Chapter 11

Scenes of Style

In this chapter, I take a look at scenes of a more specialised nature or style. This chapter is divided as follows:

• 11.1 Flashbacks
• 11.2 Flashbacks—Examples
• 11.3 Dreams and Nightmares
• 11.4 Dreams and Nightmares—Examples
• 11.5 Action Sequences
• 11.6 Action Sequences—Examples
• 11.7 Montage with and without Music
• 11.8 Montage—Examples
• 11.9 Reconstructions
• 11.10 Some Exercises for You to Try

11.1 Flashbacks

A flashback is a reversal of time within a story or, more accurately, a window through which the viewer can see what has happened at a time before the story’s present. A flashback creates its new time frame only through its content and in comparison with what’s happened in the story so far. For example, if after seeing an old lady there is a cut to a young girl being addressed by the same name, the viewer can assume, with some visual evidence, that the new scene with the youngster depicts a time previous to the story’s present. This would be a flashback.

 Words and Pictures—Give the Flashback a Different Texture

Another common technique when dealing with flashbacks is to give those pictures an individual style by colouring or grading them differently from the rest of the material.

Slight mistiness, richer colours, softening around the edges, or motion-blurring are all ways of telling your audience they are looking at pictures from another time. You could even run the pictures at a slightly slower speed, if that helps and is appropriate.

 Look Back in Anger—Different Flashback Styles

To a large extent, the style of flashbacks within a film or TV screenplay is preconceived in the writing, design, or direction. The question is, what should an editor do to help this transition to the past and create the illusion of time travel?

For the most part, we are back to our old friend the split edit, but used here in a more exaggerated form. If a character in a scene suddenly becomes emotionally reflective and starts to stare into the middle distance, and you stay long enough on this character’s shot to allow children’s voices to be heard, often distanced by reverberation, then the audience will believe the character is imagining these sounds from another time. If this is followed by a cut to some children playing, with the reverberation now gone (or reduced), hey presto, we are in the past when our character was a child.

If you reverse the role of pictures and sound, this can work just as well. In this case, you’d keep present day dialogue going over flashback pictures. For example, ‘I remember when’ over obvious shots of the past and we are instantly back when the character ‘remembers when’.

11.2 Flashbacks—Examples

Here are a few famous examples of films which use flashbacks.

 Citizen Kane (1941) —A Film in Flashback

One of the most famous examples of a nonchronological flashback film is the 1941 Orson Welles film Citizen Kane, edited by Robert Wise.

The central character, Charles Foster Kane, dies at the beginning of the film, uttering the word ‘rosebud’. A group of reporters spend the rest of the film interviewing Kane’s friends and associates in an effort to discover what Kane meant by uttering this word on his deathbed. As the interviews proceed, pieces of Kane’s life unfold in flashback, but not always chronologically.

The opening is so creepy, with misty night-time shots of the decaying state of Kane’s palace of Xanadu, complete with Bernard Hermann doing his Richard Wagner impression, as we slowly become aware of the single lit room in an otherwise deserted building.

Incidentally, it also contains one of the best track-ins in film history when, right at the end, we pan and track over Kane’s vast collection of lifetime possessions, some now in huge packing crates, assembled at his palace of Xanadu. Eventually, we track in far enough to find out what Kane meant by ‘rosebud’. Rosebud is only on the screen for a few moments, but the effect it has is amazing.

 JFK (1991)—Time Jumps at Their Best

Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), edited by Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia, is another fantastic example where flashbacks are used very skilfully to tell another life story. The rhythm of the editing in and out of these flashbacks carries the whole film. Stone brought in a commercials editor, Hank Corwin, to help cut the film. To all accounts, his technique was, in some ways, completely alien to the other editors, but Stone appreciated his more stylised approach to cutting. You can certainly see his influence on the film, as the flashbacks are crafted very much in the style of a commercial, with information packed into a very short time frame. Stone also employed extensive use of flashbacks within flashbacks, thus creating a multilayer effect of plot upon plot. As Stone said in an interview:

As the film progresses, these layers are peeled away to get to the truth. Archive newsreel footage is also woven into the narrative in an amazingly skilful way, to act as another gateway to the past, a gateway through which the film passes time and time again without effort. That’s the point: flashbacks handled well should look seamless; handled badly they can look awkward and clumsy.

Also look at Stone’s later film Nixon (1995), starring Anthony Hopkins, to see another film where editing is at its best.

 The English Patient (1996)—Two Interwoven Stories

In complete contrast to JFK and Citizen Kane, I would encourage you to have a look at The English Patient (1996), directed by Anthony Minghella and edited by Walter Murch. It starred Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche.

