4.3.3: Editing Space and Time

Edits allow the camera and the viewer to jump across space and across time.

In the hundred or so years since Kuleshov and Eisenstein, we’ve learned a lot about how editing works, both as filmmakers and as audience members. In fact, we know it so well we hardly have to give it much thought. We’ve fully accepted the idea that cinema uses editing to not only manipulate our emotions through techniques like the Kuleshov Effect but also to manipulate space and time itself. When a film or TV episode cuts from one location to another, we rarely wonder whether the characters on screen teleported or otherwise broke the laws of physics (unless, of course, it’s a film about wizards). We intuitively understand that edits allow the camera – and, by implication, the viewer – to jump across space and across time to keep the story moving at a steady clip.

The most obvious example of this is the ellipsis, an edit that slices out time or events we don’t need to see to follow the story. Imagine a scene where a car pulls up in front of a house and then cuts to a woman at the door ringing the doorbell. We don’t need to spend the screen time watching her shut off the car, climb out, shut and lock the door, and walk all the way up to the house. The cut is an ellipsis, and none of us will wonder if she somehow teleported from her car to the front door (unless, again, she’s a wizard). And if you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize ellipses are crucial to telling a story cinematically. If we had to show every moment in every character’s experience, films would take years or even decades to make, much less watch!

Other ways cinema manipulates time include sequences like flashbacks and flashforwards. Filmmakers use these when they want to show events from a character’s past or foreshadow what’s coming in the future. They’re also a great indicator of how far cinematic language has evolved over time. Back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, when editors were first experimenting with techniques like flashbacks, they needed ways to signal to the audience, “Hey, we’re about to go back in time!” They would employ music – usually harp music (I’m not sure why, but it was a thing) – and visual cues like blurred focus or warped images to indicate a flashback. As audiences became more fluent in this new addition to cinematic language, they didn’t need the visual cues anymore. Today, movies often move backward and forward in time, trusting the audience to “read” the scene in its proper context without any prompts. Think of films like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), which plays with time throughout, rearranging the sequence of events in the plot for dramatic effect and forcing the viewer to keep up. Or a more recent film like Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women (2019), which also moves backward and forwards in time, hinting at the shift through mise-en-scène and subtle changes in performance.

Another more subtle way editing manipulates time is in the overall rhythm of the cinematic experience. And no, I don’t mean the music, though, that can help. I mean the pace of the finished film, how the edits speed up or slow down to serve the story, producing a rhythm to the edit.

Take the work of Kelly Reichardt, for example. As both director and editor on almost all of her films, she creates a specific rhythm that echoes the time and space of her characters:

Sometimes, an editor lets each shot play out, giving plenty of space between the cuts, creating a slow, even rhythm to a scene. Or they might cut from image to image quickly, letting each flash across the screen for mere moments, creating a fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat rhythm. In either case, the editor has to consider how long do we need to see each shot. In fact, there’s a scientific term for how long it takes us to register visual information: the content curve. A relatively simple shot of a child’s smile might have a very short content curve. A more complex shot with multiple planes of view and maybe even text to read would have a much longer content curve. Editing is all about balancing the content curve with the needs of the story and the intent of the director for the overall rhythm of each scene and the finished film as a whole.

This is why editing is much more than simply assembling the shots. It is an art that requires an intuitive sense of how a scene, sequence, and finished film should move and how it should feel. Most editors describe their process as both technical and intuitive, requiring thinking and feeling: