Bibliography on Film Editing

:FR:AMES

Bibliography on Film Editing

9/11/10

Adams, B., Dorai, C., & Venkatesh, S. (2002). Finding the beat: An analysis of the rhythmic elements of motion pictures. International Journal of Image and Graphics, 2(2), 215-245. This paper presents a new study on the application of the framework of ComputationalMedia Aesthetics to the problem of automated understanding of film. Leveraging FilmGrammar as the means to closing the “semantic gap" in media analysis, we examinefilm rhythm, a powerful narrative concept used to endow structure and form to the lmcompositionally and enhance its lyrical quality experientially. The novelty of this paperlies in the specification and investigation of the rhythmic elements that are present in twocinematic devices; namely motion and editing patterns, and their potential usefulness toautomated content annotation and management systems. In our rhythm model, motionbehavior is classified as being either nonexistent, fluid or staccato for a given shot. Shot neighborhoods in movies are then grouped by proportional makeup of these motionbehavioral classes to yield seven high-level rhythmic arrangements that prove to be adeptat indicating likely scene content (e.g. dialogue or chase sequence) in our experiments.The second part of our investigation presents a computational model to detect editingpatterns as eithermetric, accelerated, decelerated or free. Details of the algorithm forthe extraction of these classes are presented, along with experimental results on realmovie data. We show with an investigation of combined rhythmic patterns that, whiledetailed content identification via rhythm types alone is not possible by virtue of thefact that film is not coded to this level in terms of rhythmic elements, analysis ofthe combined motion/editing rhythms can allow us to determine that the content haschanged and hypothesize as to why this is so. We present three such categories of changeand demonstrate their efficacy for capturing useful film elements (e.g. scene changeprecipitated by plot event), by providing data support from motion pictures.

Anderson, D. R., Fite, K., Petrovich, N., & Hirsch, J. (2006). Cortical activation while watching video montage: An fMRI study. Media Psychology, 8, 7–24. Comprehending edited film or video that depicts visual action requires complex perceptual and cognitive activities to appreciate the flow of action through space and time across sequences of shots. We hypothesized that these complex events are associated with the coordinated activities of multiple brain areas that are not activated byrandom sequences of shots. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a distributed cortical network was identified that is uniquely activated during viewing of normal video action sequences, but not by sequences of random video shots or by highly scrambled video image sequences. This cortical network includes extrastriate,inferotemporal, parietal, posterior cingulate, and frontal areas and are predominantly in the right hemisphere. Notably, though there was no activation of classical, left hemisphere language areas, there was activation in the right hemisphere homologues of left hemisphere language areas. In all anatomical areas but 1 in the identified network,there was nearby activation during the random shot sequences. This exception, activated only by normal, coherent shot sequences, was in the posterior cingulate (Brodmann area 31). The comprehension of edited visual action sequences that are typical of contemporary film and video formats appears to be based upon the coordinatedactivities of multiple brain areas that are bound together functionally in a high-level cognitive network.

Arce, E., Simmons, A. N., Stein, M. B., Winkielman, P., Hitchcock, C., & Paulus, M. P. (????). Association between individual differences in self-reported emotional resilience and the affective perception of neutral faces. Journal of Affective Disorders, 114, 286-293. Background: Resilience, i.e., the ability to cope with stress and adversity, relies heavily on judging adaptively complex situations.Judging facial emotions is a complex process of daily living that is important for evaluating the affective context of uncertainsituations, which could be related to the individual's level of resilience. We used a novel experimental paradigm to test thehypothesis that highly resilient individuals show a judgment bias towards positive emotions.Methods: 65 non-treatment seeking subjects completed a forced emotional choice task when presented with neutral faces and facesmorphed to display a range of emotional intensities across sadness, fear, and happiness.Results: Overall, neutral faces were judged more often to be sad or fearful than happy. Furthermore, high compared to low resilientindividuals showed a bias towards happiness, particularly when judging neutral faces.Limitations: This is a cross-sectional study with a non-clinical sample.Conclusions: These results support the hypothesis that resilient individuals show a bias towards positive emotions when faced withuncertain emotional expressions. This capacity may contribute to their ability to better cope with certain types of difficultsituations, especially those that are interpersonal in nature.

