CHAPTER 16 | Metaphors to Cinema

Introduction

The fine arts have “traditionally” been divided into painting, sculpture, and architecture. But these classifications are the exception in the long span of history. After the development of easel painting in the Renaissance, the L‘Ecole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in France codified these categories as a curriculum structure. These have persisted in the West ever since. But given that the impulse to create art is as old as humanity, the painting-sculpture-architecture model is a 500-year “blip” on a potentially 300,000-year-old radar screen.

Challenge to a status quo… or a return to integration?

“Modern” art expressions that challenged the Beaux-Arts status quo include such things as installation and performance art, cinema, and now “new media.” These means of expression can be termed immersive art environments because they often involve sight and sound or touch — in any event, more than one of the senses.

But these expressions constitute a cyclical return to the first modes of expression in art! At the fundamental level, what is the real difference between the cave paintings at Lascaux and an installation by Jonathan Borofsky? The only difference may be that the “cave” Borofsky painted is built by humans.

Here, we will explore one of these challenges to the not-so-longstanding Beaux-Arts tradition. “New media” and its use of the moving image finds historical roots in cinema. Cinema, in turn, develops out of photography. Photography, in turn, comes from — well, as we will see, from the standpoint of basic human proclivities, there is nothing “new” in “new media.” We are still telling our stories to prevail against the darkness. We’ve simply replaced the flicker of the campfire with that of the camera, the projector, or the monitor.

While time permits us only to highlight some critical concepts and developments along this historical path, an encyclopedic reference, the History of the Discovery of Cinema website by Paul Burns, provides a more comprehensive list of the scientific and artistic developments leading to the creation of motion pictures.

The persistence of persistence-of-vision

[Cinema] is the fixing of reality, the essence of time, a way of preserving time which allow to roll and unroll it forever. No other form of art can do that. Therefore, cinema is a mosaic made of time.

— Andrei Tarkovsky ¹

Why do we perceive movement as movement? More precisely, why do we perceive a series of static images, changing slightly from one another and projected at our eyes in very rapid succession, as containing the illusion of motion? The traditional theory taught in schools of film is known as persistence of vision, a phenomenon whereby a retinal afterimage is retained for a fraction of a second and blended with what is occurring right now. The theory is useful but was debunked by one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, Max Wertheimer, in 1912. Authors of the MediaCollege site suggests “it is thought that the illusion of continuous motion is caused by unrelated phenomena such as beta movement (the brain assuming movement between two static images when shown in quick succession).” ²  Visit Rod Munday’s The Moving Image for a comprehensive web lecture on the topic.

Even though it has been proven a myth, persistence of vision persists in otherwise respectable cinematic theory. Why? Rod Munday quotes some critics who blame sloppy scholarship. This author prefers the explanation that, as a metaphor, the idea of persistence relating to vision remains potent and useful to a motion picture artist. In any event, the phenomenon of apparent motion, whatever the cause, existed long before the movies came along.

Flipbook and thaumatrope

Small, hand-held, and user-controlled (interactive?), these devices came to popularity in the early 19th century. The flipbook, comprehensively illustrated at flipbook.info, uses beta movement to imply motion, while the thaumatrope creates the illusion of combining two images into one.

Random Motion by Ruth Hayes has some smart examples of flipbooks and thaumatropes.

Phenakistiscope and zoetrope

Slightly more complex, but building on the same phenomenon, the phenakistiscope by Joseph Plateau was a rotating disc that created the illusion of motion. It also went by the names stroboscope and zoopraxiscope.

The zoetrope turned the disc into a drum, and a variant, the praxinoscope, replaced slits with mirrors. William George Horner is credited with the invention of the zoetrope, but Wikipedia claims the “earliest elementary zoetrope was created in China around 180 AD by the inventor Ting Huan.” ³

In an interesting mash-up of old and new, digital artists are creating 3D zoetropes printed from digital models. An early example of this popular form, from 2006, is seen below.

