{"id":4433,"date":"2014-02-19T00:00:02","date_gmt":"2014-02-19T05:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=4433"},"modified":"2014-02-18T20:44:28","modified_gmt":"2014-02-19T01:44:28","slug":"jump-cuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/jump-cuts\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Proper and Improper Use of Jump Cuts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fogwar\"
\nThe Fog of War<\/a>, one of the only movies that uses jump cuts well.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jump cuts have always been fascinating to me. \u00a0The entire idea of editing is fascinating, obviously. \u00a0It’s this whole thing of, \u2018How can we make this look fluid?\u2019 \u00a0\u2018How will these compositions work together?\u2019 \u00a0There is even editing happening in a long sequence without cuts, because the composition is changing. \u00a0Just think of the opening of Touch of Evil<\/a> or Boogie Nights<\/a>\u2014there’s no actual editing, but the camera\u2019s movement is editing as it goes along\u2014it’s moving from one idea to another, and the varying compositions must fit together in a logical way. \u00a0Think about that great shot in Raging Bull<\/a> where we follow Jake out to the ring. \u00a0There are no cuts, but the transition from intimate medium shot to huge, wide, crane shot is an editing choice within the same shot.<\/p>\n

If you can intuit these principles naturally, you really have a leg up as a filmmaker. \u00a0Kubrick, Tarantino, Scorsese, Aronofsky, Lee, Zemeckis, Spielberg, the Coens\u2014whether you like their movies or not, these guys all have a handle on how to construct a scene. \u00a0They have a handle on the principles.
\n
\nFor those that don’t take naturally to this, there’s a rudimentary system called coverage<\/i> that pretty much anybody can be taught to follow.\u00a0 Coverage is the paint-by-numbers of scene construction, and it’s the perfect thing for less visually aggressive filmmakers to utilize.\u00a0 It’s basically a simple formula for ensuring that your scene will cut together without looking messy and distracting, by covering all the bases, all the shots you’d possibly need.<\/p>\n

Neither school of thought\u2014using coverage vs. designing your scenes\u2014is \u2018correct\u2019 or \u2018better\u2019 or anything.\u00a0 The twenty best movies ever made are really a grab bag of the two styles, from Rob Reiner’s low-key When Harry Met Sally<\/a> to the Coen’s kinetic Raising Arizona<\/a> (incidentally, both shot by Barry Sonnenfeld).<\/p>\n

Above all else, the movie just has to look right<\/i>.\u00a0 It has to look appropriate for its story. \u00a0Fluid, and not distracting or grating to look at.<\/p>\n

Cutting is one of the basic cinematic abstractions that I’m really interested in. \u00a0There aren’t really cuts in life. \u00a0I guess people blink, and one could say that information is stored in our memories as little movies. \u00a0But the eye is a very strange and very wide fixed lens. \u00a0Our eyes have an uncanny ability to focus on certain things, and in that way, we do kind of see in \u2018cuts\u2019\u2014but, it can never be the same, not just because of our wider peripheral vision, but because life goes on and on for a really long time.\u00a0 It’s not a truncated, 90-minute slice-of-life.<\/p>\n

I’ve heard that Jean Luc Goddard made the jump cut popular with Breathless<\/a> by accident. \u00a0Supposedly, the movie was too long, so he just cut some of the scenes up. \u00a0It sounds too glamorous to be true, but it could be. \u00a0In any event, that idea is interesting\u2014it sort of deconstructs the whole idea of editing.<\/p>\n

There are some people out there who despise jump cuts because they look too \u2018jarring\u2019. \u00a0I used to be one of those people about ten years ago. \u00a0The idea being that editing is supposed to be fluid\u2014by being fluid, the editing is unnoticeable, and the viewer is able to be locked into the story. \u00a0This makes total sense, intellectually.<\/p>\n

Imagine if in Star Wars<\/a>, Luke said, “I wanna go with you to Alderman and learn the force”, and then there was a jump cut to him saying, “and become a Jedi like my father.” It would look wrong<\/em>, and there’s really no better word for it than that. \u00a0It would go so against the grain, and for no logical reason.\u00a0 You would suddenly not be thinking about the story, and be thinking about why the movie looked weird all of a sudden.\u00a0 In that context, jump cuts look like mistakes.<\/p>\n

But take for instance Errol Morris’ epic masterpiece The Fog of War<\/a>, which is an Oscar-winning, two-hour interview with Robert S. McNamara.\u00a0 Occasionally, there are jump cuts, and these jump cuts enhance the visual flow. \u00a0The same effect is used in James Merendino’s SLC Punk<\/a> when Bob is ranting and raving about drugs.\u00a0 In these cases, the jagged editing makes more sense than a traditional look. \u00a0The messiness works.<\/p>\n

There’s also an interesting layer underneath that I don’t think many people pay any attention to: \u00a0if we all understand what editing consists of, which is selecting the best takes and trying to put them together in a logical and digestible way, then we can understand that editing is a decision making process where what we see on screen is considered to the best thing possible. \u00a0It’s a funny and interesting idea. \u00a0Think about any random movie that you like\u2014in Fight Club<\/a>, for instance, there are a bunch of other, unused, similar takes of Brad Pitt doing whatever. \u00a0So if you think about any given chunk of\u00a0performance in the movie, that take, the one you are thinking of, was actually one of many. \u00a0Someone could cut an entire ever so slightly different alternate version of the movie, using different takes of every shot. \u00a0Since, in\u00a0some cases, an actor’s performance can be saved, or ruined, in editing, this alternate version might be horrible. \u00a0You might think Brad Pitt or Edward Norton or whoever else were bad actors.<\/p>\n

