This week’s lecture will be split into three parts:
- In-Class Critique of Assignment #2
- Discontinuity Editing discussion
- Introduction to Music Video Assignment #3
The flip side of making editing invisible: Discontinuity. Discontinuous editing is the deliberate or accidental violation of the rules of continuity. Discontinuity has many interesting effects that can heighten the feeling of a scene. Typical approaches like jump-cuts, which once seemed very aggressive and shocking, are now very much part of film language. We will look at a few examples
Check out the other music video examples on the MUSIC VIDEO page, and add your favourites.
We will spend most of this week’s class looking at the work you created for Assignment #2.
Learning how to critique editing will be part of the focus this week. What are you looking for when critiquing the edit? How can we learn to spot errors in continuity, pace, rhythm and other elements we have learned about thus far? What is the difference between constructive criticism and non-constructive criticism?
To learn the art of criticism we will practice on the Major Lazer music video which was shot in Jamaica by SoMe and produced by Iconoclast.
Major Lazer – Get Free ft. Amber of the Dirty Projectors
Screen:
Last Year at Marienbad (1961) Alain Renais
“Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal Last Year at Marienbad(L’année dernière à Marienbad) has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. Written by radical master of the New Novel Alain Robbe-Grillet, this surreal fever dream, or nightmare, gorgeously fuses the past with the present in telling its ambiguous tale of a man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-filled château they now find themselves wandering. Unforgettable in both its confounding details (gilded ceilings, diabolical parlor games, a loaded gun) and haunting scope, Resnais’ investigation into the nature of memory is disturbing, romantic, and maybe even a ghost story.”
http://www.criterion.com/films/1517-last-year-at-marienbad
Screen Excerpts:
Jump Cuts in Snatch, Old-boy & The Ring
The Cutting Edge: The Rules in Editing French and American New Wave
Jump Cuts in Sergei Eisenstein & Georges Méliès
The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) – almost made entirely of jump cuts
Pierrot Le Fou & Breathless by Jean-Luc Goddard, examples of discontinuity editing and jump cuts with the French New Wave
The Dick Cavett Show – Jean-Luc Godard
Reading:
The Technique of Film and Video Editing: History, Theory, and Practice.
Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin (2006) Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill.
The Art of Editing SM2002 