We have spent a significant amount of time thinking about structural decisions made by writers over the years. From things like the narrative arc to the way that three act structures are constructed.

Film making is no different. All the same rules of narratology apply, Aristotle, the classical narrative structure, Freytag’s pyramid etc etc all have their place in story telling through film.

If you need to review these, please ensure that you check out previous years’ PressBooks.

Narrative overview

Coming from drama, the concept of acts and scenes is a natural progression in film. Aristotle’s three act structure is the central tenet of the whole process.

If you can recall, there are two areas here that are important

• Story
• Plot

Try to recall the difference between these two ideas.

This is an enormous subject, so we are just scraping the surface of what you can do with plot.

Of course, plot requires a narrator, so we need to discuss that along the way too.

Here are the crucial elements of plot, and plotting. A great start is to remember five words

1. Beginning
2. Middle
3. End
4. Plot
5. Story

These may not look special, in fact 2 seem to be interchangeable. By the end of this week we can establish what they mean and where they come from, as well as what they can do for us.

Although people are drawn to plots, but find them difficult to remember. Often parts of a plot are remembered, but not the plot as a whole. The parts don’t seem to be connected in meaningful ways. The experience that we want for you is to look for wider patterns, overarching shapes, and close analysis of what is happening for these characters.

BEGINNING – MIDDLE – END

Shifting perspective a little, it’s time to consider these three words from Aristotle.

Aristotle doesn’t really go into great detail in Poetics, but pretty much all of the work on these three key words is inspired by his work.

• Beginning: This is the introduction to the characters and their situation. This can sometimes be called the ‘status quo’. At this point things are relatively stable. Problems may be lurking, but they are still submerged. They are deniable or able to be suppressed. You may even be able to say that things really aren’t so bad. Somehow things may take care of themselves. Before long, something will happen to bring these conflicts to the surface. Once that event happens, it will be hard to live with. This is called a destabilising event. This sets the entire plot in motion.  Before things are simple, after, it cannot be.
• Middle: Where complications arise. As we move through the middle, clarity is brought to characters in relation to the plot and we realise that things may get significantly worse before they get any better.
• Ending: The ending is where things get resolved. Where the conflicts exposed at the beginning are finally worked out. They are resolved in one of two ways: in a comedic ending, then the characters are likely to end up reconciling their differences, marriage, or having a birth, or a rebirth of self. In a tragic ending, there are scenes of disillusion, exile or even death. Since the end of the 19th century, there is more of an open ending. An open ending leaves some questions unanswered. Sometimes on the verge on an important decision.

 

Pixar is a really good example to see how things play out in films.

CHARTING THE COURSE

Aristotle’s Beginning, Middle and End is easily adapted to the ‘Three Act Structure’. This borrows the narrative approach of plays (which obviously have Acts and Scenes). Initially, the Greek dramas only had three acts, and they served the purpose of that idea of Beginning, Middle, and End.

It was charted by some Russian literary scholars to look a little like the below. You’ll note that the x axis is the time, and the y axis is represents a heightened state either through suspense, or excitement.

A German theorist called Freytag took this one step further, and created more of a pyramid effect. You’ll notice it is basically the same

There are all sorts of structures in the world, but the above two are the most popular.

Editing

We’ll start with a quote from Alfonso Cuaron – one of the great film makers of our generation.

With all but a very few exceptions, films—especially narrative feature films—are made up of a series of individual shots that filmmakers connect in a formal, systematic, and expressive way. There are practical as well as artistic reasons for directors to assemble movies from many hundreds if not thousands of shots. For one thing, film cameras are able to hold only a limited amount of celluloid film—not enough for a feature length motion picture. (Digital cameras, however, can capture multiple hours.) More important, narrative films generally compress time considerably by leaving out the boring parts of the stories they tell. Imagine how dull it would be to watch even the most intriguing characters go through the humdrum motions of everyday life—doing the laundry, brushing their teeth, spending an hour stuck in traffic—simply because the filmmaker had no way of eliminating these necessary but irrelevant activities. Even those rare films that try to duplicate real time—the story of two hours in a woman’s life could conceivably take exactly two hours to tell on film— generally require the filmmaker to carve up the action into discrete shots and reassemble them coherently, if only to hold the audience’s visual interest, let alone to make expressive points by way of close-ups, long shots, high- and low-angle shots, and so on.

