Giannetti's Editing chapter AND non-Giannetti terms for _Rear Window_
Giannetti Ch. 6: Editing (plus non-Giannetti terms for Rear Window)
AT THE END OF THIS SET OF NOTES, YOU'LL SEE SOME NOTES THAT ARE NOT RELATED TO GIANNETTI'S EDITING CHAPTER. THOSE NOTES APPLY SPECIFICALLY TO HITCHCOCK'S Rear Window.
AS YOU'VE PROBABLY ALREADY DISCOVERED, WHEN THE GIANNETTI BOOK PUTS A WORD IN BOLDFACE TYPE, THE GLOSSARY (NEAR THE BACK OF THE BOOK) PROVIDES A DEFINITION OF THAT WORD.
"[S]hots in film tend to acquire meaning when they are juxtaposed with other shots and structured into an edited sequence [my emphasis]" (148).
(148-9) Cutting to continuity: condensing the action of a film by condensing certain actions (such as characters commuting to/from work and running errands if showing those actions in their entirety—an entire commute to work, for example—would be unnecessary and/or boring).
(149) The photo caption does a good job of explaining how editing can emphasize very different perspectives and how editing decisions (such as which shots to show and what sequence to show them in) can really change a story.
(150) The chart showing editing styles is a helpful reminder of the spectrum we've talked about before: Realism at one end, formalism at the other end, and classicism (or classical cinema or classical style) is a midpoint. See p. 4 for Giannetti's chart of styles/types of film (which also shows this spectrum).
(151) establishing shot and reestablishing shot
"[T]he shot, not the scene, was the basic unit of film construction [my emphasis]" (151). It still is. In other words, movies are built by cutting together many, many, many individual shots. Directors usually don't simply set up a scene and film it all from one perspective. If they did, watching such movies would be very much like watching a play. You wouldn't be able to see close-ups, cuts from one actor to another that emphasize a person's reactions, or interesting angles/perspectives/shots (such as pans, tracking shots, high angle shots, or low angle shots)
Classical cutting: "editing for dramatic intensity and emotional emphasis rather than for purely physical reasons" (153). Example: cutting back and forth between shots of Jeff and shots of Lisa when they're quarreling about their relationship in Rear Window. This kind of cutting/editing focuses our attention on Jeff at times, then focuses our attention on Lisa's reactions at times (and vice versa). Such shots are called reaction shots and two shots (149). When Giannetti talks about the psychological effects of such shots, he means that they make us notice the feelings and emotions of particular characters at particular times. If directors simply stuck with one master shot that showed the entire scene, watching such movies would be like watching plays. One of the advantages film has over stage drama is that film can force the audience to notice particular details that many audience members might not notice (or might notice at different times and from different angles based on where they're sitting in the theater) if they were watching a play.
Cutting for purely physical reasons means cutting simply because you need to show something you couldn't include in the previous shot or scene. If a movie has two plot lines going on at the same time (one story taking place in the mountains and one taking
place at the beach, for instance), you'd have to cut back and forth between them for physical reasons (because you couldn't show both places in one shot, and you wouldn't want the world's longest panning shot as you drove or flew the camera from one place to the other).
(159) Parallel editing and cross cutting: Think of many movie chase scenes that cut back and forth to show you the good guy racing to a location while the bad guy (already at the location) is about to do something terrible. As Giannetti points out, "Generally speaking, the greater the number of cuts within a scene, the greater its sense of speed."
(161) Using a moving camera as more lyrical and more fluid (not to mention more difficult and expensive) than cutting between different shots.
(163) "In a number of movies, Hitchcock teases the audience by not providing enough time to assimilate all the meanings of a shot" (163). In other words, sometimes Hitchcock intentionally cuts between shots a little too quickly for viewers to process everything in the shots (so viewers feel sort of rushed or unsure).
(163) Thematic montage: "Thematic montage stresses the association of ideas, irrespective of time and space." For instance, in a thematic montage that presents images of America, you might see an American flag, baseball, apple pie, a bald eagle, the monuments of Washington, D.C., New York City, and a shot of a small farm somewhere in the Midwest.
(171) Functions of editing: locale changes, time lapses, shot variety, emphasis of psychological or physical details, overviews, symbolic inserts, parallels and contrasts, associations, point-of-view shifts, simultaneity, and repetition of motifs.
(171) "Through the juxtapositions of shots, new meanings can be created. The meanings, then, are in the juxtapositions, not in one shot alone."
(172-3) Kuleshov's famous experiment: He took shots of an actor with a neutral expression, then juxtaposed them with other shots (1) a bowl of soup, or (2) a dead woman in a coffin, or (3) a little girl playing. Audience members interpreted the actor's neutral expression very differently depending on whether they saw it juxtaposed with (1), (2), or (3). This showed that, as Giannetti puts it, "In a sense, the viewer creates the emotional meanings, once the appropriate objects have been linked together by the filmmaker."
