12 Sound and Editing

The subjects of our last two chapters—sound and editing—were both too large to be easily contained in a single week. But the ways in which they overflow the limits of our previous discussions works well in terms of thinking about how they ultimately come together in the postproduction process. As an example, let’s return to our somewhat compressed discussion of visual transitions in Chapter 10 and now add the element of sound to the discussion.

Towards the end of that chapter we introduced a concept that is familiar to any of you who have done even the most basic of video editing: transitions between scenes. Within a scene, a simple splice is usually deployed, minimizing the attention to the cut between shots and striving to maintain continuity of space within that scene. On the other hand, an edit marking the shift from one scene to the next needs to both convey the shift to another space and (in most cases) to another time (usually some time after the preceding scene). Here is an example from the opening of the cantina sequence in Star Wars: A New Hope (dir. George Lucas, 1977), in which visual and sound editing serves to create out of discrete shots a sense of a continuous spatial whole. In this clip, I first run the sequence in real-time and then slow it down so we can look at the edits more closely:

Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes were not in fact playing live at Chalmun’s Spaceport Cantina the day Luke met Han Solo. No, we know they were not playing there that day because of course the band does not exist, nor does the Spaceport Cantina. If we have a sense of the space and feel of the Cantina, it is largely through art direction and editing, and the music plays a big role in it. The song the fictional band is playing is known as “Mad About Me,” based, as director George Lucas suggested, on the feel of an old Benny Goodman dixieland song. Composer John Williams assembled a group of musicians (trumpet, saxophones, clarinet, electric piano, a Caribbean steel drum and other percussion). The music editor then edited the recorded music to make it sound a bit less like traditional jazz, adding reverb and compressing the sound to make it sound a bit more “alien.” While they may have been playing some dixieland jazz on set during rehearsals to create the ambiance, none of the actual music we hear on screen was playing during shooting. It was recorded and overlaid during postproduction, serving as a vital glue for forging the spatial relations implied by the visual edits (also, a super-catchy tune that led to this strangely popular 1977 disco version, “Star Wars Theme/ Cantina Band” [1977]).

The edits designed to establish relations within the scene are generally not going to call attention to themselves. They are constructed in most narrative film so as to feel akin to a blink of the eye. Of course, transitions between scenes leads to a very different kind of edit, one designed to transport us to a different time and space. And no one in modern cinema routinely called as much attention to such transitions as Lucas. In Star Wars, Lucas famously asked his editor, Marsha Lucas, to use wipes and other heavy-handed transitions in the film when marking major changes in scene. Such transitions had been a familiar device in the B-movie serials from the 1930s that were one of Lucas’s main inspirations. Here for example is chapter six of a 1936 Flash Gordon serial:

In this 18 minute episode there are several wipes used. Here are just a few:

These kind of transitions were not widely used in the 1930s, but they did show up in serials and other B-movies with some frequency for the simple reason that they helped mark clear distinctions between scenes and locations in the story world. In these low-budget films, the set design was minimalistic, meaning a change in scene wasn’t always legible as such to audiences. A wipe was an easy way of letting the viewer know that we were now somewhere else. In prestige films of the classical studio era, such transitions were used much less often.

By the 1970s, this form of transition was considered old-fashioned and somewhat cheesy, but that was precisely part of Lucas’s interest in the device. The film was an  homage to the adventure films of his youth (including 1930s Flash Gordon, which he would have seen on TV in the 1950s). One suspects there was also a concern that his audience would not be able to follow his increasingly complicated story world as we bounced from planet to planet (and Death Star). After all, interplanetary space opera had not been tried on this scale in film before. Here is a supercut of every wipe used in Star Wars (1977):

The wipes you see here in this supercut show several different variations: first we see a diagonal wipe, followed by a vertical wipe and then a barn-door wipe and a clock wipe. And so on. There was hardly a wipe in the toolbox that did not get used in the film, and indeed, while I loved the first film at age 11 in 1977, by the time The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980, I was already enough of a  budding  film nerd to find it all a bit embarrassing. Why would any film as cool as Star Wars want to deploy a technique that so obviously called attention to its edits by using this outlandishly old-fashioned technique, I wondered. Part of me still wonders, I confess, but indeed they have become so fully a part of the editing style of Star Wars films over the course of 40-odd years that we hardly attend to them (their use has indeed gotten less frequent, but at this point fans would protest if they were to disappear altogether).

