The director (who just celebrated his 84th birthday!) himself has said that they were the result of economic necessity, because the film he had made was roughly two and a half hours long and the film he had been contracted to make was 90 minutes: Video is no longer available: The reasoning behind these cuts has long been the subject of debate, with many stories circulated. Breathless, edited by Godard and Cécile Decugis, made extensive use of jump cuts in a new and exciting way that provided the film with a kinetic energy: Video is no longer available: Godard's low-budget crime film, about a movie-obsessed hoodlum and his American girlfriend, was a sensation upon its release for its documentary feel and gritty aesthetic, like another French nouvelle vague (new wave) film, François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, which had, the previous year, brought world attention to the work of a small group of French filmmakers loosely grouped around the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. In continuity editing, when two people engage in an on-screen conversation and the image cuts back and forth between their two heads, we are not meant to notice. A key thing to remember about this editing is that it is usually "invisible," or not apparent to the viewer. Griffith's two films, Birth of a Nation and Intolerance established many of the conventions of so-called "continuity editing," or editing where, although there is a "cut," there is no temporal or spatial disruption. Gradually, the rules of film editing began to be codified, especially in the US, and D.W. using the cut to create an illusion, rather than for its own sake. Video is no longer available: But while this is technically a jump cut, it is not what we think of when we think of the term, as Méliès is going more for a special effect, i.e. Some of the first examples of jump cuts occurred in the work of French magician and filmmaker Georges Méliès, who is credited as the "father of the jump cut," which he discovered by accident and first used as a special effect in his 1896 film, The Vanishing Lady. Simply put, a jump cut is, "an abrupt transition, typically in a sequential clip that makes the subject appear to jump from one spot to the other, without continuity." Continuity in film and video is really an illusion, just like the essential mechanism behind film (i.e., a series of still pictures, projected at 24 frames per second to give the sensation of continual and life-like movement.) At the birth of cinema, most films were composed of one shot, and were essentially documentary, showing real life events. No doubt, you are familiar with the "jump cut," even if you didn't know its name. Crazy.) What does this have to do with the price of potatoes, you ask? Nothing, but it does have a lot to do with the history of editing in cinema, a history that goes all the way back to the 19th century and is a vital history lesson for any indie filmmaker. But yes, Virginia, there was a time when TV commercials were not edited like a Michael Bay film (there was even a time when there were there were no TV commercials, per se. To members of the so-called "MTV Generation" (roughly, those who were born/had cable/were young enough to care about Quiet Riot videos in or around 1981), nothing is off-limits when it comes to the methods and effects used in movies and TV, and the notion that there ever was such a time seems bizarre and anachronistic.
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