Editing

Editing is used to construct a narrative. It is used to change long boring scenes into quick visual bursts of information. The simplest form of editing is a cut, a cut is named so as in old fashioned film making they split the best parts of the film from unneeded ones, by physically cutting them. In the assassination scene of North by North west, between Roger Thornhill getting out of his taxi and looking out of the United Nations Building, there are roughly 16 cuts. These are most frequent during the conversation scene. The pace of the editing can be used to create tension. For example, in the shower scene of Psycho it is incredibly fast but, when Marion dies, the pace slows to show the life slowly leaving her (see here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atjhOhH-V3E ). There are more complex styles of editing which involve dissolve, where one scene fades into another, overlapping for a moment. Fade out and/or fade in shows a scene that, fades to black or white quickly fading to another scene. Used very cleverly in Psycho, an iris transition shows one scene in the centre of another, like the iris of an eye. A different form of cut is the jump cut. This is where, two scenes with a common element, one after the other, something tends to stay the same but everything else changed. The change between the scenes is very fast.

 

Conversation scene, in North by Northwest.

 

 

 

Iris scene in Psycho, Marion's eye and the blood washing down the plug hole- an exact graphic match.