Here, two main storylines, which are set before and during World War II, are slowly unravelled to produce a fantastic tale of love, misunderstanding, and reconciliation. The film’s present, in the last months of the war, finds Count László de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) now badly burnt from a plane crash, being cared for by his French-Canadian nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche) at a deserted Italian villa. This ‘present’, in addition to providing numerous storylines of its own, is used by director Anthony Minghella and editor Walter Murch as backdrop for a series of flashbacks into the recent life of the Count, especially concerning his love affair with Katherine Clifton (Kristen Scott Thomas). Eventually, after the film’s 40 time transitions, we understand how and why, the present has turned out the way it has. Yes, 40 time transitions, but you’d hardly notice, as the time jumps are handled with such variety, style, and delicacy.

The flashbacks occur mostly on cuts, usually with a music cue to help, but sometimes a dissolve is used to great effect. Take, for example, an aerial shot of the folded and crumpled desert landscape of North Africa visually mixing to the Count’s folded and crumpled bed sheets. In addition to the cuts and mixes, there are fade down and ups mostly with sound overlaps and all individually selected to be most appropriate for the particular transition. At one point, the sounds of the past are played over the Count’s face as he lies ill in bed, which gives the impression he is almost listening to his own memories as the next chapter of his life is revealed. It is truly a remarkable film made all the more remarkable in the cutting room.

11.3 Dreams and Nightmares

 Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares—How to Make Dream Sequences

Dream sequences, and especially nightmares, are great fun to construct because you can do what you like. Every effect in the book can be hurled at such a sequence, often being utilised in an exaggerated form. Your options here can include wild grading, resizing, rotation, defocus, distortion, reverse motion, motion judder, video howl round, in fact everything of which your software is capable. Shots can also be melded, one into another, to create fantastic distortions.

 In Your Dreams—Various Dreams and Nightmare Styles

It’s a strange fact, but you never see yourself in your own dreams. Yes, I never realised that, but it’s true, isn’t it. Because of this, many of the shots you should use to replicate dreams are POV shots. Wild camera movements (which can be wonderfully enhanced in the edit suite) can suggest the frantic movements of the dreamer’s head as he or she looks around the strange and frightening environment. Walking, running, and turning around can all be shown from the dreamer’s own perspective. However, no director would stick to only POVs, which would be too literal.

DOPs have a ball shooting this kind of material, and so should you editing it. If you are able to separate an element such as a bird, animal, or even a post-box from one picture and superimpose it on the other, you can create wonderful abstract composite images, especially if you make the relocated element absurdly large with respect to the new background.

I would be very disappointed if I wasn’t given a simultaneous ‘track and zoom’ shot to play with when constructing a dream sequence. These shots, done well, will alter the perspective of a foreground subject without changing its size. This will give the impression the background is moving with respect to the subject, a must inclusion in any dream or nightmare sequence.

 I Dream of Jeannie—The Sounds of Dreams and Nightmares

It’s not only the vision you can play with in dream sequences, because the soundtrack can also be filled with extraordinary sounds which can further heighten the sense of unreality. Sounds played backwards can produce an incredible and unnerving soundscape. Just try a church bell or plucked string in reverse. Very often, it’s better to strip any actuality sound off the pictures and replace it with exaggerated and isolated effects, which can of course be treated with some of the processing effects that we have discussed already, such as reverb, EQ, or phasing. If you’ve ever seen Jacques Tati’s films, like Mon Oncle (1958) or Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953), you’ll know what I mean. Tati created exactly this type of soundscape for comedy, but you’ll more likely be asked to create weird, horror-filled worlds where loud heartbeats and deep breathing will enhance the idea of terror. All you need to do is EQ and reverb these heartbeats, and you’re well on your way.

 Room 101—Prepare Yourself!

As we have already discovered, ideas need to come thick and fast in an edit suite, where the meter is always running. This is fine when you are on your own, but it can be slightly intimidating with an audience. To avoid this scenario, it’s wise to have thought about this kind of dream sequence in advance (well, you’re doing it now by studying this book) so that you can quickly start to throw some preselected effects onto your current shots and not have to start from scratch.

Once you’ve done this preparation work, you’ll realise what you like the look of and the range of effects your editing software is capable of delivering quickly and easily.

11.4 Dream and Nightmare—Examples

Here are a few famous examples of dreams or nightmare sequences from the movies.

 Dead of Night (1945)—A Series of Spooky Tales

In this example of a nightmare sequence from the movies, sound, or at least the absence of it, plays a vital role. It comes from the film Dead of Night, made by Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios in 1945. The film, edited by Charles Hasse, with several different famous Ealing directors, is a series of mysterious tales related by most of the characters in the film, who are gathered together at a private house in the country for an afternoon tea party.

One of the stories is told by a guy who has recently been involved in a motor racing accident. He tells the story of one particular night when he was recuperating in hospital; it was quite late, and he was lying there on his bed listening to the radio. In the film we see his bedside clock showing a quarter to 10. No one else is around. He is suddenly aware that the sounds of the wireless and the noises from the street outside are getting quieter and quieter, eventually disappearing altogether. The only sound that remains is his now overloud ticking bedside clock, when suddenly even this stops abruptly. He looks at the clock, which is now showing a quarter past four.

