In the 1920s, Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov conducted a series of experiments designed to demonstrate that when two separate shots are projected in succession, the viewer assumes a connection between them. In one experiment, Kuleshov spliced together a series of shots that had been taken in different places and at different times. The shots were of a waiting man, a walking woman, a gate, a staircase and a mansion. Kuleshov's viewers—who interpreted the sequence as a man and a woman meeting at the gate in front of the mansion—had, in essence, inferred a whole narrative on the basis of seeing only portions of it. This effect allows filmmakers to use exteriors and interiors miles apart and imply that they are in the same place, to have people filmed on different days appear to be talking to each other, to have actors seemingly facing dangerous situations, or to imply that what actors are thinking about is represented by a subsequent cutaway image.
The Kuleshov effect is an editing technique that illustrates how the human brain tries to find connections between objects when viewed together. Other editing techniques rely on how the human eye works. For example, there usually must be an appropriate change in distance for a shot not to seem like a mistake or "jump" cut. The direction in which things move across the screen is also an editorial concern. A car that exits the screen on the right is expected in a subsequent shot to reappear on the left—otherwise the car could be perceived as a different car coming from the opposite direction. Scenes featuring characters in opposition to each other (a hero and villain, for example) usually feature one character continually facing one direction with the other character continually facing the other direction. This keeps the two "sides" clear.
Storyboarding
Here is an example of a shot list for the comic strip illustrated below.
1. LS - Exterior of house. Day.
2. LS - Mom to boy. Boy facing right, Mom facing left. "You should call your Grandma."
3. MS - Overhead. Boy staring at phone facing right. Phone on right side of screen.
4. CU - Mom's face. Mom facing left. "You should call your Grandma."
5. ECU - Boy picking up phone. Hand enters from left side of screen.
6. CU - Boy on phone. Phone on left side of screen. Boy's right ear. "Hello, Grandma."
7. CU - Grandma on phone. Grandma facing left. "Why don't you call more often?"
8. CU - Boy staring at phone. Phone on left side of screen.
9. ECU - Phone. Boy's hand on left side.
10. CU - Boy hanging up phone. Phone on left side of screen. Boy looking at phone.
What happens if, instead of the current sequence, the panels are placed in a different order?
Example #1—1, 7, 6, 9, 10, 2 ,3, 4, 5, 8 (Grandma has called the boy from her house and, after hanging up, the boy is told to call his Grandma by his Mom.)
Example #2—5, 8,1, 7, 6, 9, 10, 2, 3, 4 (The boy calls Grandma, she admonishes him, the Mom says to call Grandma, and after he doesn't respond, reminds him again.)
Example #3—1, 3, 7, 5, 6, 9,10, 2, 4, 8 (The boy thinks about calling his Grandma, imagines what she would say, calls her, hangs up, and is told to call her by the Mom.)
Montage
Film editing can have its own unique logic as well, functioning in much the same manner as the brain with seemingly jumbled thoughts and images creating their own individual meaning. The groundwork for many of these techniques, later used by Alfred Hitchcock and others, was laid by a group of Soviet filmmakers—most notably Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin—who, in the early 1920s, began to experiment with film style and technique and especially with montage.
Montage, or collision editing, is done by splicing together a rapid sequence of carefully selected shots to evoke a specific emotional or intellectual response. The Russians' premise was that each shot derived meaning from the context in which it was placed. If the context changed, the meaning of the shot and the sequence also changed.
Montage, in the modern sense of the word, often refers to sequences where several shots have been edited together to compress a series of events that happen over time (e.g., sequences of young couples falling in love, scenes with flying calendar pages, etc.).
Psycho
In Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's famous shower scene uses a rapid series of extreme close-ups to build suspense and heighten the sense of panic. Many viewers believe they have seen a very brutal stabbing, even though the knife is never shown piercing the body of the victim.
Potemkin
This sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's 'Potemkin', one of the most famous in film history, recounts the brutal suppression of Russian workers and sympathizers following the death of proto-revolutionary figure Vakulinchuk onboard the Potemkin. Crewmen on the ship had mutinied due to oppressive working conditions and when they arrive at Odessa townspeople came to pay respects for Vakulinchuk and support the workers ... the film itself is based upon the failed 1905 Russian Revolution ... the Odessa sequence is a frightening precursor of government suppression of dissent throughout the 2Oth century, including, but certainly not limited, to Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Soweto (1976), Tiananmen Square (1989) - even Kent State (1970).
The Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, is the classic example of montage. In this sequence, the Czar's army is quashing an uprising. Eisenstein uses editing to show the fear of the people, their escalating panic, the tragedy of innocent bystanders as a baby in a carriage careens helplessly down the steps, and the intensifying threat of the soldiers, their guns and artillery.
