PRP Essay

‘How do different editing techniques change the audience’s perception of genre in film?’

Chapter 1 Introduction and context

“the first consideration of an editing strategy, and indeed the motivation for individual edits, is emotion”
Hurbis-Cherrier (2007)

This research paper is an investigation in to how the audience’s awareness of genre in film can be affected by editing, and as such will cover how the editing process can create different perceptions of genre and establish filmic cues which bring audience awareness of the genre. The power of the editor and the editing process is vast and can evoke various emotions within the audience who will inevitably categorise the film into a genre category due to similarity that occurs within specific events of the production. The word genre comes from the French (and originally Latin) word for 'kind' or 'class' (Chandler, 1997, 1) and it is a term that allows us to categorise different pieces of work into similar areas because recognition works on similarity and therefore can be used to give audiences a prior knowledge of what that piece of work might contain.

The research into the area of editing will cover the history of editing and the investigations into it, technology and how it has changed editing and the power of editing and how it can affect the genre of a film. Looking into other works and investigations into editing is vital as well as the research outcomes of these. The main objective of this research paper is to answer the question ‘How do different editing techniques change the audience’s perception of genre in film?’ and the main argument is that editing can affect the audiences perception of a films genre due to the way that it can shape a film in the final stage of the process. This paper will attempt to develop the argument through use of argument, discussion and conclusion, including other people’s findings and thoughts to compare and contrast against.

The role of an editor is one of great importance because the editing process is the part of film production in which the movie comes together as a whole piece of narrative, it is a chance to review the footage that has been captured and manipulate it to create something. The decisions that are made in the editing stage of a film shapes how the look and feel of the film are going to be, decisions to include or exclude parts of a film can have a big effect on how it is perceived by the audience and how it is understood, this has become more visible since the creation of DVD’s, many of which include deleted scenes and alternative endings which can give a film a new twist. The way that the audience view the film is of high importance due to the fact that they are the ones who eventually must create the genre from links inside their minds. Editing as such is easy to explain but hard to define, the closest definition we can come to is to say that editing is the process of selecting, arranging, and assembling the essential visual and sound elements to tell a unique version of the story of the film (Hurbis-Cherrier, 2007).

Chapter 2 Research Method

The research method of this project is extremely important to the final outcome of the research and so must describe “the theory of how the inquiry should proceed” and should involve “analysis of the principles and procedures in a particular field of inquiry” (Schwandt 1997, in deMarrais & Lapan, 2004). This research project involves both primary and secondary sources in both stages. Primary sources of information are those that provide first-hand accounts of the events, practices, or conditions and are created by the witnesses or first recorders of the event at about the time they occurred. A few examples of primary sources include reports, creative works, videos, photographs, and articles, along with many others (library.uiuc.edu). Primary sources will allow the research project to become more influential as a piece of academic work as they have more validity since they are firsthand accounts involving direct partakers and therefore are considered more trustworthy and reliable than secondary sources. The most influential primary sources will be more recent ones as older sources can sometimes be less relevant and also be seen as less reliable due to the fact that the methods of documentation back in previous years were not as structured and solid as they are in present day, aside from this the fact that the older the source the less likely it is to be as relevant in today’s modern society with the progress that has been made, especially in the area of editing and technology that this research paper covers. Primary sources can serve a range of functions provide context and pedigree for the practice; locate the research in both a historical and contemporary context; provide points of methodological and practical comparison and discussion; indicate a gap, or elucidate significance of the research; demonstrate how practice informs theory. Secondary sources In contrast, a secondary source of information is one that was created later by someone who did not experience first-hand or participate in the events or conditions you’re researching. For the purposes of a historical research project, secondary sources are generally scholarly books and articles. Also included would be reference sources like encyclopaedias (library.uiuc.edu). Although regarding secondary sources in the field of visual art, there can be some limitations related to their use for analysis and discussion due to loosing the sensory experiences of the work (Barrett & Bolt, 2007). For secondary sources, often the best sources are those that have been published most recently. If you use a secondary source that was published decades ago, it is important to know what subsequent scholars have written on the topic and what criticism they have made about the earlier work or its approach to the topic (library.uiuc.edu).