(173) Note that "Hitchcock was one of Pudovkin's most articulate champions." Remember Kuleshov's famous experiment juxtaposing the same neutral-looking face with a plate of soup, a coffin, and a little girl playing (in order to demonstrate that audience response and expectations played a big role in audience perceptions of what emotions actors were expressing onscreen—this experiment supports the idea that editing and directing [montage] is the most important factor). Hitchcock liked to direct an audience's emotional response by way of editing, cutting from shot to shot and using music rather than simply having his actors demonstrate emotional responses. Emphasizing editing/cutting/montage emphasizes the director rather than the actor. This approach to film de-emphasizes the importance of movie stars (whose performances could make or break a movie) and emphasizes the importance of directors. You could describe these styles as director-centered film versus actor-centered film. See the photo captions on pp 176-7 for details regarding Hitchcock allegedly not allowing his actors to act. Giannetti points out that "Alfred Hitchcock is widely regarded as the greatest editor in the history of the cinema [my emphasis]" (198), and the storyboards from Hitchcock's North by Northwest give us a sense of how carefully Hitchcock planned each shot of his films.
(178-86): Montage and conflict: The Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin exemplifies director Eisenstein's belief that conflict was the essence of montage (and his belief that montage was the essence of film). See pp. 175-8 for an explanation of this. –Check out this link to watch the Odessa Steps sequence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euG1y0KtP_Q (or if the link no longer works, search for Battleship Potemkin Odessa Steps on YouTube or Google Video).
(187-9) Bazin believed that formalist techniques (such as an Eisenstein-style emphasis on montage) presented a distorted and oversimplified version of reality because the editor of the film was in charge of making decisions for us (decisions about what to look at, and to a certain extent decisions about what to feel). Bazin felt that cinema should be a midpoint between the real world and the traditional art world.
(193) Technical innovation and increasing realism: sound, color, deep-focus photography, and widescreen films. "In short, technology, not critics and theorists, usually alters technique [my emphasis]."
(193-4) Deep focus and audience participation: Deep-focus shots make audience members read shots more actively. In other words, audience members have to pay attention to lots of things onscreen at the same time, whereas that's not the case in a close-up shot or a shot with very shallow focus.
(195) When the new screen shape (widescreen) appeared in the 1950s, some critics and filmmakers were concerned that it would destroy the close-up of the human face (because the height and width of the screen would be different).
(224) Good questions about a movie's editing style: "How much cutting is there and why? Are the shots highly fragmented or relatively lengthy? What is the point of the cutting in each scene? To clarify? To stimulate? To lyricize? To create suspense? To explore an idea or emotion in depth? Does the cutting seem manipulative or are we left to interpret the images on our own? . . . Is the cutting a major language system of the movie [in other words, is the cutting apparently a significant part of the movie's meaning] or does the film artist relegate cutting to a relatively minor function?" (224).
Auteur theory: Regards the auteur (the director) as author of a film (the word "auteur" is French for "author"). This is a director-centered theory that regards the director as THE creative force responsible for the movie, as if the director controlled every aspect of movie-making the way an author controls every aspect of what he or she writes on a page.
An alternative to auteur theory: De-centering or de-emphasizing the director in favor of a more collaborative or egalitarian view of film production (remembering that LOTS of people—screenwriters, costume and makeup people, cinematographers, casting directors, actors, special-effects people, etc.—contribute to the final production of a film)
The power of the gaze in cinema: Critic Laura Mulvey talks about "taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze." This is a VERY influential concept for film theorists and critics: A LOT of criticism after Mulvey picked up on this idea and applied it to other films. Note that this sounds quite voyeuristic, and remember that Rear Window deals pretty extensively with this general issue (voyeurism and the power of the gaze, including the power to solve a crime). Rear Window implicates viewers as well as Jeff (we're having a sort of voyeuristic experience along with him as we watch him watch his neighbors). Remember that Stella the nurse says we've become a nation of watchers. You can think of Rear Window as something of a metaphor of the cinema or the movie-going experience itself.
Thorwald returning the gaze (when he sees Jeff watching him) reminds us of one of the flaws in a simple assumption that the gaze is always controlling or dominating: Sometimes the gaze can get the gazer in trouble.
__________
Gender roles: You could do a lot of interesting things (in a paper, for instance) talking about how Rear Window deals with gender (society's ideas about how men or women should behave). Lisa has a career and some degree of professional influence. (Lisa not only likes fashion; she WORKS in the fashion world, and this clearly involves more than just putting on the clothes and looking good.) She offers to help Jeff out by getting him jobs doing fashion photography by using her influence and her contacts. If we overlook active elements of a woman's life in order to claim that she's just an object or a pawn of the male-dominated system, we're failing to notice something important about that woman.
This kind of thing can be true in all sorts of unexpected settings. Ask men who've dated Southern belles if the men have always felt that the men were in complete control. Chances are that plenty of the men will have noticed that it's possible for women to exert some power even in some situations that seem to confine them to fairly rigid gender roles. Someone can be sweet as pie and still have a guy wrapped around her finger, for instance. Grace Kelly's character in the movie isn't just being sweetly manipulative, of course. She's doing some awfully adventurous things and putting herself in really dangerous situations (a plot trend you can't dismiss even if you're tempted to overlook the way she often dominates the frame/screen and towers over Jeff, who wouldn't exactly be a commanding physical presence even if he didn't have a broken leg). Lisa's sexuality is also worth pointing out, especially since the film repeatedly contrasts it with Jeff's/Jimmy Stewart's trademark stammering and anxiety.
Perhaps the film (particularly the ending) demonstrates female power and individual will despite the pervasive influence of the male gaze (which we see when Lisa looks to make sure Jeff isn't watching her before she switches from reading the adventure book to reading her own magazine).