He can’t understand what has happened. Has he been sleeping? Why is it suddenly so much later? He can’t answer this, but he is strangely aware that the room feels different, drained as it is now of any sound whatsoever. He gets out of bed, walks across to the window in a fabulously lit, slightly low-angled shot, and pulls back the curtains to reveal the scene outside, which is in broad daylight, complete with accompanying birdsong. He looks down and sees a waiting horse-drawn hearse, complete with a driver and a coffin. The driver looks up to him with the words, ‘Just room for one inside, sir’. He recoils at this invitation and turns to get back into bed, but he still cannot understand what is going on. Gradually, the sounds of normality return and he looks at his clock, which has started to tick again and whose hands are now pointing at the correct time of 10 minutes to 10.

It’s such a simple and effective example of how a filmmaker can create tension just with silence—terrific!

Incidentally, later on in the same movie there is a great nightmare sequence, when all the told stories at that tea party come together in a terrifying climax. Not bad for 1945 and one of Stephen Spielberg’s favourite films.

Sadly, this film, probably best known for the ventriloquist story which featured a young Michael Redgrave and his dummy Hugo, is not very well known outside the UK, but despite this, it is well worth a watch.

 Spellbound (1945)—That Man Again!

In Spellbound (1945), starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock hired Salvador Dali to design a set for a dream sequence.

The dream is set in a series of three-dimensional versions of typical surrealistic Dali paintings, complete with misshapen wheels, huge eyes, and harsh shadows. Many objects are wildly out of scale and in the wrong perspective, like a huge pair of scissors or enormous playing cards. Bernard Hermann’s music, using the wonderful sound of a Theremin, adds to our discomfort.

 Inception (2010)—Dreams within Dreams

There are many scenes in Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010), edited by Lee Smith and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page, which could be highlighted here, as the film is loaded with many dream sequences, sometimes dreams within dreams, all with a goodly sprinkling of impressive visual images. Nolan wisely did not rely totally on CGI, preferring to use as many in-camera tricks as he could.

 8½ (1963)—One Hell of a Traffic Jam

Love it or hate it, Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), edited by Leo Cattozzo, is acknowledged by many as one of the greatest films ever made. For some it is pretentious, for others, a work of art; however the dream sequence, which starts the movie, is tremendous.

Set in a traffic jam in a city underpass, the driver, who we will learn to be the central character Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), is stared at by the other, largely motionless drivers and passengers who are also stuck in the jam. Suddenly, Guido’s car starts to fill with steam or gas, and even his desperate attempts to try to get out have very little effect on the staring faces of the other drivers. Here, Fellini uses many imaginative shots to tell this fantastic tale, of which one of the most famous scenes is a bus full of seemingly headless passengers with their arms hanging out of the windows of the bus.

There is no point in describing the whole sequence, but it ends with Guido, now able to fly, being tethered to a rope like a kite above a beach. He unties the rope around his foot and falls from the sky. At this moment there is a smash cut and he wakes up. Quite a nightmare!

 A Matter of Life and Death (1946)—‘One Is Starved for Technicolor Up There’

A Matter of Life and Death (1946) (or Stairway to Heaven as it was called for release in the US) was written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, edited by Reginald Mills, with brilliant cinematography by Jack Cardiff, and starred David Niven, Kim Hunter, Roger Livesey, and Marius Goring. This film has a dream-like fantasy quality throughout. You are left wondering if the whole film was indeed a dream, and therefore another ‘dream within a dream’ example, perhaps.

Squadron Leader Peter Carter (David Niven), the captain of a seriously damaged Lancaster bomber, is trying to return from a wartime raid on Nazi Germany. He has little chance of survival, as the aeroplane is so badly damaged and his parachute is shot-up and useless. He talks on the plane’s radio to June (Kim Hunter), an American radio operator, and offers a ‘goodbye’ to life as he explains to her that his cause is hopeless. Strangely enough, after he bails out to what should be certain death, he finds himself on the shores of a strange land. No one is around, save for a shepherd boy sitting in the dunes playing a pipe. Suddenly an RAF Mosquito flies overhead and he realises he has truly survived, and this is not a dream. He meets his June and the story gets going.

Shot in Technicolor, well at least the scenes on earth are, the film is breath-taking in its technique, and so far ahead of its time. The photographed images are stunning throughout, a huge staircase to the ‘Other World’ (for Heaven itself was never referred to in the movie, despite the American release title, which was forced on the makers), a galaxy turning into a truly Supreme Court, a frozen table-tennis match, the list is endless.

Yes, I know the story is somewhat corny and I know the film was commissioned to help improve the strained Anglo-American relations at that time just after the war, which gets slightly overplayed towards the end of the film, but this is of no consequence.

Not only is it a best film of all time, it also, in my opinion, offers the best reason why we are all in this business.

11.5 Action Sequences

I suppose if asked what kind of scenes the majority of movie goers like the best, I would think, for the most part, they would answer action sequences.