Austin, T. (2006). A never-ending flashback: Time, space and narrative in Anne McGuire’s Strain Andromeda The. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 4(2), 131-146. This paper revisits influential theorizations of narrative and narration in dominant film form via an exploration of video artist Anne McGuire’s ‘back-to-front’ re-edit of the virus from outer space thriller The Andromeda Strain (original 1971, re-edit 1992). In the process I both apply theories of filmic narration and point to some of their limitations. I argue that the ‘re-versioning’ of the original film derails and thus foregrounds habitual processes of spectatorship, in part by inverting the cause and effect logic of conventional narrative film. I also explore how McGuire’s experiment draws attention to significant non-narrative elements and pleasures that are present in the original version, but risk being overlooked by modes of analysis that prioritize narrational mechanisms and procedures.

Baron, C. (2007). Acting choices/filmic choices: Rethinking montage and performance. Journal of Film and Video, 59(2), ??-??. Montage has been seen as the essence of cinema for so long that revisiting that pointseems simpleminded. Yet it is worth returning to that key principle because new perspectiveson screen performance come into view when montage is understood as the selection andcombination of all cinematic elements.

Begin, P. (2006). Bunuel, Eisenstein, and the ‘Montage of Attractions’: An approach to film in theory and practice. Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 83(8), ??-??. The now abundant amount of criticism dedicated to Luis Bunuel can generally be divided into two categories: (1) treatment of his filmography; and (2) biographical criticism that is preoccupied with the director’s personality and life, particularly with his connection to the Residencia de Estudiantes from 1917 until the early 1930s, when he coincided (briefly) with Salvador Dalı´ and Federico Garcı´a Lorca, and with his affiliation to the Paris Surrealist group from 1927 up through the 1930s. Film critics naturally tend to concentrate on Bunuel’s cinema, its formal and thematic aspects,1 while Hispanists appear to be more concerned with his biography, especially as it connects to other important Spanish literary figures of the day (Alberti, Go´mez de la Serna, Lorca, Dalı´, Hinojosa, Larrea, Moreno Villa, etc.) and the Surrealist group (Breton, Ernst, Aragon, etc.).2 Rarely do these two scholarly fields overlap, although the work of Agustı´n Sa´nchez Vidal stands out as a notable exception.3 Because of this division of labour, Bunuel’s cinema is rarely studied in the light of his experiences during these formative years.

Bordwell, D. (2002). Intensified continuity: Visual style in contemporary American film. Film Quarterly, 55(3), 16-28.For many of us, today's popular American cinema is always fast, seldom cheap, and usually out of control. What comes to mind are endless remakes and sequels, gross-out comedies, overwhelming special effects, and gigantic explosions with the hero hurtling at the camera just ahead of a fireball. Today's movie, we like to say, plays out like its own coming attractions trailer. Picking up on these intuitions, some scholars suggest that U.S. studio filmmaking since 1960 or so has entered a "post-classical" period, one sharply different from the studio era.' They argue that the high- concept blockbuster, marketed in ever more diverse ways and appearing in many media platforms, has created a cinema of narrative incoherence and stylistic fragmentation.

Browne, N. (1975/1976). The spectator-in-the-text: The rhetoric of “Stagecoach.” Film Quarterly, 29(2), 26-38. The sequence from John Ford's Stagecoach shown in the accompanying stills raises the problem of accounting for the organization or images in an instance of the "classical" fiction film and of proposing the critical terms appropriate for that account The formal features of these images-the framing of shots and their sequencing, the repetition of set-ups, the position of characters, the direction of their glancescan be taken together as a complex structure and understood as a characteristic answer to the rhetorical problem of telling a story, of showing an action to a spectator. Because the significant relations have to do with seeing---both in the ways the characters "see" each other and the way those relations are shown to the spectator-and because their complexity and coherence can be considered as a matter of "point of view," I call the object of this study the "specular text."

