Why do ALL the previews now have quick cuts going to black? Can't
anyone do anything on their own nowadays? Who started it? Who
did it first? Who said now everyone has to do it the same way: short,
quick cuts, fade to black, fade to black, fade to black. The audience
can really tell that this film has lots of action, so they will want to see
it. Do not, under any circumstances, give the audience any idea of
what the movie will actually be about, because it's not about anything: it's
guns, helicopters, and babes, and moving cameras, and explosions, and
revenge and mayhem.
Event the trailers for the films that appear to be about relationships or
character are now chopped into tiny little disconnected shots, fading to
black...
All right, you've finished shooting. You
assemble your video and your audio and your special effects and start trying
to pull it altogether into a coherent whole. You think you're finished
and the big moment arrives-- you show it to your friends, some crew, film
company execs, sponsors, whatever. It's boring. It's dull.
It doesn't "move".
You are mortified. What can you do? Don't
give up! You promise everyone you'll go back into the editing suite
and fix it. But you can't reshoot, because the actors have gone home,
the crew is dispersed, the light's different...
No problem. Just shorten every cut. Shorten every cut to
about .6 seconds. That's right, less than a second. Cut, cut,
cut. Then add some more sound effects, lasers, metal on metal, whoosh!
More cuts. More, until you have about 40 cuts a minute, if not more.
Loud music, loud effects. Now, let's jiggle the camera, as if your
camera was drunk, staggering around in circles, totally discombobulated.
That's it-- makes it look like this is really happening to Brad Pitt, right.
You can tell it's really happening because the camera man is jiggling the
camera, man. That like a documentary! Looks real. Looks
really real.
Fast cuts never make any scene look great, but they prevent lousy scenes
from looking really, really bad. You can't tell any more-- each shot is
only on the screen for a second or less. What you have is the illusion
of action and movement, which is analogous to being able to be the eyes in
the heads of five different people in rapid succession. This does not
reveal anything to the viewer: it merely keeps him from realizing that the
director is unable to develop an interesting sequence of actions from a
single point of view.
This is not the same as Eisenstein's theory of
montage: in Eisenstein's view, each cut provides a comment on the previous
and succeeding cuts, thereby creating a coherent sequence that gives meaning
to the action. The famous scene of the baby carriage rolling
down the steps and the Cossack holding his sword aloft and the woman about
to scream.... Modern
action films simply provide a succession of shots without any inner
coherence at all. That would require work.
Sergei Eisenstein,
also known as the Soviet Eraserhead.
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© Bill Van Dyk
2010 All Rights Reserved
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