Here are some key aspects of the contained images that might define and distinguish an action sequence:

• There is a clash of the aims of the opposing characters or groups of characters.
• The sequence contains accelerated or accentuated movement of camera and subjects.
• The sequence tends to use shots of a shorter duration compared with gentler scenes.
• Action sequences rely on the technique of cross-cutting to keep the audience in touch with all the parties involved.
• Real time is truncated as the action is usually condensed on shot changes.
• There is little time for subtlety.
• The soundscape is thick with effects and probably music.
• Camera angles, high or low, can reflect the dominance or submission of the opposing forces.
• Decreasing shot durations can increase the intensity of the action as the clash reaches its climax.
• One side of the clash usually emerges victorious.

To achieve most, if not all, of these points, the audience must already understand the goals of the opposing parties, and therefore be hugely supportive of one over the other.

You might say that training for athletic success, for example, can also be made into a perfectly good action sequence without any obvious sign of any opposition. Well, I would say that the opposition here can be regarded as the physical limitations of the human body and how, during the training process, these limitations are overcome. In this way, an action sequence is not merely limited to a clash between those wearing white hats and those wearing black.

As you can see from the previous list, the action sequence uses some techniques which we have examined before and have already applied to less action-packed sequences. I suppose the most important technique to create a good action sequence would be to keep your audience in touch with the changing fortunes of the opposing forces by cross-cutting their action. This, along with numerous POV and close-up reaction shots, will allow your audience to enjoy the excitement on offer to the full.

As you’d imagine this is quite a task, as the sequence might reflect a rollercoaster of changing fortunes before a winner is ultimately declared.

As for notable action sequences in the movies, you could look at the attack on the train in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), or the 12-minute car chase in Peter Yates’s Bullitt (1968), or the first 20 minutes of Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998). Also, while I think about Spielberg, one of his first films, Duel (1971), with Dennis Weaver, is a masterpiece of action and suspense which virtually last the whole movie. Look at the cross-cutting, the POVs, and the reaction shots, which are interspersed with Hitchcockian wide shots, and you’ll see what I mean.

Apparently, Spielberg ‘auditioned’ several trucks and chose the ugly brute he used in the film because it more resembled a menacing face. To this day, I can never look at an American truck of a similar design in the rear view mirror without getting a tinge of excitement. The power of the movies—and editing!

Incidentally, the action doesn’t always have to result in death and destruction, as there are many comedic action sequences worthy of note. Blake Edwards’s The Great Race (1965), or Ken Annakin’s Monte Carlo or Bust (1969), or Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), or David Zuker’s Naked Gun (1988), or Jay Roach’s Austin Powers (1997–2002), or Martin Brest’s Beverly Hill Cop (1984), or Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black (1997) are good examples.

An impressive list, I’m sure you’ll agree.

11.6 Action Sequence—Examples

Here come a couple of action sequence examples from the movies.

 North by Northwest (1959)—A Real-Time Action Sequence

North by Northwest (1959), directed by Alfred Hitchcock and edited by George Tomasini, which starred Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, contains the famous and brilliant crop-spraying scene. This scene actually breaks some of the rules I laid out earlier for an action sequence, but it is still packed with all the required tension of a chase.

Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) has arranged a rendezvous with the mysterious George Kaplan, and, as instructed, he has taken a bus ride to the agreed meeting place. He steps off the bus in the middle of a flat, treeless prairie wilderness.

Just take the opening high wide angle. You could have joined this shot just as the bus pulls up at the stop. But no, Hitchcock (or his editor Tomasini) joins the shot with the bus having at least 500 yards to travel down the dead straight road before it eventually stops and lets Thornhill off. By doing this, Hitchcock gives us time to take in the open, featureless location, and we see Thornhill as a mere dot compared with the flat expanse of bare fields and barren landscape, which of course acts to emphasise his isolation and vulnerability. The second shot, as Thornhill stares at the departing bus, shows us the other direction, looking just as featureless as where he came from. Sound now plays its part in Thornhill’s isolation because, after the departure of the bus, there is an arid silence, with nothing even for any wind to interact with, except the odd telegraph pole or fence post. This silence is only broken by a passing car or truck and the distant sound of a crop-dusting biplane. To reinforce the silence, no music is used at all in this sequence until after the climax, with the clear intention of emphasising the idea of isolation.

The scene is set. I talked about rule-breaking earlier, and the rule which is most clearly broken here, apart from the one about sound, is that action sequences should be fast and furious, with many little time jumps on shot changes in order to heighten the impression of speed and content. I have looked at this scene several times, and to my judgement there are NO time jumps at all throughout its length; it’s all real time.

I have already mentioned the opening shot, but a little later on, as Thornhill looks around the arid landscape, we see a series of POV shots of what he sees. Every time we return to see Thornhill, it’s on exactly the same shot as when we last saw him. What’s more, even on each of these cut backs, there is a pause before Thornhill turns and looks in a new direction. I get the impression Hitchcock is actually stretching time here and using the POVs to achieve this.