If we know that every shot selection, and every cut, suggests importance, then the immediacy of a jump cut suggests extreme<\/i> importance. \u00a0If you’re looking at an interview, and suddenly, while the guy is speaking, it cuts to another bit of him speaking, that means that the filmmakers are insisting that you hear what he has to say in that specific way. \u00a0Any other way would be wrong, according to them.<\/p>\n

This is what occurs in The Fog of War, and the immediacy and subtle instruction to the viewer makes what McNamara is saying seem all the more important. \u00a0Sometimes, Morris even uses the effect to keep in little bits where he’s stumbling over his words, or thinking out loud to remember his place.\u00a0 These pieces are used to make him still feel human.\u00a0 In a case such as this movie, the jump cut achieves<\/em> reality, rather than destroys it.<\/p>\n

Lately, in the last five or ten years, the jump cut has become quite acceptable stylistically. \u00a0So, in indie movies, you generally have a lot of jump cuts within montages. \u00a0The other day, I was watching some random indie movie on Netflix, and there was a scene of a girl driving her car, and it had jump cuts. \u00a0Remember what a jump cut does\u2014it suggests that what you see on screen is important. \u00a0Was it important<\/i> that we saw her driving while looking sad, and then suddenly touching her hair, and then suddenly touching her hair again, and then suddenly sighing?<\/p>\n

What the filmmakers were trying to achieve was a sense of tension and urgency. \u00a0Editing in such a jagged way is meant to express the character’s state of mind. \u00a0But the reason it doesn’t work in an instance like this is because there’s no tension to express\u2014quite simply, nothing is actually happening. \u00a0But the filmmakers are trying to make you believe <\/i>something is happening, at least emotionally<\/em>, by way of the jump cuts. \u00a0But it can’t work backwards\u2014the story<\/em> must dictate the style, not the other way around. \u00a0It’s why I constantly pick on Raging Bull<\/a>\u2014undoubtedly of the most beautiful stylistic movies ever made, but style smothered on top of lack of story.<\/p>\n

What’s so interesting about a misused jump cut is how audacious it is. \u00a0It’s an amazing window into the mind of a filmmaker that thinks they can force feelings on you without earning them. \u00a0By seeing jump cuts like these, you’re getting a direct line into the aimless mind of someone who’s thinking ‘yeah, that part where she touches her hair, that needs to be on screen, people need to see that’.\u00a0 It’s a completely absurd notion, that we would ever need to see three or four shots of a woman driving strung together in such a context.<\/p>\n

A shot is a sacred thing.<\/i>\u00a0 It’s a unit of information\u2014one of the smallest segments in the DNA of a movie. \u00a0And redundancy of information is a cancer\u2014it eats away at a movie and kills it dead. \u00a0If we already know the the main character is a woman, and that she is driving, and that she is wistful, then we don’t need to see any more of it. \u00a0Showing us more just means that the director thinks we don’t \u2018get it\u2019, or thinks that the shot is so pretty that it would be impossible to decide what part of it to use. \u00a0It’s lazy, boring, indecisive filmmaking.<\/p>\n

The reason there’s no scene in Back to the Future<\/a> where Marty just sits and looks out a window, looking nervous, with sparse music underneath and jump cuts of his breathing, is because we already know<\/i> he’s nervous, and to spell it out for us in such an overboard way would be unnecessary and boring\u2014especially when there’s an important story to be told. \u00a0Lack of redundancy is a big part of what makes\u00a0Back to the Future a real movie<\/em> that people love. \u00a0<\/em>If little indie movies ever want to stop sucking, they need to understand the power of editing\u2014the power of the shot, the power of the cut. \u00a0Nobody cares about some dickhead sitting and thinking\u2014especially not four shots of it in a row.<\/p>\n

Unless you’re Errol Morris, ditch the jump cuts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"fogwar\"
\nThe Fog of War<\/a>, one of the only movies that uses jump cuts well.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jump cuts have always been fascinating to me. \u00a0The entire idea of editing is fascinating, obviously. \u00a0It’s this whole thing of, \u2018How can we make this look fluid?\u2019 \u00a0\u2018How will these compositions work together?\u2019 \u00a0There is even editing happening in a long sequence without cuts, because the composition is changing. \u00a0Just think of the opening of Touch of Evil<\/a> or Boogie Nights<\/a>\u2014there’s no actual editing, but the camera\u2019s movement is editing as it goes along\u2014it’s moving from one idea to another, and the varying compositions must fit together in a logical way. \u00a0Think about that great shot in Raging Bull<\/a> where we follow Jake out to the ring. \u00a0There are no cuts, but the transition from intimate medium shot to huge, wide, crane shot is an editing choice within the same shot.<\/p>\n

If you can intuit these principles naturally, you really have a leg up as a filmmaker. \u00a0Kubrick, Tarantino, Scorsese, Aronofsky, Lee, Zemeckis, Spielberg, the Coens\u2014whether you like their movies or not, these guys all have a handle on how to construct a scene. \u00a0They have a handle on the principles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-gregsessays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4433"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4433\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4444,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4433\/revisions\/4444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}