Analogue Art Map, 3D Zoetrope, 2006

Projection and the magic lantern

The earliest idea for projection was doubtless a simple casting of hand shadows on a cave wall by the flickering fire. Imitating animals and people, a story could be told, and even sophisticated philosophical constructs could be illustrated.

Theatrical performances changing the scale of a human figure have used shadow castings for hundreds of years. The simple moving silhouette gives inspiration to the magic lantern. A precursor to the slide projector, it was a popular Victorian entertainment; some sources claim it made an appearance as early as 1650.

The Magic Lantern Society is keeping interest in this proto-cinematic technology alive today.

Building on the camera

Most of the beta movement techniques described above involved elaborate drawing or complicated viewing interaction — peering through slits or winding string. Paralleling the exploration of beta movement was the development of the camera and a means of fixing a still image permanently to a surface. The camera has a surprisingly ancient development out of a simple physical phenomenon.

All cameras, even today’s digital devices, depend on the physics of light interacting with an opening in a particular and peculiar way. This action is sometimes known as the pinhole or camera obscura effect. This effect occurs when a small hole happens or is created in the wall of an otherwise completely darkened room. If the ratios of room size and hole are correct, a stunning phenomenon occurs. The outside world appears inverted and in motion, as diagrammed in the drawing by Reinerus Gemma-Frisius, believed to be the first drawing describing the phenomenon.

The Paleolithic pinhole

Although experimentation with the pinhole effect was prevalent during the era following the Renaissance, artist Matt Gatton makes a reasonable intuitive leap in his theory concerning the observation and use of the effect as early as the Paleolithic Era. His Paleo-Camera theory, while difficult to prove, is well hypothesized in supporting materials on his website.

Gatton’s Paleo-Camera was a happy accident of physics meeting survival and provided the prehistoric tent-dweller with “magic” upside-down moving images of the outside world. One reason why Gatton believes the rock carvings he shows contain multiple lines and overlaps is that these are a record of the animals in motion beyond the crude camera-obscura tent. These carvings were an attempt to record, or fix, the image, and could therefore, according to Gatton’s theory, be photographic in ambition.

The camera obscura

The camera obscura (a Latin phrase meaning “room of darkness” or “dark room”) was refined with the addition of lenses and screens, to the degree that it became small enough to be portable. According to artist David Hockney, physicist Charles Falco, and historian Philip Steadman, artists like Jan Vermeer began using tools like the camera obscura to refine their depiction of realistic scenes.

In the case of Vermeer, the use of the camera obscura began to change the way he saw light, whether he used a portable version or the booth style hypothesized by Steadman. Natural limitations of optical devices produce such distortions as circles of confusion, which create diffused, soft-focused highlights. Vermeer seems to have adapted these phenomena in his rendition of highlights, as described in the video from the National Gallery of Art.

Fixing the image

The lush nature of realism in work like Vermeer’s suggests some artists were conceptually comfortable with a non-mechanical way of using the camera obscura, but other artists and inventors had been seeking a way to automatically capture the images found therein since its development. Along with the photochemical expert Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, it was Louis Daguerre who found the camera design breakthrough for a viable means to create the photographic process that bears his name: the daguerreotype, officially announced in 1839. Exposure times of over ten minutes did not allow for the capture of objects in motion, however.

Stopping motion…

With the discovery of faster photochemical processes, shooting a photograph in a fraction of a second became possible. This opened the door to chronophotography, the Victorian precursor to true cinematography. Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge developed techniques for creating frame-by-frame documentation of motion, typically of animals or people. Their techniques informed the kind of stop-motion techniques that are still used in animation today, despite the dominance of computer animation.

Marey’s device gives new meaning to “shooting” photographs! At 12 frames per second, it would record these instances on the same piece of film, creating images that later inspire artists like the Italian Futurists to explore motion in painting.