As another example of not using the technique of using shot changes to shorten time, take the sequence as a car emerges from behind a field of dried up maize. Hitchcock cuts several times between the approaching car and Thornhill, but on none of these cuts is time compressed at all. In fact, on a couple of occasions I think that the car should have been a little further forward in its progress from the field to the road. This delay adds to the threat which surely must come from something sometime soon. Eventually, the car stops and a man gets out. Is this Kaplan? No, because this proves to be a massive red herring.

The rest of the scene is superb, as the rendezvous with Kaplan turns out to be a trap when the crop-spraying plane starts to attack Thornhill. This sequence gave us one of the most iconic shots and stills in movie history, with Thornhill running for his life towards the camera with the plane just over his shoulder, coming in for yet another attempt to kill him.

The scene occupies 9½ minutes on the screen and contains 130 shots, which is very low for what we must still call an action sequence.

 The Matrix (1999)—An Almost Balletic Shootout

The Matrix (1999), directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski, edited by Zach Staenberg, and starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-Anne Moss, provides us with a shootout with a difference. I must say straight away that most gunfights leave me cold, but this is different. Yes, we have goodies and baddies and lots of bullets flying around, but in addition we have an almost balletic and choreographed fight which is stunningly assembled to produce a terrific result.

The intensity of the battle contrasts with the use of slow motion as the team cartwheels through the spray of the bullets. The soundtrack, which of course is filled with the sound of gunfire, is also populated by metallic stings accompanied by rhythmic drums, which are soon joined by a bass guitar riff. Even after all that, not a single drop of blood is spilled—strange that!

Does anybody know a person who is good at retiling a lobby?

 The Cruel Sea (1953)—A Tense Action Sequence

Convoy work in the North Atlantic during the Second War was for the most part uncomfortable and tedious. The Cruel Sea (1953), from the book by Nicholas Monserrat, captures that mood perfectly. It was directed by Charles Frend, edited by Peter Tanner, and starred Jack Hawkins and Donald Sinden. Shot in black and white and accompanied by a melancholic soundtrack with the music composed by Alan Rawsthorne, the film creates a bleak atmosphere as the ship’s company endures lengthy periods of uncomfortable boredom battling against a constant and ruthless enemy, the sea, interrupted only by rare glimpses of any human foe.

The most powerful and outstanding sequence in the film is where Captain Ericson (Jack Hawkins) is attempting to hunt down a suspected U-boat contact. The sonar signal is strong, and this convinces Sub-Lieutenant Lockhart, Ericson’s number two (Donald Sinden), that they have made contact with a real U-boat submarine. With the help of the sonar echoes, Ericson steers his ship, the Compass Rose, closer and closer. Lockhart is certain it is a definite contact, but the trouble is there are some survivors from a recently torpedoed merchant ship on the surface of the sea awaiting rescue, right above where the U-Boat has been located. The close-up of Ericson’s largely emotionless face as he weighs up the evidence is brilliantly enhanced as it is intercut with the men in the water and an increasingly confident Lockhart. Ericson decides to attack.

Tension turns to action. The director and the film’s editor use a modest variety of shots, by today’s standards, in a most remarkable way. The rushes bin contained: shots of the crew preparing to attack, some clearly questioning this decision, the men bobbing in the sea as they wait to be rescued, Lockhart operating the sonar with its insistent ping-ping-ping, the engines pounding at top speed, various sizes of Ericson’s face, his POV of the men in the water, various sizes of the ship’s bow cutting through the water, the men on the surface scattering as they realise Compass Rose is not on a rescue mission, various shots as the ship steams through the men, crew members unable to watch what is about to happen, depth charges launched and dropped into the sea, groups of the crew watching as the depth charges explode, and Ericson also watching the exploding depth charges.

The sequence ends with a crew member shouting ‘bloody murderer’ and Lockhart saying the fateful words ‘Lost contact’.

I think what is so good about the sequence is that there is no clear resolution as to whether they got the U-boat or not.

This is truly an editor’s sequence. In the three-minute scene from Ericson’s cry of ‘Attacking’ to the end, there are 70 cuts. Notice how, as the ship gets closer to the men in the water, the shots of Ericson change in size from mid-shot, to close-up, to extreme close-up. Notice also, we never see any shots of the actual explosions of the depth charges; instead, all of this is played on the faces of a disbelieving and horror-struck crew.

Once again, the sound plays an important role, with the sonar pings constantly confirming to us there is a contact, and it’s real and getting nearer. There is very little dialogue in the sequence, only the sound of the ship’s engines, the men in the water, the ship cutting through the water, and the insistent sonar pings. I admire the fact that, once the depth charges are launched, the sonar pings disappear, which, at the same time as this offers us some relief, it reinforces the terrible silent wait before the charges explode.

Also, just like the crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest, music is not used until the attack, successful or not, is over. The scene settles on a shot of a now calm sea with a few floating lifejackets and other debris on the surface of the sea where the men used to be. Only now do we hear a mournful flute coda, as the picture fades to black.