This chapter describes the methods by which filmmakers link individual shots to one another in a process called EDITING, or CUTTING. These links are broadly called TRANSITIONS.

The simplest transition is the CUT. A director films a shot, the basic unit of filmmaking, and has it
developed. She films another shot and has it developed as well. She trims each shot down to the
length she wants, and she attaches the two strips of film together with a piece of tape. That’s it: she has cut from one shot to another. In this example, the filmmaker is using celluloid. She can create the same effect electronically with two shots taken in video, though in that case, of course, she has no need for tape.

Bear in mind that editing is a human activity. Unlike the camera’s mechanical recording of images, editing is quite specifically a matter of active decision-making—the product of human choice. So when describing editing, it makes no sense to say or write “the camera cuts.” Cameras can only record; directors and editors cut.

Montage

One of the key terms in film studies is MONTAGE. Taken from the French verb monter, meaning to assemble, montage describes the various ways in which filmmakers string individual shots together to form a series.

The term montage has three different but related definitions. The first definition is the easiest. In
France, the word montage simply means editing—any kind of editing. As described in the example of a simple cut, above, the filmmaker takes two pieces of exposed and processed celluloid, trims them down to the length she wants—decisions made on the basis of the expressive and/or graphic content of the image, or the dialogue, or a combination of both—and literally tapes them together. In France, what she has done is known as montage.

In the United States, the term montage refers more specifically to a film sequence that relies on
editing to condense or expand action, space, or time. The effect is often that of a rapid-fire series of interrelated images. Imagine that a director is telling the story of a rock band that forms in Omaha, and he needs to move them quickly to Hollywood, where they will perform live on a television show.

Since there is neither the need nor the time to watch the group drive the entire way from eastern
Nebraska to southern California, our director begins by filming a shot of the band members packing up their van in Omaha; he cuts quickly from this shot to a shot of the van on the interstate making its way across the Great Plains. From this he cuts to a shot of oil derricks next to the highway, then to a shot of cattle in a field, and then to a shot of the van heading toward the snowcapped Rockies. Cut to a shot of the band members in the van; cut to a shot of the van driving down the Las Vegas Strip at night. An image of Death Valley follows. From the desert the director cuts to a shot of a sign reading “Los Angeles—30 miles” and then to a shot of the van pulling up at an office building on Sunset Boulevard.

In this American-style montage sequence, the band has moved all the way from the Midwest to L.A. in less than a minute. This montage condenses time and space—a 1,700-mile trip that would take several days in real time shrinks down in screen time to about 45 seconds.

Continuity Editing

Classical Hollywood style, which film studies defines as the set of predominant formal techniques used by most American narrative filmmakers through the twentieth century and to the present day, relies on several editing principles to achieve its central goal: to keep audience members so wrapped up in the fictional world created onscreen that they cease to be conscious of watching a movie and, instead, believe that they are witnessing something real. Whether it’s a romance between two believable characters or an action film with a larger-than-life hero or a horror film featuring a preposterous monster, classical Hollywood films want us to believe that we are watching reality, if only for the duration of the picture.

For example, have you ever noticed that film characters rarely turn and look precisely at the
camera and speak directly to you in the audience? Although direct addresses from characters to
audiences have happened from time to time—Annie Hall (1977) and Wayne’s World (1992) contain notable examples of this violation of formal convention—it’s startling when it occurs precisely because it occurs so rarely.

The effect of such direct addresses is to jolt us out of our dreamlike immersion in the film’s story into a sudden awareness of the film’s artificiality: we know we weren’t there when the movie was being filmed, and we know that the character isn’t really talking to us at all. This jolt makes us aware that we’re watching a movie.

Classical Hollywood style strives to avoid calling attention to the means and forms of its own
construction. Through strictly formal techniques, Hollywood films attempt to smooth over the many cuts that occur. They try to maintain a sense of spatial unity within each individual sequence. They attempt, to use loftier critical discourse, to efface themselves—to render themselves unnoticeable.