Eadweard Muybridge extended Marey’s explorations by recording images on separate pieces of film. Setting up an elaborate battery of cameras, trip wires, and other means of controlling exposure, Muybridge proves that a horse leaves the ground under full gallop in 1873. He later expands on this exploration at the University of Pennsylvania and develops moving pictures in his zoopraxiscope. The recording of single images provides the breakthrough necessary for cinematography.

… And starting it

While it’s beyond the scope of this document to provide a comprehensive history of cinema, some key concepts and precedents are worth highlighting here.

The earliest surviving “film” is the Roundhay Garden Scene, a technical demonstration by Louis Le Prince. It runs at 12 frames per second, about half the rate of the modern cinematography standard.

Thomas Edison and his company provided us with the second U.S. copyrighted film, Fred Ott’s Sneeze, though it is now in the public domain.

The birth of a medium

Motion pictures like Le Prince’s and Edison’s remained little more than a technical curiosity until they found their voice with D. W. Griffith. If Le Prince and Edison gave motion pictures an alphabet, Griffith gave them something to say.

Continuity editing and the active point of view

Griffith’s seminal work of 1915, The Birth of a Nation chronicles the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and is regrettably tainted with a celebration of Lost Cause racism that makes it offensive for a modern audience to appreciate. However, the basic vocabulary of film pioneered in Nation — long shots, pans, close-ups, fades — is further refined in the follow-up film Intolerance. Though Griffith did not frame the film as an apology to critics of Nation, it is a somewhat more thematically accessible four-part cinematic exploration of humanity’s proclivity toward that particular vice.

We are so familiar with film’s vocabulary of continuity editing, that it’s hard to imagine a movie where the camera acts like it’s sitting in the audience of a play. But that was the norm until Griffith turned the camera loose. Try to view the clip here with the eyes of a person born in 1890 and the wow factor is easier to appreciate.

D. W. Griffith, sequence of the fall of Babylon in Intolerance, 1916

The vocabulary created by Griffith was extended by the Russian master Sergei Eisenstein. He used fades and cuts among close-ups and long shots to create a concept of montage, the opposite of continuity editing. The emotional effects of montage are still startling in the “Odessa Steps” sequence from The Battleship Potemkin, one of the most influential films of all time.

Sergei Eisenstein, “Odessa Steps” montage from The Battleship Potemkin, 1925

Metropolis, by German Expressionist director Fritz Lang, has been recently restored. The dystopian grandfather to such films as Blade Runner and The Matrix, Lang’s masterpiece developed many special effects that became standard up until the development of computer-generated imagery.

Trailer for the restoration version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927

In black and white…

Considered by many critics as the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane by Orson Welles innovates in the use of deep-focus cinematography. It also pioneered the narrative devices of extended flashbacks and multiple narrators, creating a non-linear story. It is also notable for the way Welles, in the title role, appears to age sixty years using makeup.

American Film Institute analysis of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, 1941

… And in living color

Many are surprised to learn that color film was an innovation that occurred during the Silent Era.

Kodak 1922 Kodachrome Film Test

Although not the first film to use color, Victor Fleming‘s The Wizard of Oz is notable for the use of color to advance the narrative. In L. Frank Baum‘s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy Gale’s home in Kansas is described as follows:

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side…. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere.

— L. Frank Baum ⁴

Fleming uses a monochrome sepia-tone film for all the scenes in Kansas, while all the Oz sequences are in Technicolor. This creates the contrast that Baum imagines in the book. The trick for making the transition involved nothing more elaborate than making everything inside the house sepia, including paint and fabric. A body double for actress Judy Garland wears a sepia version of Dorothy’s costume. When she opens the door, and as the camera dollies out, Garland appears to have transformed, walking out the door in her full-color costume.

Victor Fleming, The Wizard of Oz, 1939. Still one of the best practical effects in cinema history.

Animation

Some of the high points of animation history are mentioned below, but certainly not all of them. Visit Wikipedia’s History of Animation article if you want to explore the topic more deeply. CGI is purposely being left out here as a topic for another article.

