Why Do Cuts Work?

• Apocalypse Now, as well as every other theatrical film, is made up of many different pieces of film joined together into a mosaic of images

• The joining of those pieces—the “cut” in American terminology—actually does seem to work, even though it represents a total and instantaneous displacement of one field of vision with another, a displacement that sometimes also entails a jump forward or backward in time as well as space

• It works, but it could easily have been otherwise since nothing in our day-to-day experience seems to prepare us for such a thing. Instead, from the moment we get up in the morning until we close our eyes at night, the visual reality we perceive is a continuous stream of linked images: In fact, for millions of years— tens, hundreds of millions of years—life on Earth has experienced the world this way. Then suddenly, at the beginning of the twentieth century, human beings were confronted with something else—edited film

• Under these circumstances, it wouldn’t have been at all surprising to find that our brains had been “wired” by evolution and experience to reject film editing. If that had been the case, then the single-shot movies of the Lumiere Brothers—or films like Hitchcock’s Rope—would have become the standard. For a number of practical (as well as artistic) reasons, it is good that it did not

• The cut:

  • The film is being “cut” twenty-four times a second
  • Each frame is a displacement from the previous one—it is just that in a continuous shot, the space/time displacement from frame to frame is small enough (twenty milliseconds) for the audience to see it as motion within a context rather than as twenty-four different contexts a second. On the other hand, when the visual displacement is great enough (as at the moment of the cut), we are forced to re-evaluate the new image in a different context: miraculously, most of the time we have no problem in doing this
  • What we do seem to have difficulty accepting is the kind of displacements that are neither subtle nor total:
  • Cutting from a full-figure master shot, for instance, to a slightly tighter shot that frames the actors from the ankles up
  • The new shot in this case is different enough to signal that something has changed, but not different enough to make us re-evaluate its context
  • The displacement of the image is neither motion nor change of context, and the collision of these two ideas produces a mental jarring—a jump— that is comparatively disturbing

• At any rate, the discovery early in this century that certain kinds of cutting “worked” led almost immediately to the discovery that films could be shot discontinuously, which was the cinematic equivalent of the discovery of flight:

  • In a practical sense, films were no longer “earthbound” in time and space
  • If we could make films only by assembling all the elements simultaneously, as in the theater, the range of possible subjects would be comparatively narrow. Instead, Discontinuity is King: It is the central fact during the production phase of filmmaking, and almost all decisions are directly related to it in one way or another— how to overcome its difficulties and/or how to best take advantage of its strengths

• Even if everything were available simultaneously, it is just very difficult to shoot long, continuous takes and have all the contributing elements work each time

• European filmmakers tend to shoot more complex master shots than the Americans, but even if you are Ingmar Bergman, there’s a limit to what you can handle:

  • Right at the end, some special effects might not work
  • Someone might forget their lines
  • Some lamps might blow a fuse

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[[The longer the take, of course, the greater the chances of a mistake[[

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• There is a considerable logistical problem of getting everything together at the same time, and then just as serious a problem in getting it all to “work” every time
• For practical reasons alone, we don’t follow the pattern of the Lumiere Brothers or of Rope
• Apart from matters of convenience, discontinuity also allows us to choose the best camera angle for each emotion and story point, which we can edit together for a cumulatively greater impact. If we were limited to a continuous stream of images, this would be difficult, and films would not be as sharp and to the point, as they are
• Cutting is more than just the convenient means by which discontinuity is rendered continuous. It is in and for itself—by the very force of its paradoxical suddenness—a positive influence in the creation of a film. We would want to cut even if discontinuity were not of such great practical value

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[[So the central fact of all this is that cuts do work. But the question still remains: Why? It is kind of like the bumble-bee, which should not be able to fly, but does[[

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