11.7 Montage with and without Music

 Danger Man—Beware, We Are in Dangerous Territory

When you create a montage, you enter a world where the editing rulebook is thrown away. This might seem the answer to all our prayers to be able to edit without rules, but beware, you are in uncharted territory with danger signs all around.

 Call My Bluff—mon-tage: n. [mon-tahzh; Fr. mawn-tazh]

A dictionary definition of a montage might say: ‘in a montage, shots rely on symbolic association between each other, rather than connecting physical action for their continuity’. Not extraordinarily helpful I think, certainly not if you’re trying to create one. In order to help these ‘symbolic associations’ along, you’ll need some sound or vision glue. Just as with dreams and nightmares, this glue can be music, some special soundscape, or some form of grading or texture applied to the pictures.

 Time of Your Life—Montages That Compress Time

Montages are hard to classify because they can either concentrate on a small element of the story or take us on a journey through time which will propel us to a later part of the story, jumping over the bits in between. In fact, this is probably the best and most common use of a montage, to move the story on, often fast-forwarding through time, allowing only glimpses at some relevant action.

 Routine Break—Montages That Act as a Break from Dialogue

Montages on the screen can act as a break from routine dialogue and, at the same time, allow more artistic freedom to cast and crew in the shooting process. A script might simply state that ‘the two kids have a great time at a local fair’. It is hard for the director and DOP, with the help of the designer, not to shoot a barrage of fairground shots comprising many slates and handing them to you with the words ‘Off you go!’

Within moments, you’re supposed to produce a BAFTA-winning montage of that fairground evening which will live in the memory long after the film itself lies unrented on the video store’s shelf.

I did say there was danger all around, didn’t I?

You have three main options to consider when you construct a dialogue-free montage, and these are:

• Shot selection.
• Shot order.
• Shot duration.

With no dialogue to help you, shot order and duration become crucial to achieve a coherent, sequential whole. My advice here is to be quite mean with the duration of the shots and, above all, never come back to a shot that tells the viewer nothing they don’t know already.

Shot duration, of course, is mainly governed by the action the shot contains, but as we have already seen, an editor should always be on the lookout for ways of shortening such action by the clever use of all the shots that are available. A close-up of the same action already shown in a wide shot will allow you to cut down the time taken by that action and, incidentally, make it more interesting visually.

If music is to ultimately augment the shots in such a sequence, my advice would be not to put it on straight away, but instead make the shots work on their own first. Once you are happy with the sequence, add the music and tweak to suit. You will be amazed at how much of it naturally fits, but do allow the music to adjust the timing of your cuts so that the fit is made even better.

 Looks Familiar—Different Picture Styles in Montages

As I have already commented, the pictures in montages are often made to look different in some way. There are many options here. You could ‘filmise’ them (removing the shot’s interlacing) or apply colour correction, slow motion, or some form of defocusing vignette. Difference can also be generated by using footage from an alternative source. It can be the case that your sporting tournament is also being covered by hand-held roving cameras, as well as the main coverage. These roving cameras, and their operators, are often given more artistic freedom to collect different looking and perhaps more interesting shots.

This alternative coverage will give you those fantastic crash zooms that, with a bit of slow motion, can look so good in compilation montages.

 The Epilogue—End of Series Montages

Some of the best examples of sequences cut to music—yes, they are montages as well—are to be seen at the end of the day, or at the end of the tournament, at big sporting events such as the Olympics, the World Cup, or the Six Nations Rugby Tournament.

Here, set against a good choice of a musical bed, and with a good selection of shots between action, quotes from the players, and the crowd’s appreciation (might they be called reaction shots?), you can create magic that will bring a tear to the eye of even the most hardened of sports fans as their favourite tournament draws to a close for yet another year.

 Top of the Pops—Pop Videos and Other Sequences Cut to Music

I have talked a little about this aspect of editing already in the chapter about music, and I have specifically discussed the production of music videos, but I wanted to go back and talk a little more about the techniques involved and give some examples of well-cut musical sequences from TV and the movies.

When cutting a sequence to a predominantly musical bed, it is too easy to settle into a cutting rhythm so closely tied to that of the music that your cutting becomes repetitive and boring.

The trick is to vary your cutting so that you follow individual beats or rhythms for a patch, then go against this by staying on an interesting shot much longer. Maybe also, take the advantage of a slower section in the music to slow your cutting rate down before bashing in a few short shots, which will wake-up an audience marvellously.

11.8 Montage—Examples

There are many examples of well-edited montages in the movies and on TV. Here are some worthy of your attention.

 Babel (2006)—Some Beautifully Edited Montages

Especially in the Tokyo section from Babel (2006), directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and edited by Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione, you’ll find some brilliantly edited montages where actuality sound has been stripped away and replaced with music. The scene where Chieko, a young, deaf, mute girl living in Tokyo, played by Rinko Kikuchi, takes drugs and heads for a night club with her new drug-dealing boyfriend is a marvellous example of a great cinematic montage.