The earliest surviving fully animated film, by J. Stuart Blackton, combines two basic kinds of animation — stop-motion with traditional hand drawing as the artist draws and erases Humorous Phases of Funny Faces on a chalkboard. We sometimes inadvertently see Blackton in flash frames where he didn’t get out of the way in time.

J. Stuart Blackton, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, 1906

The chalkboard look in Fantasmagorie by Émile Cohl is a reversal film process that renders black lines on white paper as negative — as a deliberate homage to Blackton’s blackboard. It is the first animation using individual hand drawings — all 700 of them!

Émile Cohl, Fantasmagorie, 1908

Winsor McCay and beyond

Genuine artistry is brought to animation by Winsor McCay. His ground-breaking Gertie the Dinosaur not only has a genuine feel of anatomic structure, but a genuine personality to go with it. It’s the first animation to use the concepts of keyframes and tweens, a vocabulary familiar to digital animation software users.

Winsor McCay, Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914

Inspired by McCay’s artistry, animators like Walt Disney developed real stories, with characters who had real emotions. Although not the first Mickey Mouse feature, Steamboat Willie was the first Disney animated film with a post-production, synchronized soundtrack. No other animated film had matched its quality of sound-image synchrony up to that time. In the feature, you might notice that Mickey, as the title character, is much more devious and cruel than the Mickey we encounter as the more sanitized and familiar icon of the Walt Disney Company.

Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, Steamboat Willie, 1928

Experimental animation

Norman McLaren experimented wildly with all kinds of animation techniques in association with the innovative National Film Board of Canada. Stop-motionpixilation such as the levitation scenes from his Academy-Award-winning antiwar parable Neighbours fed his work. Puppetry did as well. However, some of the most intense and labor-intensive experiments involve McLaren drawing directly on 35mm film. Amazingly, he discovered how to animate without the use of a camera this way. Len Lye, a contemporary, also drew on film by, among other things, scratching it.

Norman McLaren, Boogie Doodle, 1948

Comic effect

Terry Gilliam is a director with a unique visual sensibility known for feature films like Twelve Monkeys. He got his start as an animator who joined the famous British comic troupe Monty Python. With them, he produced a signature style of animation that has influenced a generation of animators from Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park) to Evan and Gregg Spiridellis (JibJab Media, below). He uses a tactile collage-montage technique that presages the use of bitmap images in Flash animation.

Terry Gilliam’s American Defense Toothpaste Animated Ad for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, circa 1971

The Spiridellis brothers, known as JibJab, achieved instant, viral fame when their Flash animation parody of Woodie Guthrie‘s folk tune This Land is Your Land landed in cyberspace in 2004. This Land was such a popular video it crashed JibJab’s server after the first day. Like all good parody, it takes no prisoners, lampooning George W. Bush and John Kerry with a bipartisan relish that remained a hallmark of their work throughout.

JibJab, This Land, 2004

Art films

Since the birth of cinema, artists have been creating moving images. Many of the aforementioned works could easily be grafted into this segment. Unfortunately because of the need for brevity, there are only a few highlights below.

Fernand Léger, with Dudley Murphy and the musical composer George Antheil, had a grand vision for a film titled Ballet Mécanique. This vision was not fully realized because the score and film ran at different durations. However, the project created several interesting offshoots. An abridged score and the film were later combined by Paul Lehrman in 2000, which can be heard in the clip.

Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, Ballet Mécanique, 1924

Rise of the avant-garde

Marcel Duchamp keeps showing up everywhere, so the film medium should be no different. He was interested in the possibilities of motion since the time of his Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2. His classic, anagrammatically titled Anémic Cinéma juxtaposes images of his Rotoreliefs with spiraling, nonsense puns in French. The version here includes a modern soundtrack by Laptop Quartet Twentytwentyone. Don’t look for narrative: this is Dada at its finest.

