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Match Frame and Jump Cut
A dialectic theory of montage in the digital
age
No life can be long enough to see every audio-visual production
realised. If the ideology of cinéphilie was to watch any
film of any style of any period, it has to be qualified as a
historical movement and nothing more. Today, the academic on
the one hand and the téléphile on the other have replaced
the cinéphile. The first has a very specialised historical
knowledge that ends, where the knowledge of the latter begins. In
other words, the combining point of vision is not practicable any
more. A film will be forgotten most quickly after its cinema
exploitation to be found again as a déjà-vu in television. Later,
in video exploitation, it will provoke a reaction of
"hey-this-is-cool-this-is-cool". And than it will be
forgotten in the graveyards of archivation, in company archives,
collector archives and, finally, official archives.
In this situation, cinema is experiencing a process of
canonization. The canon is not based on the success of a film, as
cult movies or great classics used to do (who will, of course,
still continue to exist), but on university work cinema has become
a matter of historical research like other bourgeois arts as
literature, the fine arts, music and the performing arts.
Television, video exploitation, computer games, video art and
internet movies are considered to be daughters of cinema and in the
consequence are mostly treated apart. Even if this division is
problematic, it can be justified with the different intentions of
those media. While cinema is looking for the specific experience,
the orgasmic event, so to say, television has the role of the
collective subconscious, video exploitation and computer games of
collective phantasms, video art of repression and internet movies,
until now, of refreshments or appetisers (and are in that sense
rather much comparable to the function of advertising and
clips).
But cinema itself seems to change these days. All media
mentioned have their influence on it. To keep its exposed position,
cinema is forced to adapt any invention in the technical and
aesthetic field. The speed of this development and the change of
technology in almost any domain of cinema provokes the question,
whether "cinema", as a synthetic term, does not loose its
sense. Can it still be considered as one medium? Does the digital
technology not replace cinema? Is the final acceptance in the
academic world not just once more a proof for the presume that
theory comes, when the phenomenon already has appeared, i.e. when
things are over?
If we consider cinema to be a principle much more than a medium,
these questions seem less crucial. We do not have to be concerned
about a change of the form of projection or the form of production.
For the aesthetic reflection is only interesting, what can be seen
on the screen. Not even the size of the projected image makes any
difference. A movie, small like a stamp, differs of course from
another, big like a tennis field. To figure that out, it does not
need much capacity of theoretical analysis. But even if the
panoramic shot does not work in the small format and if the
close-up might function badly in the big one, the basic language of
moving images stays the same.
A theory of montage has to start from the idea, that there is a
common principle for any audio-visual production: a shot is a shot,
a cut a cut. Only, the changing of the technical disposition can
change the implication of a take. The effect of a cadre, a tracking
or a dissolve can have a completely different subtext than it would
have under other technical conditions. In other words: The means
stay the same, but the context is giving them a different
signification. The new technology, therefore, is not causing the
changing of the audio-visual expression. It is on the contrary
necessary to keep the old forms of montage going!
This remark must be left in its paradoxical beauty for the
moment. I will discuss it later. First, we have to find a general
theoretical approach, that allows to define the relations of the
images for any audio-visual product, i.e. for a montage beyond
specific codes. Two terms are of great help for such an effort.
They mark extremes, that have always been present as regional
preferences as well as commercial arguments (classical Hollywood
against Russian film, for example, or blockbusters against
independents). Both had a historical impulse on the development of
cinema. The first half of the 20th century has been essentially
impregnated by the match frame, while the second was largely
influenced by the jump cut. Before discussing the historical
value and respectively the changing of the cinematographic
expression, a precise definition of these terms is necessary.
Definition of terms
Match frame and jump cut are to be considered as direct
opposites. They are the two possible basic forms, a cut ever can
have. An ordinary cut - and any cut is ordinary except of match
frame and jump cut - can be described as a mixture of them. The two
terms allow to describe the audio-visual language with regard to
the principles of space and time, the latter being of exorbitant
importance for montage. The match frame is a cut in space, but not
in time. The jump cut is a cut in time, but not in
space.
Match frame and jump cut have very specific significations in
the technical language of filmmaking. A match frame in its pure
form is the combination of two takes, showing completely different
places. They are forced into a correlation by the movement of a
person, who is passing from one take to the other, continuing
exactly the same action. The interest focuses on the acting person,
while the space is only important in relation to it. Even if the
abrupt changing of the places will create an effect of poetry or
humour, the match frame shows clearly, that the cinematographic
interest does not lie in the representation of the spatial world,
but in the presentation of somebody acting.