My methodological framework will involve qualitative research. Qualitative research explores and tries to understand people's beliefs, experiences, attitudes, behaviour and interactions in a non statistical format (Welsh Assembly Government, N.D. [Online]). Qualitative research attempts to make sense of or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them, it transforms the world into a series of representations (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). Qualitative research is appropriate for this project because it can tell us more about the meanings behind editing as apposed to the statistics and figures around films, overall it will gain a better and broader perspective from which a discussion can take place. Sullivan (2005) argues those in the arts need to be knowledgeable about methods of inquiry used in the sciences so that similarities and differences can be clearly expressed and that the quest for knowledge consequently requires procedures to be put in place that serve as an agreed set of practices for a community of inquirers.

Chapter 3 Survey of literature & works

An editor works to enable a narrative to fit together, the primary reason for editing according to Hurbis-Cherrier (2007) is to tell a particular story in our unique way and in doing so to guide the audience to see what we want them to see. The audience must be able to understand what the editor wants them to understand, and at the moment when they want them to see and understand it. The end result that the editor is looking to achieve is to induce emotion in the audience as this is when the audience can most relate to what is happening in the narrative and hopefully make a connection with it.

The most famous example of research into the field of editing is one performed by Lev Kuleshov who is believed by many to be responsible for identifying montage as the essence of the cinema and characterising the cinematic process as a brick-by-brick assemblage of “shot-signs”, these are individual shots whose significance is determined by the montage order (Butler, 1991). This experiment was named the “Kuleshov experiment”, it involved previously unused footage of a Russian actor named Ivan Mozhukin, Kuleshov took a close up shot of Mozhukin with a neutral expression on his face and edited this together with footage of a bowl of steaming soup, a woman in a coffin, and a child playing with a toy bear (Levaco, 1974), each time showing the close up shot Mozhukins face first. The audience was impressed by the actor‘s capability to react to each different situation and had different interpretations to the actor‘s expression (Touzard, N.D.). The audience believed that Mozhukin had in each case performed in response to the previous shot and it was claimed that the audience admired Mozhukin’s portrayal of hunger, grief, and paternal joy, his subtle shifts of emotion depending on what he was looking at. Kuleshov proved that the order of shots in a sequence influenced the perception and meaning of any given action (Prince & Hensley, 1992) having previously stated that “content” of a film was irrelevant to the structuring of its “material”, so the shots assembly of the shots was more important than what they were about (Levaco, 1974).

Another man responsible for identifying the importance of the context and order for film editing was Gregory (1961) who claimed that when shots are combined they cannot always create a meaning but there are restricted conventions that can help create larger meaningful entities, this means the shots would have to be put in context to show the meaning that they had created as a whole. Gregory said meaning could be created when joining shots that were assertions and linked cues, where an assertion is the relationship between two elements. The meaning to evolve from this was that if two shots were in juxtaposition, therefore not related, then they could still be able to create meaning (Gregory, 1961, in Nack & Parkes, 1995).

Over time the art of editing has evolved as technology has evolved, filmmakers have invented new aspects of cinematic language. In this process, they reshaped the relationship between specific cinematic elements, the final movie, and the audience (Davenport et al, 1991). Although the principles of editing have not changed, and the juxtaposition of shots is still a primary source of meaning in films and television programs, the audience‘s perceptions have changed (Touzard, N.D.). This is evident in the reactions of the audiences; in the infancy of cinema audiences became frightened if a train was travelling towards them on the screen that it would injure them just as a real train would. This was described as the `train effect’ by Yuri Tsivian, a writer who studied at the Leningrad Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinema in 1984 (Macmillan, N.D. [online]) and has been the author of many books on the area of Russian cinema. Bottomore (1999) defines the ‘train effect’ as ananxious or panicky reaction to films of approaching vehicles. A director, Francis Doublier, born in France in 1878, declared that when showing films to audiences for the first time he had to “convince spectators that neither the horses nor the trains could come out from the screen and endanger the audience” (Doublier, 1945, in Bottomore, 1999, 178). In present day audiences still have emotive reactions to films but not in the same ways of the start of cinema.

In 1929 the debut of the first film with sound, “The Jazz Singer” (Goncalves, 2008), heralded the death of montage (Davenport et al, 1991) and meant that narratives could be progressed further without the use of text in between the film as dialogue became the standard to be used in films, this gave the industry a boost and ensured that films had a more flowing quality to them. As the technology used in film making enhanced, so too did the quality of films and the techniques used to make them, the relationship between the last frame of one shot and the first frame of the next shot generated new theories of continuity and ideas for sequence construction (Davenport et al, 1991), this meant that every part of a film crew had to be more creative and begin to understand how each shot worked side by side, especially in the editing stage of the process.

