Shots
A shot is what is recorded between the time a camera starts and the time it stops, that is, between the director’s call for “action” and the call to “cut.” Perhaps the average shot is about ten seconds (very rarely a fraction of a second, and usually not more than fifteen or so seconds). The average film is about an hour and a half, with about 600 shots, but Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) uses 1,360 shots. Three common shots are (1) a long shot or establishing shot, showing the main object at a considerable distance from the camera and thus presenting it in relation to its general surroundings (for example, captured soldiers, seen across a prison yard, entering the yard); (2) a medium shot, showing the object in relation to its immediate surroundings (a couple of soldiers, from the knees up, with the yard’s wall behind them); and (3) a close-up, showing only the main object, or, more often, only a part of it (a soldier’s face or his bleeding feet).

In the outside world we can narrow our vision to the detail that interests us by moving our head and by focusing our eyes, ignoring what is not of immediate interest. The close-up is the movie director’s chief way of directing our vision and of emphasizing a detail. (Another way is to focus sharply on the significant image, leaving the rest of the image in soft focus.) The close-up, a way of getting emphasis, has been heavily used in recent years, not always successfully. As Dwight Macdonald said of John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Getting Straight (1970), “a movie told in close-ups is like a comic book, or like a novel composed in punchy one-sentence paragraphs and set throughout in large caps. How refreshing is a long or middle shot, a glimpse of the real world, so lovely and so far away, in the midst of those interminable processions of [a] hairy ogre face.”

Two excellent film versions of Shakespeare’s Henry V nicely show the different effects that long shots and close-ups can produce. Laurence Olivier’s version (1944) uses abundant long shots and, on the whole, conveys a highly pictorial sweeping epic version of the war in which Henry was engaged. The film was made during World War II as a patriotic effort to inspire the English by showing the heroism of combat. On the other hand, Kenneth Branagh’s version, made in 1989, uses lots of close-ups of soldiers with mud-splattered faces, emphasizing the grittiness of war. Olivier brought out the splendor and romance, Branagh the labor and pain of war.

While taking a shot, the camera can move: It can swing to the right or left while its base remains fixed (a pan shot), up or down while fixed on its axis (a tilt shot), forward or backward (a traveling shot), or in and out and up and down fastened to a crane (a crane shot). The zoom lens, introduced in the 1950s and widespread by the middle 1960s, enables the camera to change its focus fluidly so that it can approach a detail—as a traveling shot does—while remaining fixed in place. Much will depend on the angle (high or low) from which the shots are made. If the camera is high (a high-angle shot), looking down on figures, it usually will dwarf them, perhaps even reduce them to crawling insects, making them vulnerable, pitiful, or contemptible. The higher the angle, the more likely it is to suggest a God’s-eye view of entrapped people. If the camera is low (a low-angle shot), close to the ground and looking up, thereby showing figures against the sky, it probably will give them added dignity. In Murnau’s Last Laugh, we first get low-angle shots of the self-confident doorman, communicating his grand view of himself; later, when he loses his strength and is reduced to working as a lavatory attendant, we see him from above, and he seems dwarfed. But these are not invariable principles. A shot in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), for example, shows Kane from above, but it does not dwarf him; rather, it shows him dominating his wife and then in effect obliterating her by casting a shadow over her. Similarly, a low-angle shot does not always add dignity: Films in which children play important parts often have lots of low-angle shots showing adults as menacing giants, and in Dr. Strangelove (1964) Stanley Kubrick regularly photographed Colonel Jack D. Ripper from low angles, thus emphasizing the colonel’s power. In Citizen Kane, Kane is often photographed from floor level, similarly emphasizing his power, but some low-angle shots late in the film, showing him in his cavernous mansion, help convey his loneliness. In short, by its distance from the subject, its height from the ground, and its angle of elevation, the camera comments on or interprets what happens. It seems to record reality, but it offers its own version. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the camera always lies, that is, gives a personal vision of reality.

Slow motion and fast motion also offer comments. In Branagh’s Henry V, as in Orson Welles’s Falstaff, part of a battle is filmed in slow motion; thus, the weariness of the soldiers is emphasized. On the other hand, a fast-motion shot of factory workers or of vacationers betting in Las Vegas will—probably comically—emphasize their frantic activity.

Sequences
A group of related scenes—such as the three scenes of soldiers mentioned earlier—is a sequence, though a sequence is more likely to have thirty scenes than three. A sequence corresponds roughly to a chapter in a novel, the shots being sentences and the scenes being paragraphs. Within a sequence may be an intercut, a switch to another action that, for example, provides an ironic comment on the main action of the sequence. If intercuts are so abundant in a sequence that, in effect, two or more sequences are going at once (for example, shots of the villain about to ravish the heroine, alternating with shots of the hero riding to her rescue), we have parallel editing (also called a cross-cut). In the example just given, probably the tempo would increase, the shots being progressively shorter as we get to the rescue. Though often a sequence will have an early establishing shot, it need not. Sometimes an establishing shot is especially effective if delayed, as in Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943), in which scenes of a witch tied to the top rungs of a ladder lead to a long shot of the context: The witch has been tied to the top of a tall ladder near a great heap of burning faggots. Still at a distance, the next shot shows the soldiers tilting the ladder up into the air and onto the pyre.

