The technique of film editing (1958)

ACTION SEQUENCES The ability of the cinema to record movement, to take the action of a story instantaneously from one place to another, remains one of its main sources of appeal. Many different styles of filmmaking have been developed around this central asset. The Western, almost as old as the cinema itself, the tough " sociological " gangster cycle of the thirties, the post-war semi-documentary police films, all with their compulsory chase endings, as well as the more sophisticated thrillers of Lang and Hitchcock, have based their appeal largely on the use of fast, exciting action scenes. Passages of movement, fighting and action are uniquely presented by the movies and remain perennially popular. In the silent cinema the development of the action picture was inextricably bound up with the development of film editing. Characteristically, the first films to employ a rudimentary editing technique were Porter's chase films. Griffith developed the device of cross-cutting and thereby gave his action scenes a further dimension — by timing the conflicting shots he was able to give now the pursuer, now the pursued, the advantage of the chase. Later, the reaction shot — usually a static image of an observer — was used to punctuate the moving shots and to produce the visual contrast which accentuates the effect of movement. All these devices of presentation have remained essentially unaltered to the present day. The use of cross-cutting gives the director a unique instrument with which to suggest physical conflict on the screen. By alternately cutting from the man chasing to the man being chased, the conflict is constantly kept in front of the audience, and the illusion of a continuous scene is preserved. Yet this very asset presents problems to the editor which are in some ways more difficult than those faced in passages of straight story-telling where each cut 69