With constant silent reminders of how Chieko herself is experiencing the night’s events, the montage takes us through her ‘high’ to ultimate disappointment and rejection as she sees one of her girlfriends making out with the boy she liked. When she leaves the nightclub and returns to those silent streets alone, the effect is incredibly poignant and sad, and it was mostly created in the editing suite rather than the camera.

 The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)—The Eiffel Tower Sequence

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) provides a great montage example. It was one of the classic Ealing comedies and starred Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway, and Sidney James. It was directed by Charles Crichton and edited by Seth Holt.

The montage occurs when our bullion-robbing heroes, Holland and Pendlebury, are in Paris and find out that their solid-gold Eiffel tower statues are now being sold by mistake to a group of English schoolgirls from a souvenir shop at the top of the Eiffel tower itself. They get most of the statues back from the girls and replace them with the correct souvenir versions, but a couple of the girls head off into a descending lift with a pair of the gold statues. There now follows a dizzy set of Vertigo-like shots as Holland and Pendlebury run down the huge number of steps of an emergency access spiral staircase to beat the lift to the ground in order to get the statues back. The choice and variety of shots used here, as they get drunk and dizzy from spinning around and around, makes for a very funny montage. They emerge at the bottom, unable to stop spinning, just in time to see the girls with their statues get into a car and drive off.

 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969)—The Journey to Jupiter

Another great example of filmic montage is the sequence Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1969. This is truly montage at its best.

Starting off in a relatively simple narrative form of shooting, a series of approaching and passing colourful light shapes starts to disorientate us as they are intercut with our hero, Dave, in his spacecraft. Reflections of these lights on his helmet show us that this is what he is experiencing. The glue for the montage is György Ligeti’s music, starting with a chorus of voices crying out in a more and more anguished way as the images increase in intensity, thus heightening our disorientation. On his journey to infinity through alien solar systems, Dave’s image is shaken violently to imply high speeds of travel. Views of deep space are intercut with extreme close-ups of his facial features. We see his eye is highly tinted to reflect his colourful surroundings. He blinks and we see exploding nebula, blazing skies with wildly and weirdly colourful landscapes.

At the end of this 10-minute sequence there is silence; time has vanished, as cuts from POV to POV reveal that Dave is reborn.

I saw this when it came out in 1969 (I was 13) on a huge screen in proper cinemascope. It made a big impression.

The rulebook has well and truly been thrown away—but stop: this is not the time to add this particular publication to your recycling bin just yet. There are a few more old and enjoyable rules left for us to examine.

 Notting Hill (1999)—A Montage to Move the Clock Forward

Notting Hill (1999) provides a perfect example of a montage being used to move time on. The film was directed by Roger Mitchell, edited by Nick Moore, and written by my Blackadder colleague Richard Curtis. In the montage, William Thacker (Hugh Grant) walks down the Portobello Road in Notting Hill as the seasons change from summer, to autumn, to winter, through Christmas, to spring, and back to summer.

Even though we are cleverly only on one shot as far as the walking William Thacker is concerned, I would still categorise this as a montage, as the market backgrounds are clearly changing, however invisibly, if that makes any sense at all, to represent the passing year. The song ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ by Bill Withers adds perfectly to the impressively cut visuals.

 The Prisoner (1967)—One of the Great Title Sequences

I must not forget TV, and my favourite titles montage comes from The Prisoner (1967), which starred Patrick McGoohan. Here, the story of ‘how he got to the village’ is perfectly told in pictures against Ron Grainer’s compelling music and a few well-written lines of dialogue.

Everything is so right—good shots of his car driving around Westminster in London, his footsteps is sync with the music as he goes to see his boss, thunder replacing a ‘frank exchange of views’ when he resigns, his photograph ID being over-typed with a series of capital Xs, futuristic machinery then filing his ID card as ‘Resigned’, a hearse following his car back to his London home, his abduction and ultimately waking-up in a replica of his flat in the village, when the dialogue with the new Number Two begins: ‘Where am I?’…‘In the village’…and so on.

I must have seen this sequence hundreds of times, but it still thrills and sets you up perfectly for what is to come in that episode and, at the same time, introduces the new Number Two.

 Last Night of the Proms (2014)—A Fantastic Opportunity to Be Inventive

It’s not only sporting events that allow such montage opportunities. As an example, the 2014 BBC Proms closed with a fantastic highlights package which contained brave and thrilling musical edits, including some fantastic musical smash cuts, which really brought the season to a close in a most memorable way.

Given that the range of music now featured in the BBC Proms is so huge, it gave the editor here a fantastic opportunity to cut from Richard Strauss, to a 1940s swing number, to Ravel, to Cole Porter, to Sibelius, to Verdi, to John Tavener, back to Richard Strauss, to Mozart, and even a Wilfred Owen World War I poem. Clever shots of conductors and performers made this into a stunning piece of work. Again, last time I looked, the BBC still had a link to this sequence.