The jump cut, on the contrary, sets the place above the action.
By cutting out a part of the temporal continuity of a take, the
acting person is found again in a different position in the same
cadre. This jumping of the person does not correspond to a rational
explanation. The pure form of the jump cut does not necessarily
signify a lap of time. It stands for a static vision of the world.
The person is thrown into a space, which is extraneous to it. Its
movement does not make any sense. It is absurd, contradicted by a
space that cannot be changed by action anyway.
Match frame and jump cut, however, do not appear very often in
their pure forms. But matching and jumping can be considered as
general principles of editing. Any cut in space is a match frame.
Two different takes of the same room, let it be a shot -
reverse-shot, demand the same competence of abstraction from the
spectator than two completely different places, showing for
instance an inside and an outside, night and day, sun and rain or
whatsoever. Only the difference is more evident for the latter. The
classical scheme of a film is the lost of unity of the hero with
the world. He has to get over different obstacles, until he finds
(or in the tragic genre finds never ever) again the unity. This
fight is presented as an inner struggle, even if we can only see
the outer confrontations. The spatial surroundings become in the
matching tradition in some way the illustration of the person's
inner state. (It will rain, when people are sad, sun will shine,
when people are happy and not the other way round - people are not
happy, because the sun shines.)
Any cut in time is a jump cut. Its task in a narration is the
cutting out of a piece of action. Temporal discontinuity,
therefore, is based on the jumping mode of expression. But the
time-lap does not necessarily have to resemble a jump. The absurd
aspect of the jump cut is replaced by an elliptic function. The
ellipse is probably the most important invention for editing,
because without it, real time and represented time would be the
same, i.e. no complex cinematographic structure would be possible.
Potentially, any cut represents a small lap of time. The matching
rules permit to forget the stagnation of cutting; the narrative
norms help to understand temporal differences. How much the
understanding of the cut as a lap, however, goes, becomes obvious
remembering the refusal to cut between a gun shot and its result,
as Arthur Penn and Dede Allen have practised it in Bonnie and Clyde. The new representation of
violence since has a lot to do with the vision of a cut as
non-realistic. (André Bazin is discussing this idea on a less
spectacular matter. He takes two children films as examples to
prove the paradoxical fact that to make the spectator believe in
the simultaneity of a fiction, knowing that it is a fake, the
cinematographic representation has to respect the
spatial-continuous reality. A cut could, therefore, be prohibited.
Montage, he says, being the essence of cinema, can become an
anti-cinematographic and purely literary element. André Bazin.
Montage interdit. In: Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?
Paris 1994 [1975]. His conception of the plan-séquence as an
assurance of realism is another example for his critical reception
of the cut as elliptic and artificial.)
Historical Survey
It took about 20 years, before spectators and makers mastered
completely the matching method - being a highly abstract form of
language. The evolution of montage is often explained with the
enlargement of the spatial concept of cinema. The cut, representing
at first the curtain, which is closed between the changing of acts,
was more and more used to separate action, to get directly into a
scene, as we know it today, and to combine the different
perspectives of the same situation. All the codes had to be
invented, as the eye lines, the rule 180° (prohibiting the
camera to pass freely from one side of an actor to the other, to
guaranty the continuity of action, because otherwise the actor
would run from left to right in the first and from right to left in
the next take), the different focal lengths, the insert, the
flashback construction and so forth. (See, for instance, David
Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The classical
Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960.
London 1994 [1985].) Once mastered, the matching became norm. Any
other form was excluded from the rules of cutting.
The jump cut, being a non-continual principle, could not be at
the origin of a narrative system. To incorporate it into the
matching system, as it is true for the pure form of the match
frame, any aspect, which could not be explained rationally by the
spectator, was suppressed. If the jump cut did not indicate time
passing, it was considered to be a mistake, with only one
exception: Its non-rational effect was used for the production of
fantastic situations, suggesting the metamorphose of something or
somebody. To ensure the success, the person or object had to be in
the same position as the one, it was changing into. The place
staying the same, the jump cut gave the impression of the
transformation of the person or object. This aspect of the jump
cut, that is usually called stoptrick, predeceased the curtain-cut
(Georges Méliès used it a lot to create his miraculous effects) and
reveals from the very beginning the manipulating nature of the cut
in general.