As advances in technology have increased throughout recent years, editing has become more accessible and apparent to people which has brought about a new generation of editors. Fifteen years ago editing was generally only available to people who worked in the film industry but since technology improved and dropped vastly in terms of cost the general public has been able to become editors themselves in their own homes. This type of ‘home’ editor has brought about phenomenons like recut and mash up trailers, recut trailers are created by taking a film and editing it in to a trailer which changes the genre of the film.

In a recent study of genre-typical events versus genre-typical filmic realisation on film viewers’ genre recognition, carried out by Valentijin Visch and Ed Tan (2008), they claimed that the viewers ability to recognise audiovisual genres is obvious, for example when audiences flick through TV channels within seconds they seem to know whether the program is for example a comedy or a non-fiction. Genre categorization may profoundly affect how the film involved is being processed by the viewer and they interpret what they see and hear in quite different ways depending on their categorization of the film’s genre. Visch and Tan (2008) suggest that the way audiences determine genres is through the use of relying on cues, which is defined by the dictionary as ‘stimulus’ or ‘sensory signal used to identify experiences, facilitate memory, or organize responses’, this therefore refers to generic cues in films which help the audience to identify the genre of the film by being previously familiar with that genre. The definition of cues within films is not exact but plot, setting, iconography and film style have all been suggested as what they may be (Altman, 1999; Bordwell and Thompson, 2004 in Visch & Tan, 2008). Audiences tend to put films into genres so that they can process the film more easily and get maximum satisfaction in the way of emotional experiences, this is the reasoning behind why audiences detect genre cues and refine genre categorisations all the time (Visch & Tan, 2008)

A previous study again by Visch and Tan (2007) revealed that as part of the editing process the velocity of a scene could affect the audience’s recognition of a genre. The study was based on three different speeds of film; same speed, increase of speed by one third and decrease of speed by one third, and carried out across four genres of film; comedy, action, drama and non-fiction. In this study it was proved that change in velocity caused the audiences perceptions to change in relation to the drama and comedy genres where the audience perceived a decrease in speed in any genre to mean that it fit into the drama genre and an increase in speed in any genre to mean that it fit into the comedy genre.

Chapter 4 Discussion

In the experiment performed by Kuleshov in the late 1910’s his discoveries were that the audience was affected by the power of two separate images in juxtaposition, i.e. Mozhukin’s face and a bowl of soup, and the editing together of these two images caused the audience to create associations with the actor and the object in their mind, this could be the portrayal of hunger when ‘looking’ at the bowl of soup, even though the shots were two entirely different objects that were completely separated from each other. The kuleshov experiment and effect supports Gregory’s (1961) theory, which stated that meaning could be created when combining two shots together through editing, and through assertions and cues meaning could be created even when the two shots are in juxtaposition. Overall both Kuleshov and Gregory (1961) proved that unlinked shots that have no relevance, can still affect audiences through being edited together, therefore if this is true it is also true that the audiences perception of genre can be affected through editing. This is true because the way in which a film is edited, whatever techniques may be used, the audience will be affected, if two different people take the same unedited footage and both edit it into a film then the outcomes will be very different and the genres may even be different. This is supported by Hurbis-Cherrier (2007) who recalls being a student in an editing class where they were all given the same batch of footage and had to edit it into their own different films, he states that “It was a surprise to the students that the same footage yielded seven different films; one was even a comedy, while another was edited as a mystery”. Hurbis-Cherrier (2007) claims that “The differences between all of those student films, made from the same raw materials, were the result of the conceptual plasticity and creative flexibility of the editing process”.