Butte, G. (2008). Suture and the narration of subjectivity in film. Poetics Today, 29(2), ??-??. DOI 10.1215/03335372-2007-026. To begin with, the essay identifies shortcomings in classical suture theory’sapproach to film’s narration of consciousness. This approach, which has been widelyinfluential in film theory, grew out of work by Jean-Pierre Oudart, Jacques-AlainMiller, Daniel Dayan, Stephen Heath, and Kaja Silverman and emphasizes a Lacaniandrama of absence. This model of suture has also been the focus of importantcriticism by scholars like David Bordwell and Noel Carroll. My alternative paradigmof embodiment and multiple consciousnesses, what I call deep intersubjectivity,emerges from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, with contributionsfrom Oudart’s own phenomenological observations, and seeks to return the body(including its politics) to suture and to film narrative. The fundamental image drawnfrom Merleau-Ponty is the chiasmus, the film version of which is the shot/reverseshot sequence. I conclude with close readings of two moments from Michael Roemer’s1964 film about African American life, Nothing but a Man: they illustrate howsuture enables the narration of intersubjectivity in film, in its embodiments (includingthe political) from violation and humiliation to evasion, opacity, and sometimesa recuperation, even if incomplete, of community, however temporary or partial.

Castello-Branco, P. (????). Pure sensations? From abstract film to digital images. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5(1), ??-??. This article is a study of ‘film as sensation’. It provides a new approach to abstract cinema practices and demonstratesthat they include the idea of ‘pure sensation’. Therefore, abstract cinema should not be interpreted as purely structural andconceptual. The author argues that ‘film as sensation’ has been part of the essence of cinema since the very beginning. Theargument proceeds from a brief rewriting of the history of abstract cinema with a view to demonstrating how ‘film assensation’ is present in the essential moments of cinema’s history. Furthermore, it is argued that this concept of ‘film assensation’ does not correspond to an idea of cinema or visual effects as ‘pure entertainment’ but should be understood as‘critical rupture’. This idea of ‘critical rupture’ finds its theoretical justification in the concept of ‘perceptive shock’ or ‘perceptivetrauma’ from which Walter Benjamin justified the aesthetic intentions of the new-born art.

Choe, Y. (2006). The cinema of the interstice: Jean-Luc Godard’s Prenom Carmen and the power of montage. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 23, 111–127. Throughout the history of cinema, the rise of a new idea has always accompanied achallenge to redefine the methods that prevailed in the previous mode of filmmaking.Early American cinema (e.g., Blache, Porter and Griffith) was able to pave the way foran organic presentation of narrative by innovative camerawork and editing techniquesfrom the earliest stage of cinema. Sergei Eisenstein advocated dialectical montage whilecriticizing directly what Griffith accomplished with parallel editing and close-up. TheItalian neo-realist group (e.g., De Sica and Rossellini) approached cinema as a transparentWindowto the ordinaryworld, and in doing so, they avoided the conventional mise-en-sc`eneof their predecessors. The French nouvelle vague group challenged traditional cameraworkby bringing the hand-held camera to the street, and thereby tried to break with the illusionof reality in traditional realism. All these efforts to change cinema illustrate precisely howa new idea interrogates and redefines the existing methods within a new context.

Crittenden, R. (2008). Conceiving the rhythms of silence. The Soundtrack, 1(2), ??-??. From the point of view of a film editor, it is important to consider the details of picture and sound in tandem when editing a film. What is visible and audible in the finished product necessarily obscures the work done to reach that point. However, the archaeology beneath the surface is worth investigating if only to confirm how effective or otherwise the symbiosis has been. I will refer to examples taken from both personal experience and observation of the methodology of others.

Dayan, D. (1974). The tutor-code of classical cinema. Film Quarterly, 28(1), 22-31. Semiology deals with film in two ways. On the one hand it studies the level of fiction, that is, the organization of film content. On the other hand, it studies the problem of "film language," the level of enunciation. Structuralist critics such as Barthes and the Cahiers du Cinema of "Young Mr. Lincoln" have shown that the level of fiction is organized into a language of sorts, a mythical organization through which ideology is produced and expressed. Equally important, however, and far less studied, is filmic enunciation, the system that negotiates the viewer's access to the film-the system that "speaks" the fiction. This study argues that this level is itself far from ideology-free. It does not merely convey neutrally the ideology of the fictional level. As we will see, it is built so as to mask the ideological origin and nature of cinematographic statements. Fundamentally, the enunciation system analyzed below-the system of the suture- functions as a "tutor-code." It speaks the codes on which the fiction depends. It is the necessary intermediary between them and us. The system of the suture is to classical cinema what verbal Brian Henderson collaborated in writing this article from a previous text. language is to literature. Linguistic studies stop when one reaches the level of the sentence. In the same way, the system analyzed below leads only from the shot to the cinematographic statement. Beyond the statement, the level of enunciation stops. The level of fiction begins.