For all their corniness, however, it is important to recognize that the use of the wipe in Star Wars films allowed for the transition not just from, say, one house to another house, but from one planet to another. Here are some annotated examples:

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Before we turn to sound editing, let’s cover the full range of visual edits commonly deployed in postproduction:

Some of these we know well from earlier chapters, but some are new. Let’s review the new terms with brief visual definitions to accompany the textual definitions in the table above.

Crosscutting cuts back and forth between a larger action, allowing the viewer to focus on it in smaller slices that are assembled through the back-and-forth of the edit. It is indispensable in big fight scenes in war movies and superhero movies, when there are too many actions and characters to meaningfully occupy the frame all at once. Below is an example from the battle towards the end of Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2018), in which Okoye and her fellow warriors attempt to take down Killmonger while T’Challa is struggling to prevent the dispersal of  Wakandan military tech. There is simply too much happening—and all of it too widely dispersed across the plain—to be shown in one shot. Crosscutting is used to bring them together so that the viewer understands them as happening simultaneously.

The complexity of Inception‘s dream-levels requires complex cross-cutting for it to be comprehensible to the viewer. Note here how the editing sets up relationships between the actions taking place simultaneously in multiple dream levels:

Parallel editing is a subset of cross-cutting. Indeed, today many use the terms interchangeably, and I have no problem with that—especially as the distinction can be a bit fussy. But I think the distinction is worth pausing over as it gets as the different ways in which this technique can be used narratively. If in the scene above from Black Panther we cut between various aspects of a larger battle, in parallel editing we are cutting between two very different spaces and actions that can be, at first glance, not clearly related. Perhaps the most famous example of parallel editing is the famous baptism sequence from The Godfather (1972):

Here we cut back and forth between Michael Cin church, faithfully reciting the words of the baptism ceremony for his godson, and various scenes of his soldiers gunning down members of the opposition in New York City’s organized crime world. We understand by the use of the crosscutting technique that the scenes are unfolding roughly at the same time. And it is the jarring juxtaposition of the scenes—one a holy ritual, and the other a wholesale slaughter—that causes us to reflect on the relationship between the parallel actions:  Michael disavowing the devil and all his works, even as he has unleashed satanic violence on the city.  Throughout the 5-minute scene, the pace of the cuts increases, building the tension until we arrive to the orgy of violence we know is coming.

Even though our definition of cross-cutting does not reference sound, the role of sound in this sequence is crucial, as it bridges the two juxtaposed worlds—of God and of Crime—and plays out uninterrupted as the cuts continue. In addition, even as the priest and the church organ continue, we also get diegetic sound from the other spaces to which we travel, the two mixing together—gunshots and cathedral organs. So while our definition focuses on the visual elements, we must also pay attention to how the sound is being edited and mixed as it is the combination of the two edits—visual and sound—that makes the scene work.

If in the above sequence the parallel editing serves to show the now-complete transformation of Michael from the sweet young soldier we met at the film’s beginning into the monster capable of murdering everyone in his path (including the father of his godson), parallel editing can be used for different effects as well. Here is a nicely annotated scene from towards the end of Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991) in which the editing suggests to the viewer that the FBI have finally arrived at the house of the serial killer and his surviving victim. However, as you will see in this sequence, the cross-cutting sets up a false expectation on the part of the viewer that actually deepens the suspense when we realize that the FBI were at the wrong house and our protagonist, Clarice Starling, is at the right one… alone:

Continuing with our list of visual edits: a Cut-away is closely related to a cut-in, and as far as I am concerned, you can use them somewhat interchangeably in many circumstances. Insert shot is also used synonymously at times. We can be more precise, however, with a few  examples.