Source: Young Minds Inspired and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
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For more information on narrative structures and post-production, click here and click here for class notes (courtesy and copyright of Prof. Christopher Moore).
JANET MURRAY: "HARBINGERS OF THE HOLODECK"
Murray, Janet. (1997). "Harbingers of the Holodeck", Hamlet on the Holodeck. New York: Free Press, 1997.
The final quarter of the twentieth century marks the beginning of the digital age. Starting in the 1970s, computers have become cheaper, faster, more capacious, and more connected to one another at exponential rates of improvement, merging previously disparate technologies of communication and representation into a single medium. The networked computer acts like a telephone in offering one-to-one real-time communication, like a television in broadcasting moving pictures, like an auditorium in bringing groups together for lectures and discussion, like a library in offering vast amounts of textual information for reference, like a museum in its ordered presentation of visual information, like a billboard, a radio, a gameboard, and even like a manuscript in its revival of scrolling text. All the major representational formats of the previous five thousand years of human history have now been translated into digital form. There is nothing that human beings have created that cannot be represented in this protean environment, from the cave paintings of Lascaux to real-time photographs of Jupiter, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Shakespeare's First Folio, from walk-through models of Greek temples to Edison's first movies. And the digital domain is assimilating greater powers of representation all the time, as researchers try to build within it a virtual reality that is as deep and rich as reality itself.
The technical and economic cultivation of this fertile new medium of communication has led to several new varieties of narrative entertainment. These new storytelling formats vary from the shoot-'em-up videogame and the virtual dungeons of Internet role-playing games to the postmodern literary hypertext. This wide range of narrative art holds the promise of a new medium of expression that is as varied as the printed book or the moving picture. Yet it would be a mistake to compare the first fruits of a new medium too directly with the accustomed yield of older media. We cannot use the English theater of the Renaissance or the novel of the nineteenth century or even the average Hollywood film or television drama of the 1990s as the standard by which to judge work in a medium that is going through such rapid technical change.
In 1455, Gutenberg invented the printing press-but not the book as we know it. Books printed before 1501 are called incunabula; the word is derived from the Latin for swaddling clothes and is used to indicate that these books are the work of a technology still in its infancy. It took fifty years of experimentation and more to establish such conventions as legible typefaces and proof sheet corrections; page numbering and paragraphing; and title pages, prefaces, and chapter divisions, which together made the published book a coherent means of communication. The garish videogames and tangled Web sites of the current digital environment are part of a similar period of technical evolution, part of a similar struggle for the conventions of coherent communication.'
Similarly, new narrative traditions do not arise out of the blue. A particular technology of communication-the printing press, the movie camera, the radio-may startle us when it first arrives on the scene, but the traditions of storytelling are continuous and feed into one another both in content and in form. The first published books were taken from the manuscript tradition. Malory's Morte darthur, written in manuscript in 1470, drew on prose and poetry versions of the Carnelot legend in both French and English, which in turn drew on centuries of oral storytelling. The elements of the story were all there already: the rise and fall of the hero Arthur, the gallantry of the knights, the love between Guinevere and Lancelot, and the destruction of the Round Table through civil war. But Malory's prose brought these elements together and introduced colloquial dialogue, more consistent plotting, and a pervasive tone of nostalgia. Fifteen years later, William Caxton took Malory's separate tales and bound them together into a single volume, with descriptive chapter headings that lured readers into the story. Only then, after such long episodic narratives were commonplace in publishing, could Cervantes write a contemporary tale like Don Quixote (1605), which marks the begin, ning of the European novel.
We can see the same continuities in the tradition that runs from nineteenth-century novels to contemporary movies. Decades before the invention of the motion picture camera, the prose fiction of the nineteenth century began to experiment with filmic techniques. We can catch glimpses of the coming cinema in Emily Brontë's complex use of flashback, in Dickens' crosscuts between intersecting stories, and in Tolstoy's battlefield panoramas that dissolve into close-up vignettes of a single soldier. Though still bound to the printed page, storytellers were already striving toward juxtapositions that were easier to manage with images than with words.
Now, in the incunabular days of the narrative computer, we can see how twentieth-century novels, films, and plays have been steadily pushing against the boundaries of linear storytelling. We therefore have to start our survey of the harbingers of the holodeck with a look at multiform stories, that is, linear narratives straining against the boundary of predigital media like a two-dimensional picture trying to burst out of its frame.
Click here to read the rest of the article and learn about "mutliform" narrative.
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