#filmediting

After watching the two seasons of The Bear, I realized how powerful of is the editing of this TV show.

In this week’s reading, Sergei Eisenstein explains that film making is a form of art. He also believes that “Conflict lies at the basis of every art” (Eisenstein 20). This belief of his is shown through how montages can be made of conflicting images to show different meanings. He further states, “Synthesis that evolves from the opposition between thesis and antithesis“ (Eisenstein 24). This means that ideas evolve from the interpretation of the collision of two like or unlike shots. One of the forms of montages known as dialectical montages were discussed heavily in this week’s reading, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form”. This was his term for the cutting together of conflicting images to evoke an idea from the audience. This could be found in this week’s film, “Man with a Movie Camera (1929)”, where the one of the shots showed a man cleaning his hair in a water trough while there were women combing their hair right after the salon. This scene is a prime example of what he was trying to explain, the conflict of these two highlight class difference. Had these two different shots not been paired together in a montage, the same type of idea would not have been evoked.

The Eisenstein reading detailed the idea of montage and editing as an important part of film and the conveyance of ideas. A dialectic montage is described as "an idea that derives from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another.” This film, Man with a Movie Camera, is made up almost entirely of dialectic montage. As a silent film, the viewer relies on combinations of images to gain information from the film. For example, there is a sequence of footage from a wedding procession, a funeral procession, and a birth all entertained together. Apart, these images would be strangely disjointed in the film. Together, however, they make a comment on how people celebrate life. Weddings, funerals, and births are all celebrations of life, but in very different ways. Another example is the comment on the permeating nature of war. Images of Lenin’s portrait over public buildings and signs mentioning the Five Year Plan are shown with chess players, checkers players, a person shooting a nazi-shaped target, and a person shooting down an army of glass bottles. War works its way into life when a country’s people are oppressed under such regimes, and this is fitting considering the time period this film was made. It was also pretty fun to see a tribute to Edweard Muybridge and his invention of the movie camera. His famous footage was of a galloping horse, captured in a bet to see if all four hooves leave the ground at some point in the gallop. In Man with a Movie Camera, there is footage of a racehorse galloping, and it pauses for a very short time at the point where all four of the horse’s hooves are off the ground.

In his writing, “From Film Technique” Vsevolod Pudovkin describes the different manners in which films are edited after they are shot. In his work Pudovkin specifically talks about the significance of the close-up during a sequence. As a sequence is made of multiple shots, the shot will gradually come closer to one particular character or prop and this is because the emphasis on that aspects draws the spectators attention to that detail and will likely be important to a reoccurring thematic element of part of the plot. During Shadow of the Doubt, when the family is having dinner after Charlotte “Charlie” talks to Charles “Uncle Charlie” about the crime and he starts describing life. In that scene it begins to zoom into his face more and more as he’s talking about how disgusting life and the widow’s women are. This moment in editing is important because we then understand the dissonance and resentment that Charlie really feels about life and specifically these women who are left large sums of money and do nothing. As he continues talking, all the discussion of murder and horrible women sets Charlotte off and she runs out of the house. Continuity editing is used to then show them on the streets and finally into a local bar. When Charles “Uncle Charlie” is explaining to Charlotte why she can’t talk about anything and the camera zooms in on him wringing, squeezing and tightly pulling a napkin. Then, the viewer can see his truly unleashed anger and dangerous potentially as the strangler.