“The king died, and then the queen died, is a story. The king died, and then the queen died of grief, is a plot.”

E.M. Foster

Film Editing

The Rule of Six The first thing discussed in film-school editing classes is what I’m going to call three-dimensional continuity: In shot A, a man opens a door, walks halfway across the room, and then the film cuts to the next shot, B, picking him up at that same halfway point and continuing with him the rest of the way across the room, where he sits down at his desk, or something. 

For many years, particularly in the early years of sound film, that was the rule. You struggled to preserve continuity of three-dimensional space, and it was seen as a failure of rigor or skill to violate it.9 Jumping people around in space was just not done, except, perhaps, in extreme circumstances—fights or earthquakes—where there was a lot of violent action going on. 

I actually place this three-dimensional continuity at the bottom of a list of six criteria for what makes a good cut. At the top of the list is Emotion, the thing you come to last, if at all, at film school largely because it’s the hardest thing to define and deal with. How do you want the audience to feel? If they are feeling what you want them to feel all the way through the film, you’ve done about as much as you can ever do. What they finally remember is not the editing, not the camerawork, not the performances, not even the story—it’s how they felt.

 An ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the following six criteria at once: 1) it is true to the emotion of the moment; 2) it advances the story; 3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and “right”; 4) it acknowledges what you might call “eye-trace”—the concern with the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame; 5) it respects “planarity”—the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography to two (the questions of stage-line, etc.); 6) and it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where people are in the room and in relation to one another). 

1) Emotion 51% 

2) Story 23% 

3) Rhythm 10% 

4) Eye-trace 7% 

5) Two-dimensional plane of screen 5% 

6) Three-dimensional space of action 4% 

Emotion, at the top of the list, is the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs. If you find you have to sacrifice certain of those six things to make a cut, sacrifice your way up, item by item, from the bottom. 

For instance, if you are considering a range of possible edits for a particular moment in the film, and you find that there is one cut that gives the right emotion and moves the story forward, and is rhythmically satisfying, and respects eye-trace and planarity, but it fails to preserve the continuity of three-dimensional space, then, by all means, that is the cut you should make. If none of the other edits has the right emotion, then sacrificing spatial continuity is well worth it. 

The values I put after each item are slightly tonguein-cheek, but not completely: Notice that the top two on the list (emotion and story) are worth far more than the bottom four (rhythm, eye-trace, planarity, spatial continuity), and when you come right down to it, under most circumstances, the top of the list—emotion—is worth more than all five of the things underneath it. 

And, in fact, there is a practical side to this, which is that if the emotion is right and the story is advanced in a unique, interesting way, in the right rhythm, the audience will tend to be unaware of (or unconcerned about) editorial problems with lower-order items like eye-trace, stage-line, spatial continuity, etc. The general principle seems to be that satisfying the criteria of items higher on the list tends to obscure problems with items lower on the list, but not vice-versa: For instance, getting Number 4 (eye-trace) working properly will minimize a problem with Number 5 (stageline), whereas if Number 5 (stage-line) is correct but Number 4 (eye-trace) is not taken into consideration, the cut will be unsuccessful. 

Now, in practice, you will find that those top three things on the list—emotion, story, rhythm—are extremely tightly connected. The forces that bind them together are like the bonds between the protons and neutrons in the nucleus of the atom. Those are, by far, the tightest bonds, and the forces connecting the lower three grow progressively weaker as you go down the list. 

Most of the time you will be able to satisfy all six criteria: the three-dimensional space and the twodimensional plane of the screen and the eye-trace, and the rhythm and story and emotion will all fall into place. And, of course, you should always aim for this, if possible—never accept less when more is available to you. What I’m suggesting is a list of priorities. If you have to give up something, don’t ever give up emotion before story. Don’t give up story before rhythm, don’t give up rhythm before eye-trace, don’t give up eye-trace before planarity, and don’t give up planarity before spatial continuity.

Murch, Walter. In the Blink of an Eye, 2nd Edition: A PerspectIve on Film Editing (pp. 25-27). Silman-James Press. Kindle Edition. 

Comparative study: Narrative structure Focus

Task 4: Plot a graphic for Run Lola Run

How do films arrange and structure unconventional and/non-linear narratives?

The most obvious departure of Run, Lola, Run from traditional cinematic narration is the triple repetition of a single sequence of events. Thus, its overall narrative function does not proceed along a line parallel to the narrative stream. The beginning scenes of the movie contain several devices of art house cinema. Run Lola Run subverts audience expectation of linear time and narrative structure.