>>7298619
9. The beach is taken.

Throughout the overall sequence, close-ups are used to emotionalize the action, and increasing pace is used to punctuate the chaos and carnage. Increasing pace is important to build the tension as we move through the different two- to three-minute sequences. Only in the last sequence does the pace at last slow. This by-now-classic set piece reflects ninety years of editing innovation utilized to the peak of their possibilities for conventional narrative possibilities.

>>7298628
Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line, a war film made in the same year as the Spielberg film, exemplifies a very different set of editing goals. Although the overall shaping device is the battle for Guadalcanal in the Pacific, Malick's narrative goals are totally different than those of Spielberg. Instead of tension about who will win the battle, how it will be won, and a focus on the human cost, Malick opts for a meditation on life, death, man's relation to the natural world, the humanity even of the enemy, and how the struggles of personal ideology often supersede the collective ideology so necessary in the effective functioning of an organization such as the army.

To achieve these subtextual ideas Malick moves away from editing goals such as identification with a character and pace to build suspense within a scene or a sequence. Even though the war film as a genre is about the central question of survival of the main character, Malick implies the irrelevance of the question by focusing instead on the humanity of the character within the natural world rather than humanity transcendent over the natural world.

>>7298636
In the latter, the struggle of men for primacy is central. In the former, the struggle of man for primacy seems arrogant and foolish. Here editing for the subtext takes us away from the progress of the battle to the question of the progress of mankind through its sideline journey into warfare as the be-all and end-all of existence.

>>7298644
Other examples of editing for subtext include Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge (2001), and Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married (2008).

In Fellini's 8 1/2, the narrative focuses on the central character, Guido, and his creative logjam. Guido's life is brimming with pressure, from his producer, from his wife, his mistress, and his potential actors. He ruminates on his past in a series of fantasies that focus on his relationships with religion, his parents, and women. In the fantasies, retribution for desire is the primary thread. This description would suggest a film overweighted in the direction of victimization, but that's not the experience of 8 1/2.

On the contrary, the editing focuses in a playful manner on the richness of Guido's inner life. Fellini juxtaposes an image of his alter ego, Guido, floating high in the sky, with an image of his producer pulling on the rope. He then cuts to Guido's body plunging to earth. Fellini uses sounds cues (asa nisi masa) or a visual cue, the raising of eyeglasses higher on the bridge of his nose, to move us from Guido's present reality into his fantasy. The juxtapositions, the playful visual cues, the mysterious use of a phrase from the past, all convey a subtext that differs substantially from Guido's present. His inner life is rich while his outer life seems barren.

In Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, an aspiring writer comes to Paris, and, of course, to write about love, the writer must suffer and lose his lover. This is the narrative of Moulin Rouge. The film's subtext, however, is all about the excitement and energy of the musical theater. The joy, the energy, the pleasure of music and dance is conveyed by pace. The camera moves, the actors move, and the pace moves them faster. Far more memorable than the lovers' loss is the writer's gain. The pleasure of Moulin Rouge resides in its editing for subtext.

In Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, the drug-addicted Kym (Anne Hathaway) gets a pass from her rehab facility to attend her sister's weekend wedding. Can past traumas, parents' reconstituted marriages, and liberal Connecticut be outweighed by the joyful occasion of the wedding? The answer is no, as Rachel returns to rehab at the end of the film. The editing of the film, however, suggests the messy energy of music and feeling--both of love and anger--and what we're left with is the sense of the relentlessness of life in the face of tragedy. The editing for subtext emphasizes the vitality of the life force in spite of those tragedies. In fact, in each of these three films, the somber narrative content is subverted by an editing strategy that captures the vitality and creativity that characters need to call upon to deal with the problems of living. In each case it's the subtext that makes the film a surprising and rewarding experience for its audience.

>>7298686
The Departed is an unusual police story where a criminal organization and a police organization are presented as "families" with more similarities than differences. Each family has a father--the crime organization led by the Irish Frankie Costello (Jack Nicholson) and the police Special Investigations unit led by Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen). The two "sons" are Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) and Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their responsibilities to their "fathers" are to become the mole within the opposing organization. Colin is a dutiful son to the end. Billy is more confused but nevertheless fulfills his responsibility. Each organization is presented in familial rather than professional terms. The plot to bring down the other--the sale of computer technology for missile systems--is secondary to the strategic rivalry between the two organizations. Loyalty, duty, and love are most highly valued and emphasized in the narrative.

In order to emphasize the main characters of Colin and Billy and their goals (to please the father), Scorsese and Schoonmaker prominently use close-ups of them, especially in reaction shots to their "fathers." These shots make the son-father linkage emotional and indelible as a motivating force for these two characters. In both cases the narrative clearly addresses the fate of the real father. For Colin, he is set aside in favor of a "stronger father," Frankie Costello. For Billy, his father is eulogized as a man who went his own way in spite of the pressure to choose sides (criminal or police).

>>7298711
The second editing goal in the opening sequence of The Departed is to establish, via parallel action, the relationship between Colin and Billy. Both are trained as state troopers, but Colin is portrayed as winning and effective, while Billy is portrayed as the outsider (less winning, less effective). Nevertheless the parallel editing links their stories and supports the narrative point that each is being trained to be a mole in the opposition's family. In the opening fifteen minutes of the film, both the close-ups and the parallel editing, especially of moving-camera shots, energize the narrative.

The editing in The Departed thus exemplifies classic editing strategies that will direct us to a clear sense of the narrative and provide dramatic emphasis when needed. After the first fifteen minutes, there is no doubt about whom we are watching and why we are doing so. Nor is there any lack of clarity about their goals and how those goals fit into the overall narrative direction. There is also no doubt that the film will be primarily about character rather than plot.