Transitions
Within a sequence, the transitions normally are made by straight cuts—a strip of film is spliced to another, and the result is an instantaneous transfer from one shot to the next. Usually, an audience is scarcely (if at all) conscious of transitions from, say, a long shot of a character to a medium shot of her or him, or from a close-up of a speaker to a close-up of her or his auditor. But sometimes the director wants the audience to be fully aware of the change, as an author may emphasize a change by beginning a new paragraph or, even more sharply, by beginning a new chapter. Two older, and now rather unfashionable, relatively conspicuous transitions are sometimes still used, usually between sequences rather than within a sequence. These are the dissolve (the shot dissolves while a new shot appears to emerge from beneath it, there being a moment when we get a superimposition of both scenes), and the fade (in the fade-out the screen grows darker until black; in the fade-in the screen grows lighter until the new scene is fully visible). In effect the camera is saying “Let us now leave X and turn to Y,” or “Two weeks later.” In Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) a prehistoric apelike creature discovers that it can use a bone as a tool, and it destroys a skeleton with it. Then it throws the bone triumphantly into the air, where the bone dissolves into a spaceship of the year 2001. The point is that the spaceship is the latest of our weapons and that progress is linked with destructiveness. Two older methods, even less in favor today than the dissolve and the fade but used in many excellent old films and in some modern films that seek an archaic effect, are the wipe (a sort of windshield wiper crosses the screen, wiping off the first scene and revealing the next), and the iris (in an iris-in, the new scene first appears in the center of the previous scene and then this circle expands until it fills the screen; an iris-out shows the new scene first appearing along the perimeter and then the circle closes in on the previous scene). Charles Chaplin more than once ended a scene with an iris-out of the tramp walking jauntily toward the horizon. François Truffaut used iris shots in The Wild Child (1970), suggesting by the encircling darkness the boy’s isolation from most of the world surrounding him as he concentrated on a single object before him. In Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), a wipe is used with no archaic effect: An industrialist, trying to decide whether to pay an enormous ransom to free a child, has been told to toss the money from a train; the scene showing him arriving at his decision in his luxurious home is wiped off by a train that rushes across the screen. He has decided to pay.

Editing
All of the transitions discussed a moment ago are examples of editing techniques. A film, no less than a poem or a play or a picture or a palace, is something made, and it is not made by simply exposing some film footage. Shots—often taken at widely separated times and places—must be appropriately joined. For example, we see a man look off to the right, and then we get a shot of what he is looking at and then a shot of his reaction. Until the shots are assembled, we don’t have a film—we merely have the footage. The Russian director V. I. Pudovkin put it this way: “The film is not shot, but built, built up from the separate strips of celluloid that are its raw material.” This building-up is the process of editing. In Film Technique Pudovkin gives some examples of editing:

1. In the simplest kind of editing, the film tells a story from the best viewpoints, that is, sometimes from long shots, sometimes from medium shots, sometimes from close-ups.
2. Simultaneous actions, occurring in different places, can be narrated by cutting back and forth from one to the other.
3. Relationships can be conveyed by contrast (shots of starvation cut in with shots of gluttony), by symbolism (in Pudovkin’s Mother [1926], shots of an ice floe melting are cut into shots of a procession of workers, thereby suggesting that the workers’ movement is a natural force coming to new life), and by leitmotiv (that is, repetition of the same shot to emphasize a recurring theme).

More than a story can be told, of course; something of the appropriate emotion can be communicated by juxtaposing, say, a medium-long shot of a group of impassively advancing soldiers against a close-up of a single terrified victim. Similarly, emotion can be communicated by the duration of the shots (quick shots suggest haste; prolonged shots suggest slowness) and by the lighting (progressively darker shots can suggest melancholy; progressively lighter shots can suggest hope or joy). An extremely obvious but effective example occurs in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), a satire on industrialism. We see a mass of workers hurrying to their jobs, and a moment later we see a herd of sheep on the move, this shot providing a bitter comic comment on the previous shot.

The Russian theorists of film called this process of building by quick cuts montage. The theory held that shots, when placed together, add up to more than the sum of the parts. Montage, for them, was what made a film a work of art and not a mere replica of reality. American writers commonly use the term merely to denote quick cutting, and French writers use it merely in the sense of cutting.¹

All this talk about ingenious shots and their arrangement, then, assumes that the camera is a sort of pen, carefully setting forth images and thus at every point guiding the perceiver. The director (through the actors, camera technicians, cutters, and a host of others) makes an artifact, rather as a novelist makes a book or a sculptor makes a statue, and this artifact is an elaborate contraption that manipulates the spectators by telling them at every second exactly how they ought to feel. But since the 1950s, a reaction has occurred against such artistry, a feeling that although the elaborate editing of Sergei Eisenstein and the other Russians is an aesthetic triumph, it is also a moral failure because by its insistent tricky commentary it seems to deny the inherent worth of the event in itself as it happens. Moreover, just as the nineteenth-century narrator in the novel, who continually guided the reader (“Do not fear, gentle reader, for even at this moment plans were being laid...”) was in the twentieth-century novel sloughed off, forcing the readers in large measure to deduce the story for themselves, so, too, some contemporary filmmakers emphasize improvisation, fully aware that the film thus made will not at every point guide or dominate the viewer. Rather, the viewers of such a film become something of creators themselves, making the work of art by sorting out the relevant from the irrelevant images. The American author and sometime filmmaker Norman Mailer, in an essay on his film Maidstone (1971), calls attention to the fact that in making this sort of film the camera, expecting an interesting bit of acting, may zoom in on what later turns out to be dull, but the scene is not deleted or shot again. The dull parts, the mistakes, are kept, and what was missed is not reenacted. In Maidstone, Mailer says, “When significant movement was captured, it was now doubly significant because one could not take it for granted. Watching film became an act of interpretation and restoration for what was missed.”

¹ You don’t have to be in Hollywood or in Russia or France to write a script. You may find it challenging and entertaining to recall either some incident you were involved in or a scene from a novel and then to recast it as a script, indicating shots, camera angles, lighting, and sound track.

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