Marcel Duchamp, Anémic Cinéma, 1926

Artist and filmmaker Hans Richter creates a Surrealist-Dada mash-up with Dreams That Money Can Buy. It includes segments by a who’s who of the avant-garde: Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, and himself. The disparate segments are bound by a diegesis in which the protagonist sets up a business in a room with a very complicated lease. This is such a crazy interesting work, the clip below is the full feature on Internet Archive. Feel free to come back to it when you have some time to spend.

Hans Richter, Dreams That Money Can Buy, 1947

Straddling the border between artist and designer, husband-and-wife collaborators Charles and Ray Eames produced many film shorts. Their seminal documentary, Powers of Ten, makes macrocosmic-microcosmic leaps of scale perception based on orders of magnitude. The film became one of the primary inspirations for Google Earth and the long zoom effect common in today’s films and games.

Charles + Ray Eames, Powers of Ten, 1968, reissued 1977

Video art

Video artists

Considered by art historians to be the first true “video artist,” Nam June Paik engages in ironic cultural criticism through his work. Global Groove starts with a voiceover claiming “[t]his is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.” A devotee of media theoretician Marshall McLuhan, Paik could have been talking about streaming and YouTube. However, when the piece was created in 1973, there were 3 networks and no cable, never mind the Internet. No AfterEffects here!

Nam June Paik and John Godfrey, Global Groove, 1973

Since 1976, Bill Viola has been exploring extreme states of human emotion, often disassociated with any cause for the display. A student of history and mysticism, his tableaus often map onto classical and medieval art compositions. The power of his work doesn’t emerge from the complex use of computer technology. On the contrary, he uses long shots with ultra-slow-motion cameras to heighten the state of emotion.

Bill Viola, Silent Mountain, 2001

Installation

Like a bizarre Rube Goldberg scenario, The Way Things Go by Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss documents a thirty-minute chain reaction of everyday objects cast in very non-everyday situations. The work is part sculpture and part performance. Thus, the film becomes much more than a simple record of events. Filmed in real-time with a hand-held camera, we get caught up in the drama of a lit fuse or waiting for a ladder to slide down a ramp.

Fischli + Weiss, excerpt from The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge), 1987

Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle is a kind of parallel universe, where the familiar is strange and the strange is familiar. Not only five films, but also sculptural installations, photographs, drawings, a book, and a website document this metaphorical exploration of creation. Barney maps the work on two biological phenomena: the process of fetal gender differentiation and the function of the male cremaster muscle.

Matthew Barney, Trailer for The Cremaster Cycle, 1994-2002

Sound and vision

1894-5 The Dickson Experimental Sound Film. A test for Edison’s “Kinetophone” project, the first attempt in history to record synchronized moving imagesound. The experiment failed, but 105 years later Oscar-winner Walter Murch digitized the audio and video and complete it.

Concurrent with the technical search for recording images was the quest for recording sound. In 2008, historians at First Sounds announced an amazing discovery: the earliest known recording of a human voice occurred on April 9, 1860, almost a generation before Edison’s phonograph. Here you can read about their process of discovering the phonautograms of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, whose voice we presumably can hear in this audio clip, one hundred and fifty years later.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, first recorded sound of a human voice, 1860

Not to take anything away from Thomas Edison, though, as he was instrumental in not only refining the recording and playing of sounds but also moving pictures as well.

“Silent” film

For the first thirty years of cinema history, there was no practical way of synchronizing sound and image. Thus the period from about 1895 to the mid-twenties has become known as the Silent Era. This is a misnomer, as rarely were the films shown in complete silence. Live musicians, orchestras, organs, live sound effects artists, and other ways of creating sound in real-time were more than common.

Typical of the grand scale for “blockbusters” of the time, Napoléon by Abel Gance was intended to be shown accompanied by a full orchestra creating the soundtrack. The film was restored with a new score by Carmine Coppola, premiering at Radio City Music Hall in 1981, and here shown in a trailer for a 2016 restoration.