The match frame, however, as the leading figure of classical
cinema, helps to find the secrete impulse of audio-visual narration
until the 60s. The interest for the acting person instead of the
spatial surroundings, the vision of the world as the reflection of
an inner state of the hero show, that the classical film with its
anthropocentrical conception of the world finds its roots in a
romantic and surrealistic motivation. The romantic influence is the
prerequisite for the technical evolution of montage. The importance
of this influence has been seen right from the start by D.W.
Griffith, who was inspired by Charles Dickens for the invention of
the insert from his description of details, that become revealing
for the heroes characterisation. (See Sergej M. Eisenstein.
Dickens, Griffith and we (1942). In: Gesammelte
Aufsätze I. German translation from Lothar Fahlbusch. Zurich
without year. Eisenstein cannot accept the matching method, because
he is looking for a metaphorical montage. His idea of the
collision-cut, therefore, must be based on the jump cut.) The
surrealists, on the other hand, saw in the slapstick tradition a
realisation of their aims. It is characteristic, that they
identified with matching, because it is surrealistic method, on the
contrary to the dadaistic approach - where a collage presented
reality fragments - to show a unity, giving the impression of a
fictional whole, which was highly inspired by the modern conception
of dreams (presenting a collage of impressions based on one single
imaginary, not on the multiplicity of reality). Surrealism is the
practice of the invisible cut, classical cinema has always searched
for. It does hardly surprise - the matching being of such an
importance for the American tradition - that the American founder
of experimental cinema, Maya Deren, has been working with the match
frame, while the European early experimental cinema, coming out of
a dadaistic tradition, was much more attracted by the jump cut, as
the films of René Clair, Hans Richter or even Luis Buñuel
prove.)
The revenge of the jump cut in the 60s is an expression of the
commercial and conceptual crisis of cinema, whose matching methods
were getting out of fashion. Since the 50s, the importance of
television was growing. It was revolutionising the audio-visual
forms, becoming quickly a live medium, which combined the function
of radio with the attraction of cinema. Television was presenting
anything on the same level, without caring for narrative
continuity. It was jumping from one theme to the other, from one
style to the next, from one image to the following. It was the
final witness for the alienation of the world that could not be
seen any more as an expression of the hero's emotion, but only
as the Other, the Foreign, the Unconscious. The cinema was
confronted with this new concurrence that was an expression of
reality as a heterogeneous simultaneity and on top of that tended
to absorb the films. In that situation, cinema only had two
choices. Either, it would push the great emotion, the
bigger-than-life, the dream even wider, or it had to reflect the
idea of heterogeneity, multiplicity and estrangement. The first
reaction led to the invention of cinemascope, a larger screen
format, which allows impressive panoramics and ensembles, denying
the detail and the explicit fragmentation of reality. The latter
reinvented the jump cut. Its refusal of any matching was the apt
form to express the vision of the surroundings as extraneous, the
movements as senseless and the world not as a continual process,
but a simultaneous state. It was the time of pop art, whose
cinematographic variant usually is called New Wave.
If the victory of the jump cut was connected with the rise of
television, it depended in the same way on a new technology that
was getting important in the 60s. The 16 mm equipment led to a
dilettantisation, so to say, of production mode and style of moving
images. The handhold camera, for example, became accepted in
documentaries at first as well as a more independent treatment of
sound. The invention of 8 mm, Super-8 mm and finally video
technology was the next step, but those media did not play an
important part for greater productions. Amateurs and
experimentalists in the beginning only adapted them. Parallel to
this technical process, the music clip production was developing.
Its spreading was accompanying any technical invention. Getting
commercially influential, the clip production started to dictate
its own style. The echo can be found in any medium. Based on
rhythmic montage intentions, the rule system of narrative
continuity had no influence any more on the editing.
And there, something strange happens. While the jump cut
continues to be present in the clip montages, the match frame is
resuscitating not in its conventionalised variant, but in its pure
form: The singers change costumes and places all the time though
they continue their singing and dancing. For the first time in the
history of moving images, we find a peaceful coexistence of match
frame and jump cut. The two main directions of audio-visual
language, the surrealistic-romantic matching and the
existentialistic-deconstructive jumping have been replaced by a
third way. This new style is non-rationalist and intuitive. Space
and time cannot be thought as two isolated principles any more.
They represent a new unity. Let's call this renewal montage of
relativity.