Editors. (2009). The art and craft of film editing. Cineaste, 34(2), ??-??. {No Abstract}

Emmers-Sommer, T. M., Triplett, L., Pauley, P., Hanzal, A., & Rhea, D. (2005). The impact of film manipulation on men’s and women’s attitudes toward women and film editing. Sex Roles,52(9/10), ??-??. DOI: 10.1007/s11199-005-3735-5. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of film manipulation on men’s andwomen’s attitudes toward women and film editing. One hundred and seventy-four participantswere randomly assigned to one of four groups. Three groups viewed a particularmanipulation of the treatment film (i.e., uncut, mosaic-ed, or edited) The Accused, a movieabout gang rape that was based on a true story. The fourth group served as a control.As predicted, men reported significantly higher levels of traditionalism and rape mythacceptance-related attitudes at the onset of the study, whereas women reported higher levelsof empathic attitudes. Following the study, and as expected, women experienced significantlymore attitude change as a result of viewing the treatment film; men’s rape myth-relatedattitudes nonetheless continued to exceed those of women. Finally, men’s positive attitudestoward favoring editing decreased as sexual violence increased, whereas women’s pro-editingattitudes increased as sexual violence increased. The theoretical implications of the study,as well as the impact of viewing sexual violence in a more reality-based, versus a moreentertaining, forum are discussed.

Germeys, F., & d'Ydewalle, G. (2007). The psychology of film: Perceiving beyond the cut. Psychological Research, 71, 458-466. Abstract: First-order editing violations in film refer either to small displacements of the camera position or to smallchanges of the image size. Second-order editing violations follow from a reversal of the camera position (reversed-angle shot), leading to a change of the left–right position of the main actors (or objects) and a complete change of the background. With third-order editing violations, the linear sequence of actions in the narrativestory is not obeyed. The present experiment focuses on the eye movements following a new shot with or withouta reversed-angle camera position. The findings minimize the importance of editing rules which require perceptuallysmooth transitions between shots; there is also no evidence that changes in the left–right orientation ofobjects in the scene disturb the visual processing of successive shots. The observed eye movements are dueeither to the redirecting of attention to the most informative part on the scene or to attention shifts by motiontransients in the shot. There is almost no evidence for confusion and/or for activities to restore the spatialarrangement following the reversal of the left–right positions.

Grant, B. K. (1976). Whitman and Eisenstein. Literature/FilmQuarterly, 4(3), 264-270. {No Abstract}

Harvard Suture PowerPoint. Source unknown.

Isenhour, J.P. (1975). The effects of context and orderin film editing. AVCR, 23(1), ??-??. A motion picture is composed of thousands of shots. Duringthe process of editing, each of these shots is placed in a specificcontext and order. Traditionally film theorists have believedthat the meaning of a given motion picture shot isdetermined to some extent by its context and order, but untilrecently no one could prove it. Now there is sufficient evidenceto verify this well traveled theory, and more importantly,there is some evidence suggesting how and why shotmeanings change with arrangement. The purpose of thisarticle is to review and analyze these findings and place themin a unified theoretical framework. The discussion is limitedto the simple juxtaposition of two silent film shots joined by a cut.

Kadlec, D. (2004). Early Soviet cinema and American poetry. Modernism/Modernity, 11(2), 299-331. Since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians havebeen rediscovering the American 1930s, particularly those artisticand cultural movements erased by conservative and even anticommunistforces during the years of the Cold War. Art criticshave begun to take more seriously the effects of constructivismand Russian futurism upon avant-garde movements in WesternEurope and in America; and literary scholars have begun to notice the imprint in the 1930s of Soviet genres such as that ofthe worker correspondent—factory-floor testimonials that, duringthe 1920s and 1930s, surfaced repeatedly in Soviet theater productions, in newspaper columns, and in newsreels as well.Worker testimonials could be either spoken or written, but mostof the examples that appeared in the U.S. in the early 1930swere literary ones, letters and poems, that filled out the pages ofradical journals like The New Masses.