Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1947)

260 JUNE 1947 range to attend our Gala Mid-Year Contest and dinner and view the picture entries to be exhibited by the membership. Later in the summer, on August 10. a field trip is planned under the auspices of the Club. Ace cameramen from various Hollywood studios will direct the members in picture technique. The Los Angeles Cinema Club welcomes you; if you are interested in attending the dinner or going on the field trip, or in any meeting the first Monday of each month, please write the Club's secretary. Jack Shandler. 3959 West Sixth Street, Los Angeles 5, California. Creative cutting [Continued from page 242] in the seven locales which occur previously in the film. But, in the middle of the action, she stops abruptly and looks sharply out of the frame, moving her eyes or head from left to right, as if she were following an action. Between each of these six or seven shots is cut a shot from a reverse angle of the same girl running rapidly from left to right through the opposite part of the same locale. Here the action "across the splice" is the movement — left to right — which is performed alternately by the watcher and the runner. The impression is that she is running backward through time, through all the actions which she herself has carried out, and which she can see herself still carrying out, and that she. who is carrying them out, can also see the one who runs by. The verbal description of this sequence is very awkward, but that is so because the reality created is so completely a visual one that it is almost impossible to convey in verbal terms. Not only can different periods of time be made simultaneous by such manipulations, but different orders of time can be made to seem to occur simultaneously. In the opening sequence of Ritual in Transfigured Time, there is a sequence in which one woman is winding a ball of wool as another woman holds the skein which feeds it. They are first shown sitting opposite each other, facing each other, and, after this has been established, medium close shots of each of them in profile are alternately inter-cut. However, while the woman who winds up the ball does -ii at a constant rate of normal speed (twenty four frames a second), each successive shot of the woman with the >k<-in is increasingly slow motion, the f i r1 inter-cut of her being at twenty four frames a second, the second one at about forty eight, the third at sixty four and the fourth at 128. Thus the time of one woman remains the normal order, whereas that of the other becomes increasingly slow motion; but they are made to seem, by inter-cutting, to be taking place simultaneously. Shooting and cutting cannot be approached separately without disastrous results, as any one who has brought back a large collection of odd, impro 16mm. scenes by Maya Deren * Planned to suggest different orders of time existing side by side, the sequence begins with the spatial orientation of the two girls. Its continuity is sustained by the movement of the hand, which introduces the girl entering the room and leads her, through a reverse angle, to scene three. Once this face to face position is established in normal speed, the two are never again shown together. In filming them separately, it is now possible to picture one in increasingly extended time (up to 128 frames a second), taking part in actions with the other moving through a normal time extension. vised shots from a vacation trip, and could not put them together into a film, will acknowledge. However excellent the pictorial quality of these individual shots, they simply do not come together to make a film of any appreciable form or continuity, except where several shots, accidentally, may share rhythm, direction or some other editorial relationship. One of the factors which may contribute to this state of affairs is that the exposed film is permitted to accumulate and is developed in a batch after returning home. My opinion is that, if film makers did all in their power to see what they have already shot before shooting any more, they would be able to shoot with their final cutting film in mind. I should have found it impossible to make my films during the war were it not for the fact that the Ansco monochrome film which I used was processed promptly enough for me to be able to see the rushes on one day's work before proceeding further; for, no matter how careful the paper planning, it is in the actual film that one can see precisely the rhythm of movement which must subsequently be maintained, or the directional reference which must be answered in the inter-cut. I think that it is, by now, apparent that, once cutting is understood as an organic part of the planning of a film, in the sense that one shoots to cut, the combinations which can be worked out between motion across splices, timing, spatial orientations within the frame, etc., are endless or, at least, excitingly rich. There can be no rules established to govern when and where to follow closeup with long shot or vice versa, since this cannot be thought of as a cutting problem independent of the camera work and the film as a whole. In some conditions closeup must follow closeup, as when the proximity of people is to be established who are, in actuality, separated. In other cases such procedure would not even make sense, much less tension, continuity or any other film virtue. With all such possibilities at the disposal of the film maker, it is inconceivable that the creative possibilities of editorial planning should be longer ignored. The family tries drama [Continued from page 239] herself out of her chair and along the lawn. When she used the croquet mallets as crutches, she was told to try to put most of her weight on the mallets and to hobble and not take definite steps. Our next problem was filming a letter from a physician that tells of the need of a shock. Here again we resorted to positive film for making the test shots, to determine the type of paper and the number of letters in a line. We had to make many changes in the letter before we finally filmed it on Kodachrome. It was mounted on the