A cut-in shifts from the main shot to some detail in the shot we could not read fully without the “cutting in” to the shot. Here are two examples, the first from Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000) and the second from The Big Lebowski (dir. Coen brothers, 1998):

In both of these cases, we see the paper in the master shot but cannot read it until the cut-in shot gives us that access.

In the case of a cut-away, we are cutting away from the master shot of the scene to some detail we cannot see. That detail can be something a character is thinking (a flashback or memory), but more often it is something that is simply not contained within the frame. In scene below, our protagonist in Goodfellas comes to his mob boss Paulie to beg for help, and we cut to a detail in the scene that is not necessarily visible (although it is audible) which adds something to the overall scene in terms of explaining the characters or providing insight into the larger events unfolding. Here, as our protagonist prepares to accept his exile, we are reminded of earlier scenes in which food was being prepared when he was part of the “family”:

In this scene from early in The Godfather, the cutaway allows us to see the object of the narrative Michael Corleone is telling Kay, even as the singer, Johnny, is behind Michael and not contained visually in the master shot.

It is worth noting in the above examples that the off-screen information which requires the cut-away to be visible on the screen is in fact audible in both cases, a reminder of the ways in which sound and visual information travel differently to the viewer/listener.

The match-on-action we have seen before in Chapter 10 in our discussion of match cuts, and, of course, dissolves, fades, and wipes are easily identified on screen. One last edit worth focusing on before we return to sound, however, is the jump cut, which tends to push against many of our conventions in Hollywood-style narrative film by explicitly calling attention to the cut as a gap. This device was frequently used in the movement known as the French New Wave, which sought to differentiate its style from the dominant American approach to editing. Here is an example of a jump cut from Breathless (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1961):

Here, instead of the continuity editing style with which we are familiar, we see what we might understand as a discontinuity style. Yet, despite the “jumps,” we can still follow the narrative action, and the whole scene plays out as if in highly-charged fragments, creating a very different feel and unique responsibility on the part of the viewer. The jump cut is one way in which a film can let us know that we need to be attentive viewers if we are to follow the narrative to follow.

Jump cuts can be put to different effects, however. For example, they can be used to convey the passing of time, as in this scene from Little Shop of Horrors (dir. Frank Oz, 1986):

And they can be put to very effective use in horror films, in the service of the “jump scare.” This scene from The Ring (dir. Gore Verbinski, 2002) uses the device perfectly as our monster moves in on a soon-to-be-late character:

All of these visual transitions, from cut to wipe, are always accompanied by sound transitions as well. These sound transitions are less precisely named; as we have seen, we have a much thinner vocabulary in film analysis for sound than we do for visual elements. But we do have some terms that are useful.

First, we can describe sound as synchronous or asynchronous, referring to the match between the visual track and the soundtrack. Of course, most sound is edited meticulously to be synchronous. But asynchronous sound can be used to communicate certain kinds of information and effect. Below is an example from Night of the Living Dead (dir. George Romero, 1968), the first modern zombie movie, in which the asynchronous sound conveys the chaos and disorientation of the first encounter with a zombie:

The visual and sound track in film are most edited to be synchronous, but very frequently we will find examples of what is called a split edit. This refers to any edit in which the sound starts before or after the cut (that is, is not synchronized with the cut). When the audio from the preceding scene overlaps into the visual track of the second, it is referred to as an L-cut. When the audio from the subsequent scene begins before the visual track has cut to that scene, it is called a J-cut. Here is an example of a J-cut from The Matrix (1999), in which the sound of Neo’s alarm begins before we see the visual track that shows us the alarm in his bedroom:

And here is an example of an L-cut from Silence of the Lambs, as the audio from Clarice’s conversation on the phone continues even after the visual track has cut away from her on the phone to the self-storage business she has just discovered:

The other place where we almost invariable encounter J-cuts and L-cuts is in the filming of conversation. In Chapter 10, we looked at the ways in which conversation are edited visually using crosscutting between the speakers, cameras positioned behind their shoulders. What we can note now, however, is that sound is almost never edited synchronously with the cuts between shots. Here is an example from Shaun of the Dead:

We begin with a two-shot, showing where Shaun and Ed are sitting in the Winchester pub, serving as a master shot for the scene. Then we cut to a very drunk Shaun, seeing his reaction to Ed’s proposal (more drinking), even as Ed’s voice continues. We then cut to Ed, who says “Talk to me.” And Shaun begins his reply—”She said…”—before the cut back to him. This overlapping sound and visual information feels natural, allowing us to capture reactions as well as the details of the words spoken, and creating a more seamless conversation. By contrast, we can look at this clip from Pulp Fiction (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 1994), which deliberately violates both the conventions of camera setup and the use of J- and L-cuts when editing a conversation:

The goal here is of course to convey the stiff artificiality of the conversation, and the lack of overlapping sound makes the whole thing feel more artificial, as if assembled out of spare parts.

The crucial thing is to be paying attention to edits in film on both the visual and the auditory level. Every edit is always at least two edits (visual and sound), and on the sound track of course we can pay attention to the ways in which, for example, diegetic and non-diegetic sound can be edited differently across these transitions.

Let’s end this chapter by looking at a sequence from towards the end of Snatch (dir. Guy Ritchie, 2000) that brings many of these elements together. Brad Pitt’s character, Mickey, has been forced to participate in a bare-knuckle fight arranged by the mobster who had murdered his mother, ordered to put on a convincing fight but to go down at a certain point in the film. Mickey seems to be going along with it, until of course he isn’t. The editor,  Jon Harris, and the sound team led by Matthew Collinge, tell the story of the event twice: first from the perspective of our narrator, “Turkish” (played by Jason Statham), whose neck is on the line along with Mickey’s, and then a second time, now cross-cutting between the fight and the actions of Mickey’s fellow-Travellers (Irish gypsies) who are wreaking their revenge on the mobsters who attacked them.

The clip begins late in the fight. Mickey has not been putting on a convincing show, and the crowd is growing unruly, suspecting a fix. Mickey has already been hit many times, and he is feeling a bit wobbly, as conveyed by the asynchronous sound as Turkish shouts at him, the words not aligning with his mouth. The sound team has also overly compressed the sound of Turkish’s voice so it sounds muffled and unnatural, conveying the subjective experience of Mickey’s ringing ears. Meanwhile the non-diegetic music—the unfortunately titled “Fuckin’ in the Bushes” (2000) by Oasis—is fading in and out in the background.

Mickey takes numerous blows and seems clearly to be doing his part to go down as demanded by the gangster, especially when a punch literally lifts him off his feet and sends him crashing to the canvas…. and then down through it into the water below. Of course, we know there is no actual water below, and that this sinking into the waters represents Mickey heading towards unconsciousness. The sounds of the crowd drop away and we hear mostly the rippling sound of the water. As Turkish says, all he needs to do is stay down. But of course, as we learn in the second telling of the story—another example of iterative narrative—it was never his intention to lose.

The editing here in both versions is masterful both in the visual and the soundtrack. Listen to the sound design and mixing, to the ways in which the sounds play off the rhythms of the visual edits, especially in the second telling of the story when the sounds of the Travellers attacks blend with the sounds of the fight and the Oasis song, creating an entirely new medley—and allowing us to see everything that has transpired up to this point from an entirely different perspective. This is an example of a film which is elevated above its script (which is solid) and its director (who is good enough) by its editors. And you know what: that is just fine by me. After all, as Hitchcock says, editing is the essence of the art.