>>7298721
In Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, the editor, Dylan Tichenor, provides us the clearest example of editing for subtext. The narrative focuses on Daniel Plainview, an entrepreneur whose passion for wealth exceeds any other personal goal. Personal relationships with an adopted son or any other familial relationship, posed or authentic, or communal and social relationships, are very low priorities for Plainview. He demonstrates a ruthless cruelty toward any threat to his primary goal of acquiring wealth from the mineral bounty of turn-of-the-century California. There Will Be Blood is both an admiring and critical portrait of what it takes to become a robber baron, a barbaric scion of wealth and power, a particularly American vision of this iconic character in our nation's history.

The conventional narrative content of the film's opening sequence establishes that Daniel Plainview mines for gold in 1898 and by 1902 he has discovered oil. It also establishes that the work is dangerous. This minimal content could be conveyed much more speedily, if that was Anderson's only goal. The fact that Anderson and Tichenor use more close-ups on material (rock, gold, oil) than on the human beings who search out the material, immediately establishes the priority in the sequence, the subtextual idea that material is more important than people.

The first fourteen minutes of the film proceed with periodic, asynchronous music but neither dialog nor narration. Although Daniel is the primary character in the sequence, neither he nor a coworker nor his baby infant are introduced. Initially we watch Daniel alone, excavating a mine for gold. Later he and a colleague drill for oil. Often the main character is in shadow and we never fully see Daniel's eyes.

YAY!!!! Film school for dummies! Keep posting I'm totally not going to leave forever now.

>>7298725
The sequence unfolds in a pattern akin to the opening sequence of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Time does not seem to exist. Scenes register modest actions--the discovery of a chunk of gold, the slow laborious creation of a pool of oil. And, all the while, the danger of the work: Daniel breaks his leg in a fall; his colleague is later killed by a wooden beam falling into the mine shaft. What remain constant are the daunting environment and the danger of the work. Anderson presents the environment in extreme long shot and the danger in close-up.

In terms of exposition, this fourteen-minute sequence is about work, its risks and rewards. What we take from the sequence is the determination of this character to prevail in work that is dangerous and in an environment that is daunting. Through the editing of the sequence, using a mix of shots, eschewing natural sounds or a personal narration, and sidestepping the purposefulness of pace; Anderson and Tichenor lead us into the intriguing subtext of There Will Be Blood.

The absence of the familiar and/or the personal takes away from the viewer the option of contextualizing the character and his goal. The discordant music, its frequent absence, the long takes and the shadowed activity of the character we are watching, confuse and eventually create an anxiety in the viewer. We may not know the character we are watching, but we sense the danger he has placed himself in. The lack of reactions from other humans or animate beings emphasize his aloneness.

>>7298726
I have a feeling you don't care because you're never gonna try to make a film.

>>7298750
And yet he does not seem afraid. He falls and breaks a leg. There is no one to help him, but he helps himself, and he survives. What kind of man is this? He must be unusual, determined, and strong beyond ordinary human strength. By proceeding in this manner, Anderson and Tichenor imply that this is no mere mortal-this is the iconic entrepreneur, the backbone of the enterprising America. His frontier is no longer pastoral or moral; it's deterministic without the idealism of the Western hero. This is a new kind of hero, a pillager rather than a moral man.

Another subtextual insight emanates from the pace of the sequence. Unlike the mah-jong game in Lust, Caution, the pace of the opening sequence in There Will Be Blood is slow, often punctuated by jump cuts. By sidestepping pace, Anderson and Tichenor are not dictating or guiding our feelings in the sequence. Audiences are accustomed to identifying with a character and the orchestration of feeling about their situation via the use of pace. Our relationship with Jason Bourne in the Bourne action films is the perfect example of how pace can be effectively used.

In There Will Be Blood, it is the absence of conventional narrative pacing that leads us to a subtextual insight. There is no free lunch for the film's protagonist. No, it is will rather than desire that counts here. Daniel Plainview seems to have walked straight out of an Ayn Rand novel. Do such people exist? The absence of pace suggests that such hard-wired characters do exist. Forget the psychology, the internal emotional life that pace implies and relies upon. Here we have a man Nietzsche would be proud of. He can do anything.

>>7298769
In the editing of the opening sequence of There Will Be Blood, director Anderson and editor Tichenor focus on the environment and the men who seek wealth from the environment. They focus on the work, the tools, the process, the sought outcome, and the danger of the effort. By the use of a periodic but nonnaturalistic soundtrack and by dehumanizing the characters through murky, low-key images, long shots, and random jump cuts, time, space, and emotional contextualization are undermined. The result is an iconic determinism devoid of fellow feeling. For the next two plus hours we will watch Daniel Plainview exercise his determinism, uncensored by morality or social convention.

Unlike conventional film editing, then, editing for subtext leads us to a less apparent meaning. Just as good and great directors take us to another, deeper level, so, too, do those editors working with a subtextual goal. Their work has made the experience of their films more subversive, more dramatically enriched, and fulfill the goal of art--to show us the pathway to changes of view, possibly even of behavior.

Written by you or copypasta?

I applaud your initiative.

Interesting read.

>>7298809
Copypasta, but I edited out references to films I hadn't seen.

source? most interesting.

For the first time my brain is tingling from reading /tv/. Please post more.

good thread

>>7299334
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Editing+for+subtext:+altering+the+meaning+of+the+narrative:+how...-a01
95135113

This is the worst thread I have ever seen on /tv/.

I have reported you with multiple IPs in hopes of getting you banned.

this thread is terrible and you should feel terrible.

>>7299671
Your sage MADE me feel turrible!