 29 Discontinuity of early cinema 34 The exhibitor as editor 39 The film pioneer as editor 53 The writer as editor 64 The director as editor 76 The imaginary observer 84 Classicism vs montagism 90 Editing mise-en-scène 102 Towards classical editing 111 The rise of the film editor 117 II. From cut to continuity Montage 133 Avant-garde 134 Montage of affects 141 Montage of images 159 Montage in practice 167 Découpage 179 Continuity system 198 III. From chaos to equilibrium Two paradigms 218 The spiral model of editing 220 Selecting and arranging 222 Cutting 225 Blending 225 Cultural mapping 229 2 Documentary editing 231 Digital editing 235 Finding equilibrium (the case study of An Insignificant Man) 240 Conclusion 247 Bibliography 251 Filmography 277 List of figures Fig. 1 Diagram of relationships between four actions of editing (by the author) 227 Fig. 2 Diagram of the spiral model of editing 229 Fig. 3 Diagram of the relationship between cultural schemas and editing (by the author) 235 Fig. 4 Spiral editing structure of An Insignificant Man 244 Fig. 5 Paper edit of the last sequence of An Insignificant Man 246 3 Introduction What happens when a film is being edited? I mean this question first in a technical sense. A group of shots, or nowadays, to be precise, a batch of digital files are collected. They undergo a selection. Next, they are manipulated and put into an order. These very acts transform what initially was a collection of fragments into a coherent whole. The unsorted pieces of film material cease to be individual shots and when cobbled together become scenes, beats, sequences, plots, works of art, essayistic montages, factual programmes; essentially, a film in its many forms1. This transition can be understood in many ways. Assuming that the moving images are a form of utterance, the most fundamental aspect of that process is concerned with the emergence of a structure that is intended to communicate something to a spectator.2 Yet this simple premise already suggests a direction, one of many. Are all films letters addressed to a spectator? Do all editors practice audio-visual semiotics? The question of editing touches on the very understanding of the cinematic medium. At the same time what the editor does is tangibly concrete, unavoidable and surprisingly universal. If one were to suggest the most basic definition, one could say that editing is about cutting and splicing shots in order to produce a film text.3 This (trans)formation at the mechanical level is usually followed by the creation of a narrative. The conjunction of spatiotemporal coherence and plot construction can be considered the core tenet of continuity editing, a crucial concept in many discussions of editing. However, as soon as we propose that minimal formula a few problems arise. While the ‘shot’ can be defined in purely technical terms, the ‘scene,’ to take one of the basic terms as an example, is a unit of narrative development. The former is understood intuitively by anyone who has had a camera in their hands, but only by referring to a concept of plot construction (or 1 I use the word ‘film’ as a synonym of the moving images without specifying its material basis or ontological status. It is a matter of convenience. I am aware that even as broad and tempting definition as Cavell’s ‘film is a succession of automatic world projections’ might leave out almost all of the contemporary cinema which is digital. Unless we agree with Gunning that the digital has not affected the indexical status of film at all, in which case Cavell’s definition holds true. Quoting Stan Brakhage ‘the most aesthetically hopeful definition of Film I’ve found is Bill Wees’ “Light Moving in Time.”’ (Stan Brakhage, ‘In Consideration of Aesthetics,’ Chicago Review 47/48, no. 4, no. 1 (Winter 2001 – Spring 2002): 60. 2 See Francesco Casetti, Inside the Gaze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 136. 3 ‘Editing may be thought of as the coordination of one shot with the next’ according to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. David Bordwell and kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 8th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2008), 218. 4 indeed harking back to Aristotle’s unities) can we describe what the scene is. This conceptual move towards storytelling takes us away from the physical properties of film material, whether celluloid or digital, and forces us to look to narratology for the answers to the question of editing. But at what precise moment have we made this decisive step? What exactly happened to those shots that we no longer refer to them as ‘mere’ shots but as the elements of a film narrative? And crucially: is it really necessary to invoke the theoretically charged notion of ‘narrative’ to discuss something as ubiquitous as cutting and splicing moving images? One of the threads followed in this thesis is an observation that the critical transformation of shots into a narrative (or a visual argument, or a work of art) has something to do with the dualism in the notion of editing, the split that permeates its many aspects. This dualism is clearly visible at the juncture of film’s materiality as an object and immateriality as an act of communication. In the celluloid era, ‘editor’s scissors’ could metonymically refer to the process of constructing a film, that is, they were both physical tools used in cutting and stood for cinematic storytelling, or, more often, for the intervention of a censor. An editor could leave an actor’s performance ‘on the cutting room floor’ meaning that strips of film featuring their acting were discarded from the edit which led to the actor’s vanishing from the diegesis. ‘Cutting’ and ‘the room floor’ belong to the physical realm, whereas diegesis by its very nature is a psychic entity. The latter is, therefore, constructed by the editor, for the spectator, from the material which is nothing but raw ingredients. The constructedness of that editing-induced world of a film is something usually missing from the accounts of editing that see it as one of the aspects of film form, equal to mis-en- scène, acting or lighting. But in fact, it would not be an overstatement to say that editorial decisions are the sine qua non of any sort of filmic experience in a way that is fundamentally different than the role played by other creative contributions to the film. To edit, as we are reminded by the etymology, is to make known to the world. An intimation of that central place of editing features strongly in some earlier strands of film theory. The resemblance of the two-tier structure of a filmic utterance to the binary nature of a linguistic sign has been a powerful 5 inspiration for filmolinguistics and structuralist film theory.4 Although looking for the cine-language proved to be a maddeningly arduous task (precisely where is double articulation in cinema?), if not ultimately futile, editing still seems to be an area of film theory where semiotic questions are as urgent as ever. Can we define editing as a process that produces a ‘filmic sentence’? What would be the relationship between that cutting-induced utterance and Bazinian indexicality of the cinematic image? As will be investigated in the second part of the thesis, theories influenced by semiotics were fuelled by the unsettling question of whether film was more of a symbolic than an indexical medium. While the iconicity of the cinematic sign emerged as the middle-ground compromise, editing lay in the background of these considerations.