Continuity editing is one of those things that tend to be taken for granted . If you work in the film business or have an interest in how films work, you already know what it is. If you’re the typical film viewer or home streamer you are effortlessly consuming films constructed using the techniques of continuity editing without needing to know anything about it.
Films can be made without editing, as were the first films screened for the public by the Lumiere Brothers in 1895. These films don’t have cuts: instead each simply shows the record of whatever happened in front of it for as long as the film stock lasted. That in itself was something new at the time—people had seen magic lantern shows and the like, but there was something fascinating about seeking actual workers leaving an actual factory that held people’s attention although they probably wouldn’t stop to look at a similar scene happening in real life. Some of these early films also told a story of sorts—like the mischievous boy standing on the garden hose and getting smacked for his efforts—but the action took place continuously before the camera.
A continuously-recording camera has its limitations in terms of storytelling, but you have to find a way to use cuts so the audience can understand the story being told. So the early filmmakers developed a film language employing a number of techniques, like shot/reverse shot, match on action, and the 180° rule, that allowed them to construct films using editing without confusing their audiences. These conventions were pretty settled by 1910 and were used by filmmakers around the globe, as they still are today. So we know that continuity editing works, but do we know why?
Enter Sermin Ildirar, who became “obsessed” (her word) with continuity editing while working in the film industry. Her question: how is it that films are shot out of order, with multiple angles for the same shot, and yet by the time the completed film gets to the audience, they have no problem understanding it as one unified whole? So she went back to school to learn how it all works (and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at the University of London) and describes some of her research in this film.
During her academic studies, Ildirar came across the claim that continuity editing echoes real-life perception by mimicking the ways we already see the world: cutting is like blinking, selective focus approximates the way our visual field works, and so on. That’s a difficult proposition to test, given that most people grow up with at least some exposure to film and television and hence to the continuity conventions. When she heard about a remote region of Turkey where people had never seen a car before, she reasoned that they probably had not seen a film either, and residents’ reactions to the conventions of continuity editing might tell us something about whether you have to learn to understand continuity conventions or if they are so natural that you grasp it upon first exposure. I’m not going to give away the results, but they offer a real lesson in the benefits of testing the assumptions everyone else accepts without question.
Director Chad Freidrichs (The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, The Experimental City) works with traditional documentary materials—mostly talking heads and archival materials—but he’s made a good selection (it’s always the right time to listen to David Bordwell and Walter Murch) and they’re put together well enough that even a film newbie should have no trouble following. For people already familiar with film study the Film School 101 bits may seem unnecessarily basic, but sometimes that’s the price of inclusivity. | Sarah Boslaugh
The Cinema Within is distributed on DVD and streaming by First Run Features.
