Home Movies and Home Talkies (Jun 1933-May 1934)

472 HOME MOVIES & HOME TALKIES FILM EDITING The Importance of Tempo and Rhythm, with some Practical Examples By B. VIVIAN BRAUN I HAVE fairlj' often seen amateuifilms well photographed, well acted (if it is a dramatic film), occasionally even beautifully 2^iiotographed and excellently acted — but I have seldom seen an amateur film which is really brilliantly cut. And cutting (i.e., editing or movmting) is the most vital factor of film-making. A film with dull subject-matter may be made interesting and alive by careful ciitting — known, when its meaning is constriictive, and not automatic, cutting, as "montage." The first sentence of Pudovkin's excellent book. • Film Technique," recently published by George Newnes, is ' ' The foimdation of film art is editing. ' ' No truer words were ever spoken. To learn the possibilities and correct use of metric, rhythmic and other cutting requires a little experimentation. Practise experiments in cutting short and long lengths of film (any old material may .suffice) and note the different effects. Why not, for example, this : For your material, take a semi-close-up of a man laughing ; a semi-clo.se-up of a woman's face, static, motionless ; a hand (which might be a man's or a woman's) pointing a revolver ; a crumpled letter and envelope. All this means about twenty feet of film, or possibly a little more, as it is to be used for cutting and re-cutting and re-ctitting again. Thus we have : — S.C.U. : Man laughing. S.C.U. : Woman's face, static. C'.V. : Hand pointing revolver. C'.U. : A crumpled letter. Four shots in all. B\ different methods, each controlling the tempo and rhythm, these four shots, inserted in different order and in different lengths, may assume aboxit half a dozen meanings. Supposing we momited tlie images Leeds Film Arts Club. The letter (which, though it miglit mean one of a lumtlred things, means here the letter written by the man to the woman telling her ). Of course, a cruder example could hardly be imagined, but it ma\suggest the numerous different results obtainable from editing. Here is one more. Tlie scenes are inseited thus : — Letter. Woman's face. Hand with gun. Man lavighing. Gim again. Man laughing again. w ~ h, A ' <^MM%4^J ■ 1" -r^-k in the above order. The significance would be something like this : Over, shall we say. some love affair the woman is furious with the man. He doesn't care, so the woman shoots him (this scenario is not intended to be very serious). We get, as above : The man, not caring. The woman determined. Tlie shot. The Leicester A.CC. gets busy I'holo : R. T Tnisler Here the meaning suggests something like this : A letter is received with devastating contents. The woman is then seen frightened (thus, b.\cutting, we make her static face, which actually still has the same expression, assume another meaning : fear, in place of the foj'mer tlesperate determination). The man holds the gun. He laughs. Ag&in the gim. is seen. And then him laughing once more — the audience assuming that the deed is done. He has sliot the woman. Probably the reader can thinlc up another five or six meanings to be got by cutting these four shots in different order and m different lengths. It would be an excellent film exercise. Slow cutting creates calmness, (juick cutting, dynamicness. But there is more to it than that. There is our mere metric cutting [i.e., of the actual length of the pieces of film), and then there is rhythmic cutting (i.e., of the time-relation of the contents of the scenes) : e.g., two scenes — one a man walking slowly, another a motor car travelling at speed. They may each be four feet long, but because the contents of the latter are more dynamic, it will seem the shorter of the two scenes. Try this— another film exercise ! The relation of length and time in H scene may be dealt with in a liituie articled