The phenomenon of recut and mash up trailers began to become significant in 2005 when a recut trailer for The Shining (1980) created by Robert Ryang for a competition, was released on the internet. The original film is about Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) who becomes the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel in the secluded mountains of Colorado. Jack, being a family man, takes his wife and son to the hotel to keep him company throughout the long and isolated nights. During their stay strange things occur when Jack's son Danny sees gruesome images powered by a force called "The Shining" and Jack is heavily affected by this. Along with writer's block and the demons of the hotel haunting him Jack has a complete mental breakdown and the situation takes a sinister turn for the worse (Niam Dodd). In the recut trailer, Ryang has taken clips of the Torrance family in scenes where they appear smiling and happy to give the appearance of a fun family atmosphere. Ryang compliments this with a voice over to help give further depth to the narrative which says “Meet Jack Torrance, he’s a writer looking for inspiration” combined with medium shots of Jack attempting to write his book and gain publication for it, this then switches to shots of the young boy Danny, at which stage he is introduced “Meet Danny, he’s a kid looking for a dad”, this creates connotations of the film being about the foundations of a family and the love between the two as Jack says “Im your new foster father”. Various shots of Jack, Danny and Wendy (the mum and wife), together is accompanied by the song Solsbury Hill (Peter Gabriel) which when put together gives connotations of a family who are happy and having fun whilst staying in the hotel and indicates to the audience that the film is of the romantic-comedy genre which is of great contrast to the original film which was located in the horror/thriller genre. This being one of the first recut trailers, started a trend that many more people followed and began to release their own recut and mash up trailers on the internet, and is a great vehicle of discovery to show the world how editing can be used, how it can change, how it can manipulate and how it can contain vast amounts of power.

In 2004 a film directed by Adam McKay (SNL (2000/1), Step Brothers (2008)), Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) was released, in the same year after the first film was released another follow up was released called Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie (2004). The second film was edited together through taking unused footage, alternate takes, cleverly edited pre-existing scenes, and additional voice-over narration from TV journalist Bill Kurtis to establish the story, then follows a completely different plot arc that was cut from the main film (Spout, N.D. [Online]). Whilst unsurprisingly the film was not as well rated or as funny as the first film, it only served to show how effective editing can be especially considering that this was footage that was considered unusable or unsuitable for the film itself but then was able to be used to good effect by the clever work on part of the editing team. This brings us to DVD’s many of which include deleted scenes and alternative endings, which when watched by the audience can make them realise how a scene that has been deleted from the final cut could have a major effect on the direction of the film and in turn their perception of the film which could change their assessment of the genre itself. Some films, such as The Butterfly Effect (2003), can be released on DVD as two different takes on the film, the normal cut and directors cut, this is generally due to conflict between different parts of the film between the studio and the director, but shows the audience a new perspective.

In the one of the recent studies conducted by Visch and Tan (2007) they proved the velocity of a film, when changed in the editing process, could affect the genre of the film, this therefore supports part of the argument that the editing process can affect the audiences perceptions, although this is only a small part of the editing process it can still prove that this is part of the process that is able to affect the perceptions of genre. In the other study that was conducted Visch and Tan (2008) stated that audience’s process films into genres to increase their enjoyment and enable connectivity to the film that they are watch, this is why they constantly refine their genre categories so that they can feel the accurate emotions to fit in with what they are watching. These studies both support the idea that because audiences detect the genre of a film via cues, then if the editing process has created these cue through techniques (e.g. velocity) then we can theorise that the editing techniques have affected the filmic cues and therefore shaped the genre of the film.

Chapter 5 Conclusion

The research concluded in this paper indentifies that the editing process is one that can be used to shape and control the audience’s emotions and enable them to connect with a film and in doing so they can then become familiar with the genre of that film in their minds. The genre is not only affected by the editing process but also by the audience’s perceptions of what they consider that genre to be, and so it is all influenced as a circular development. Different editing techniques control the outcome of a film, phenomenon’s such as recut trailers have made this apparent by enabling audiences to see that footage can be taken and cut, twisted and manipulated to fit in with a certain genre, even if that was not the intended genre when it was filmed, this is also apparent in deleted scenes, alternate endings and directors cuts, each of which can give the audience a perspective which was not seen in the final cut. Editing is a very powerful tool, and as more and more people are beginning to access it, they too are discovering and acknowledging its power, it is a power that cannot only create a film but create the emotive and contextual surroundings, and allow a genre to be deciphered via the audience.

The continuation of this research in the next stage of this project will enable the argued theories in this paper to be founded on a solid standing and give depth and new knowledge in the area of editing. As Sullivan (2005) states “the experience of the artist is the core element in the creation of new knowledge and the potential for new understanding is further enhanced through research projects that may take varied forms such as exhibitions, performances and publications”, this is true both for researchers and projects alike and tells us that to fully understand a subject area it must be first researched and then conducted in experiments.




References

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Einstein, Picasso, Agatha and Chaplin by Regina Goncalves
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Voice & Vision – A Creative Approach to Narrative Film and DV Production, Mick Hurbis-Cherrier, Burlington, USA, Focal Press, 2007