The overall term that describes this formal system is CONTINUITY EDITING, also known as INVISIBLE EDITING. Continuity editing is a set of editing practices that establish spatial and/or temporal continuity between shots—in other words, any of the various techniques that filmmakers employ to keep their narratives moving forward logically and smoothly, without jarring disruptions in space or time, and without making the audience aware that they are in fact watching a work of art. Continuity editing strives not only to keep disruptions to a minimum but to actively promote a sense of narrative and spatial coherence and stability in the face of hundreds or even thousands of the discrete bits of celluloid called shots. What are these techniques?

The first set of continuity editing techniques involve ways to downplay the jarring effect of cutting.

They are called editing matches. There are three essential ways of matching one shot to another, and they are defined according to how the match is made.

1. Matching on action
2. Eye-line matching
3. Graphic matching

MATCHING ON ACTION occurs when a piece of physical action in the first shot continues in the second shot. Here’s a simple example: In the first shot, a character opens a door; in the second shot, she goes through the doorway. Her movement provides the continuity that matches the two shots. If the shots are set up well and the editor knows his stuff, the audience will slide visually from the first shot to the second, thanks to the seemingly continuous, apparently uninterrupted movement of the character through the doorway.

180 Degree Rule

In addition to these three types of matches, classical Hollywood cinema developed a so-called rule in order to maintain a sense of coherent space within a given film sequence: the 180° rule. Because it is a rule that is often broken, film studies tends more and more to call it the 180° SYSTEM.

Terminology aside, the 180° system provides a simple but crucial way for filmmakers to preserve
spatial coherence within a given scene. Imagine a scene taking place in a living room; there are two chairs set at three-quarter angles to one another, and in these chairs sit two women.

The 180° system suggests that the best way for a director to establish and maintain spatial coherence in this scene (or any scene) is to draw an imaginary line across the axis of the action (the middle of the set), dividing it in two. In figure 4.5, the 180° axis is represented by a dotted line.

If the director keeps the camera on one side of the dotted line for the duration of the sequence—
and she would probably choose the side that includes the characters’ faces—when the film is edited and projected onto a screen, the woman on the left in the illustration will always be on the right. This seems simple.

Shot-Reverse-Shot

One of the most common, efficient, and effective editing patterns developed by classical Hollywood cinema is the SHOT/REVERSE-SHOT PATTERN. To define this technique, let’s use the above example of the living room scene illustrated immediately above. The two women are seated in living room chairs set at a three-quarter angle toward each other, and they are having a conversation.

Establishing and maintaining the 180° system, the director chooses her first shot to be taken from position 1 (see fig. 4.6). The resulting image onscreen is that of the woman in medium shot facing at a three-quarter angle to the left of the image. Since our director has chosen to film and edit this sequence using a shot/reverse shot pattern, she then positions the camera to film the so-called “reverse angle,” namely from position 2: now the camera faces the other woman, who is seen onscreen in medium shot, also at three-quarter angle, looking toward the right of the screen.

The word “reverse” in this instance does not really mean an absolute reversal of the camera’s place; the camera does not cross over to its truly opposite position because that would mean violating the 180° axis system. Instead, shot/reverse-shot means that the shots alternate not between the two characters but between the two camera positions, one pointing right, the other pointing left. The shot/reverse-shot pattern can be used to reveal both characters in both shots the camera pointing over the shoulder of one to the face and upper body of the other—or we can see them as individuals appearing to look at each other by virtue of eye-line matching. Or the shots can be imbalanced: in shot 1 we might see over the shoulder of one character to the face and shoulders of another character, while the so-called reverse shot might only be an angled close-up of the first character. The point is that the director shoots an apparent reverse angle while maintaining the 180° axis system, thereby showing both characters from more or less equal but appropriately reverse angles.

Here is the ending of a Charlie Chaplin film that does not meet the expectations of the continuity editing process. In the final few shots you will see shot-reverse-shots between the tramp and the woman, note the placement of the flower.