 ‘I Just Wanna Dance’ (2004)—My Favourite Music Compilation

For me, no holiday to Gran Canaria would be complete without a beer in my hand and several viewings of this video compilation of clips from film musicals cut to ‘I Just Wanna Dance’ from Jerry Springer the Opera, written by Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee and sung by Alison Jiear. It plays in one of the bars out there on a regular basis.

The video, which was made by Manny Patel in 2004, is a lesson in how to punctuate a music track with well-selected clips.

The line ‘things are looking bad for me’ over a pregnant Barbra Streisand from Funny Lady makes me smile every time I watch it. What makes the compilation so good is that the original film clips are cut in such a way that the characters are now dancing and singing to ‘the beat of a different drum’. This is done so skilfully that you’re almost convinced, at times, that the original performers are actually singing the new words.

11.9 Reconstructions

Either because not enough actual footage is available, or because there was none in the first place, an editor’s skills can be used to great effect when creating reconstructions.

 Crimewatch—Criminal Reconstructions

Let’s look at one specific area, commonly used on TV, and that is criminal reconstructions.

For the reconstruction of a crime, the last moments of a victim’s journey are often reenacted to help jog people’s memories as to whether they can give any more information about the actual crime to the police.

When you construct this sort of sequence, you must make it absolutely clear to the viewer at all times what is actual real-life footage and what is reconstructed. This probably means the repetitive use of captions, but it is part of broadcasting regulations (certainly in the UK) that this is made absolutely clear.

Today, with the extensive use of CCTV cameras, much of a person’s last known journey is available to the programme maker once it’s been released by any police investigation. This CCTV footage can now be intercut with new specially shot material relating to the incident. Using look-alikes, the shots of these actors are photographed in a much more stylised way than would be normal, which is mainly done to avoid seeing the actors’ faces.

Because of this, the conventional shots of facial expressions are out. Instead, the camera is made to hang back or go in close to shoot specific parts of the body like hands, feet, clothing, handbags, umbrellas, and so forth. Recent photographs of the real victim can be inserted over the action to remind us of what he or she actually looked like. Remember, you are creating a montage.

Cross-cutting scenes (like the train and the car on the level-crossing) can heighten tension as victim and criminal get closer geographically. Many filler shots are used, such as pavements passing under walking feet, railings and walls going by, or passing traffic—the list is endless. These shots are there mainly to fill time and to allow voiceovers to inform us further about the known facts of the actual incident. Added captions will also help to clearly identify time and place.

 We the Accused—A Look at Picture and Sound Techniques in Reconstructions

The different attitudes of victim and criminal can be represented by different styles of POV shots. If the criminal is high on drugs or alcohol, then their POV shots could, with some justification, be shot to reflect this. An editor can help here by treating these shots with focus variations or creating a tunnel-vision effect (if that’s what’s wanted) by distorting the edges of the frame. We are back in the territory of dreams and nightmares, and some of the treatments we applied to the POV shots there are equally applicable here.

What about sound? Well, if the crime was recent and the criminal is still on the run, then the sound, for the most part, is played very straight, so heavy breathing or rapid heartbeats would not be appropriate here. Some music can be used, but this is rare; it completely depends on the programme’s style. If the crimes were committed a few years ago and the criminal’s trial is over, then more audio embellishments, like elaborate and suspenseful soundscapes complete with music, can be used more freely.

I know this is mostly directorial stuff, but I am telling you all this so that you can understand why the item was shot the way it was.

Add some intercuts to interviews with the victim’s relatives and the investigating officers, and the reconstruction can be made to look really interesting, with the hope it will throw some light on the crime.

 Time Tunnel—Other Reconstructions

I know that in this section I have concentrated on criminal reconstructions, and I am fully aware that there are many different types of reconstruction, such as historical, social, wartime, or scientific. However, these can be filmed and put together in so many different ways, it would be impossible for me to lay out any ground rules here as to their individual construction.

I would hope that, given what you have seen and learnt up to now in this publication, you will be able to adapt such knowledge to suit.

11.10 Some Exercises for You to Try

 In Loving Memory—Different Flashback Styles

After all that chat, it’s high time for an exercise.

I’ve got a dream sequence for you to generate for yourself now in Exercise 49: Dream Seqs.

I hope you enjoy my version after you have had a go.

 The Photograph—A Closing Sequence Is Required

This next exercise, Exercise 50: Montage 1, is not quite as dramatic in nature as some of the recent examples from the movies I have just discussed, but we need to end The Photograph in a poignant and stylish way.

You have to do everything here. Choose the shots, choose the font for the credits, and make the music fit a credit duration of 45 seconds.

Your cut-down version of Music Example 5 in Exercise 47: Editing Music 1 might just help here.

 Sunday, Bloody Sunday—More on Montage

Here’s another montage to create: It’s Sunday morning and Chocolates and Champagne requires an opening montage. Your job is to make an opening title sequence, complete with graphics, to open the programme. It needs to last the duration of Ken Casey’s announcement on his radio show, which most people in this suburban setting seem to be listening to as they get on with Sunday morning chores.

Have a go at this one: Exercise 51: Montage 2.