Abel Gance, Napoléon, 1927, restored 1979-80, and again in 2016

Talkies

The first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue elements was The Jazz Singer in 1927. By 1930, the “talkies” had pretty much taken over Hollywood. Most of the improvements over the coming decades were chiefly technical, allowing sound to play the supporting role necessary to carry the visual narrative. Sound itself doesn’t become the star until much later. However, the addition of sound does give rise in the 30s, 40s, and 50s to the golden age of musicals.

Alan Crosland, The Jazz Singer, 1927. “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet…”

Films for Music for Films

In the 1980’s a new phenomenon began with the experimental documentary film Koyaanisqatsi. Director Godfrey Reggio avoids dialog in place of an intimate relationship between the slow-motion and time-lapse film techniques of Ron Fricke and the mesmerizing minimalist musical score by Philip Glass. The musical score became so popular that the Philip Glass Ensemble toured the world, creating the music in front of the movie, replacing the recorded film score with a live performance much in the manner of early silent film presentation. Below is a snippet. MGM Digital Media has posted the entire film here, and it’s worth a watch (despite the ads).

Godfrey Reggio, Koyaanisqatsi, 1982

Another minimalist, Brian Eno, concocted a trio of albums as a Music for Films series in the late 70s and early 80s. These classics of the ambient music genre are soundtracks to films that don’t exist. Yet, they have informed so much film music since their release it’s difficult to not hear them as actual soundtracks. And, some of the tracks eventually did make it into some films, after all.

Brian Eno, Task Force, track from Music for Films

The future is the past

A trend of the past decade has been the revisiting of old art films by young musicians. Reclaiming a lost territory, Eno-inspired groups like Laptop Quartet Twentytwentyone compose for Duchamp, Eggeling, Richter, and other avant-garde filmmakers. This makes the older work fresh for a new audience. Found sound combines with real-time samples from acoustic instruments in a way that honors the content without losing a contemporary edge.

Viking Eggeling, Symphonie Diagonale, 1924. with sound performance by LQ2021, 2008

Another group that creates new sounds for old silent films is Alloy Orchestra. Roger Miller (of Mission of Burma fame), Terry Donahue, and Ken Winokur are three musicians, but they sound like 15 in this adaptation of Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera. With soundtracks for Nosferatu and Metropolis, Alloy has even inspired some modern filmmakers to make silent movies today.

Dziga Vertov, Man With a Movie Camera, 1929, with soundscape by Alloy Orchestra, 1995

Found sound

Let’s face the fact that it’s hard to do it all. It’s tempting to snatch a bit of sound and hope no one notices that you’ve stolen a copyrighted work — but remember the opportunities in sharing and licensing. Fortunately, there are places where sound is free. So as long as you play along with terms of use, you’ll soon have a pretty impressive library of sound to glean from.

Sites like FindSounds, a kind of search engine for audio clips, allow you to collect an impressive array of snippets to create sound collages and samplings from, all either public domain or Creative Commons licensed. Sites like these often stipulate to credit the original site as the source of your sound.

Some artists are now providing free services for independent, non-commercial, or student filmmakers. Moby, no stranger to film scoring himself, has donated part of his website to a project called mobygratis.com. There you can set up an account and request the rights to use tracks under a license that restricts your use to the film project proposed.

The language of cinema

Image-making is a language. It has an alphabet (bits of light, shadow, or color), words (groupings of light, shadow, or color we can recognize), and grammar (rules for organizing those groupings), all of which generate semiotic meaning or compositional relationships. As a way of communicating, image-making can be understood around the globe — perhaps even around the rest of the universe, which is why pictures rather than words are used to communicate on the Voyager Golden Record!

Moving pictures linked with sound create the special case of image-making language we call film or cinema. If you come to this course having started as a painter, you might think you know enough about the language of image-making that your movie-making efforts will translate easily. But it’s a bit like knowing Italian and believing that will help you speak Spanish. True, they are both derived from Latin. But each has enough uniqueness that it becomes important to learn the language you intend to use.

For a take on what to do with the language of film, visit The Writing Studio website.

And for a take on what not to do, visit D.U.M.P.S. and heed the warnings!