Montage of relativity
The digital editing has changed the relation of the cutter and
his material. While a cut on a traditional table is a rational
decision in the sense that the film reel has to be stopped at the
right place, a white line to be drawn, where the cut is meant to
be, and the cut finally to be actually executed, the cut in digital
editing is set less carefully. In a way, the practice of cutting
tends to be replaced by trimming. This function allows to
add or subtract frames of the last or the next take by clicking on
a left or right button until the cut works out. Trimming is a
method of try and error. Its result is much more a matter of taste
than of norm. The trim is following its own principles. When a cut
looks good, it is good. But this anything goes of editing (which
must not be mixed up with the practice of jump cutting, being a
conceptual editing method that sets the principle above the beauty)
does not necessarily signify, that a cut cannot be judged any more
as good or bad, breathtaking or vulgar. There still is a difference
between trimming and zapping. Even if trimming is a method of try
and error, even if it is a process of eliminating worse solutions,
the result is never a haphazard. Behind every trim is a decision
for something that can be called positive and definitive.
This is not the case for zapping. A trim, therefore, can be
considered as the direct opposite of a zap, which is always a
decision against something.
The impulse of trimming on the editing style, however, lies in
the fact, that the searched solution would be the one of least
resistance, i.e. resistance against the spectator. In other words,
the more the material is getting heterogeneous and not classically
storyboarded, the more it becomes important, that the montage
appears smooth and homogeneous. The invisible cut has finally
imposed itself over the collision-cut, ironically just in the very
moment, where the method of collision has commercially become
accepted. Connected to the invisible cut is the phenomenon of the
dissolve. It had become quite unpopular since the 60s, being the
weakened form of the jump cut and therefore disregarded. Its
traditional tasks, the signification of a passage of time or of a
remembrance of the past (before and after a flashback), had become
dull and banal. But all of a sudden the dissolve is experiencing a
renaissance and becomes omnipresent. During the 90s, its functions
have been partly replaced, partly enlarged. Its original role as a
kind of soft jump cut has been tempered. Its too clearly defined
tasks have been enlarged and any concrete explication has been
taken away. From now on, the dissolve can be used whenever it seems
practical. It becomes the preferred form of editing, because it
liquidates the montage and seems the perfect realisation of the
invisible cut.
But its role is not limited to make certain the flow of images.
It can be used the other way round as well. With their passage from
traditional to digital editing table (AVID), i.e. from Casino on, Martin Scorsese and Thelma
Schoonmaker use the dissolve quite often as a smooth variant of the
pure form of the jump cut. The dissolve within a take, fading, for
instance, from a panoramic over a wall to the same panoramic or a
similar take, does not have a logical signification. There might be
the function of a certain distance taking to the narrated story and
of a purely cinematographical approach. But in the end, the
dissolve is not understandable. Undermining a cinematographical
convention, the digital montage gives new importance to an element,
which had become out-of-mode.
Now it becomes evident, why the digital is keeping the old forms
of montage going, as I said above. The new technology has freed
them from a very specific task, changed their cinematographic
subtext and given them, because of the different context, a
different connotation. We can reject the question, whether the
digital technology replaces cinema. But changing the code of
cinematographic forms, it modifies cinema, of course. When I asked,
whether the academic acceptance was a sign for the end of cinema,
we can now answer, that it is an indication for the end of a
certain idea of cinema. I therefore started this text mentioning
the cinéphilie. But the missing of cinéphilie is a problem, because
it stands for the missing of a capacity of judgement. The
enthusiasm for a tracking, a plan-séquence, a close-up, a
deep-focus-photography seems hardly understandable our days and it
is only very partly replaced by a contemporary enthusiasm for
digital effects that become used up very quickly (as the developing
of morphing shows, for instance. Again, however, this variant of
the stoptrick testifies for the desire of liquidity as the main
characteristic of digital cutting). In a way, the contemporary
situation is the inverse of the past. It is not the masterly
performance, that become significant for quality (as a long
tracking, a great plan-séquence, a magnificent close-up or a
splendid deep-focus), but the mastery of non-performance. The
danger of the digital anything goes (be it practical or
theoretical) is the using of anything possible. By doing so, the
montages tends to resemble slide shows with moving pictures, having
no inner connection, but good design, or to fall back to a
classical form, which is not free of restorative aspects and
therefore not a solution. To make good films, cinematographical
thinking is necessary. Finding that again by using the digital
technology will be a good way for audio-visual production.
Jan Speckenbach
© 03/2000
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