For our purposes here, let’s break the process down into three related, overlapping, intertwining actions: shooting, editing, and sound. As we do, we’ll be using film jargon. Use the Glossary to help you with these terms.

Shooting

Whether you choose abstraction or traditional narrative, the universe depicted in your film is known as the diegesis. This consists of two related but very different things:

• The Mise-en-scène is a French term meaning “formatting the scene” or “staging.” In a traditional, live-action narrative, it includes how you use actors, sets, props, costumes, lighting, sound, and location. In an abstract animation, visual elements and principles — line, shape, color, balance, rhythm, and so on — become your mise-en-scène.

• The Mise-en-shot, French for “formatting the shot” or “shooting.” This involves the translation of your mise-en-scène into shots, individual instances where the camera is recording action in the mise-en-scène.

Shots start with a visual vocabulary based on the placement and movement of the camera, duration of the shot, depth of focus, and scale of shot. The varieties of shots — long shot, medium shot, close-up — all contribute to the nature of the movement in the picture.

As an active time-and-motion media, action is at the center of every shot, even relatively calm scenes. We break this down into:

• Primary action: the movement of actors or elements in the visual field. 
• Secondary action: the movement of the camera itself).
• Tertiary action: the motion created by editing between cuts.

Editing

When you’re done recording action, you’re barely half done. Taking individual shots and putting them all together into an organic, coherent temporal composition is the art of editing. This is where you’ll be spending quality time with Premier. The quality of your editing, like the quality of your shooting, can make or break your project. In other words, it’s hard for a good editing job to make anything out of bad shooting. And it’s easy for a bad edit to destroy good shooting. The nature of your film will broadly determine your editing style as either:

• Continuity editing is a sense of continuous, sequential action in a logical space-time continuum. Most Hollywood films favor this style as less demanding on an audience. Since the audience is largely unaware of the editing in this style, it is sometimes referred to as transparency editing.

• Montage creates action that develops in a non-linear fashion. This invites the audience to create connections between what may appear to be unrelated shots. This kind of editing is sometimes referred to as framed editing. It continually reminds the audience that the film is an artificial construct. Flashbacks, flash-forwards, jump cuts, cutting to black or fading to white, and sudden starting and stopping of sound or action are typical hallmarks of this style of editing.

Some filmmakers favor one or the other. Others feel free to pitch back and forth between them, even within one film.

Transitions

When editing, you are stringing pearls, placing one shot next to another in a deliberate sequence. The link between the shots is known as a transition. The most elementary transition is the cut, a simple straight splice from one piece of action to another. A fade brings the action to a stop slowly and gradually by transitioning to a neutral visual field, usually black or white. A dissolve or cross-fade is similar to a fade but transitions gradually from one shot to another. A wipe suggests a shot pushing or pulling another shot out of the way. In the digital age, new transitions — 3D swoops, pixilated dissolves, and the like — are available through software.

Sound

The next time you see a film, don’t watch it. Listen to it. Sound is a vital part of the filmic language and can fundamentally change the meaning of the action. Sound can be diegetic: the voices of the characters in the world of the film, for example. It can also be non-diegetic: a voice-over or a full orchestral soundtrack doesn’t exist in the world of the film. It can also switch — a pop-tune overdub soundtrack can feel non-diegetic until a character unexpectedly switches off a radio.

Sound comes from a variety of sources: dialog, sound effects, and music. Human voices or sound effects can be synchronous (exactly matching the action in the film) or asynchronous (not matching the action, or occurring outside of the visual field).

1. Bielawski, Jan and Trondsen, Trond S. “Andrei Tarkovsky Talks About… .” nostalghia.com: an Andrei Tarkovsky Information Site. 2001-2005. http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/AT_For_Dummies.html[↩]
2. https://www.mediacollege.com/glossary/p/persistence-of-vision.html[↩]
3. “Zoetrope.” Wikipedia. 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoetrope[↩]
4. Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. George M. Hill, 1899. p. 12[↩]