In film, a match cut is a cut from one shot to another in which the composition of the two shots are matched by the action or subject and subject matter. For example, in a duel a shot can go from a long shot on both contestants via a cut to a medium closeup shot of one of the duellists. The cut matches the two shots and is consistent with the logic of the action. This is a standard practice in film-making, to produce a seamless reality-effect.[1]
Match cuts form the basis for continuity editing, such as the ubiquitous use of match on action. Continuity editing smooths over the inherent discontinuity of shot changes to establish a logical coherence between shots. Even within continuity editing, though, the match cut is a contrast both with cross-cutting between actions in two different locations that are occurring simultaneously, and with parallel editing, which draws parallels or contrasts between two different time-space locations.
A graphic match (as opposed to a graphic contrast or collision) occurs when the shapes, colors and/or overall movement of two shots match in composition, either within a scene or, especially, across a transition between two scenes. Indeed, rather than the seamless cuts of continuity editing within a scene, the term "graphic match" usually denotes a more conspicuous transition between (or comparison of) two shots via pictorial elements.[2] A match cut often involves a graphic match, a smooth transition between scenes and an element of metaphorical (or at least meaningful) comparison between elements in both shots.[3]
A match cut contrasts with the conspicuous and abrupt discontinuity of a jump cut.
Notable examples
A bone-club and a satellite in orbit, the two subjects of the iconic match cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey contains a famous example of a match cut.[4][5] After a hominid discovers the use of bones as a tool and a weapon, he throws one triumphantly into the air. As the bone spins in the air, there is a match cut to a much more advanced tool: an orbiting satellite.[6] The match cut helps draw a connection between the two objects as exemplars of primitive and advanced tools respectively, and serves as a neat summary of humanity's technological advancement up to that point.[7] The satellite is unidentified in the film, but the novel makes it clear that it is an orbital weapon platform, thus linking with the use of the bone as a weapon.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944) is a predecessor for the 2001: A Space Odyssey match cut in which a fourteenth-century falcon cuts to a World War II aeroplane.[8] The sense of time passing but nothing changing is emphasised by having the same actor, in different costumes, looking at both the falcon and the aeroplane.
An early Hollywood example of the technique is the dream sequence in Buster Keaton's 1924 fourth feature film, Sherlock Jr.. The scene contains a number of match cuts as the protagonist's surroundings change sharply around him several times: at one point he dives off a rock into the sea but lands in a pile of snow on a hillside.
Another early example is Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which opens with a series of match dissolves that keeps the titular character's lit window in the same part of the frame while the cuts take viewers around his dilapidated Xanadu estate, before a final match dissolve takes viewers from the outside to the inside where Kane is dying.[9]
Another match cut comes from Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) where an edit cuts together Lawrence blowing out a lit match with the desert sun rising from the horizon. Director David Lean credits inspiration for the edit to the experimental French New Wave. The edit was later praised by Steven Spielberg as inspiration for his own work.[10]
One earlier use of the match cut is shown in Satyajit Ray's film, The World Of Apu (1959). The cut starts from a movie screen, which the couple Apu and Aparna are watching, to the windowpane of the carriage they are returning home in. This technique allows for a rather sound montage, moving from a boy burning in fire in the movie they are watching, to the fire dissolving, and finally, to a rectangular faded glass pane as the camera rolls back and reveals the entire carriage.[11]
A match cut occurs at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest. As Cary Grant pulls Eva Marie Saint up from Mount Rushmore, the cut then goes to him pulling her up to his bunk on the train. The match cut here skips over the courting, the marriage proposal, and the actual marriage of the two characters who had for much of the film been adversaries.[12] Another Hitchcock film to employ the use of a match cut is Psycho. Just after Marion Crane is murdered in the "shower scene", the camera shows blood flowing down the drain of the tub, then cuts (dissolves) to a shot of Marion's eye.[13]
German director Fritz Lang provided early uses of match cuts in his silent and first sound films. In Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, he shows a circular casino from above and cuts to a circle of hands at a seance happening the same night involving Mabuse and others. This smoothly changes into the simultaneous scene and links the two activities as "decadent" pastimes of the rich in pursuit of excitement and celebrity. Lang reused the technique in M while cross cutting between the meetings of Schränker's criminal union and Inspector Karl Lohmann's homicide investigation squad. Schränker and Lohmann are matched in movement and in dialogue (which is carried over the cut to form a coherent phrase) to illustrate their unlikely connection in a shared goal, to capture a serial child killer.[citation needed]
The "Morning in America" campaign commercial for US President Ronald Reagan's successful 1984 re-election bid also uses this technique. Early in the ad there are match cuts between a taxi cab, a tractor, and a bike, all facing the camera with the headlights on. Later there is a match cut between two men, both hoisting the American flag.
For his 1986 fantasy film Highlander, director Russell Mulcahy employs multiple match cuts to indicate movements backwards in time and forwards again to the present day, telling the story of an immortal who relives episodes from his past in the ancient Highlands of Scotland (and later across Europe), as he faces his final challenge in modern New York City. Examples include a World Wrestling Federation match cutting back to the bloody clan battles of his youth, a fish tank cutting back to an experience in a boat on a loch, and an emotional face in the past dissolving into a giant NYC advertising hoarding showing the impassive Mona Lisa. In the case of this film, the match cut is integral to the storytelling, as a potentially confusing back-and-forth narrative is thus held together; with the denouement's final cut to Scotland cleverly revealed to be not a jump in time, as previously, through the inclusion of a modern fighter jet in flight over the Highlands.
In the 1986 film Aliens there is a match cut between a close-up of Ripley's sleeping face and a distant shot of planet Earth.
Yet another example of a match cut can be found in the final episode of the first season of David Lynch and Mark Frost's television show Twin Peaks. In the opening moments as Dr. Jacoby is struck down by a masked assailant and rolls over onto his back, the camera zooms in onto his eye which slowly fades away to a roulette wheel in One Eyed Jack's casino. This transition is a key moment in the episode as it connects two very different story lines together through a strategic cut.
The Simpsons make major usage of the match cut, providing seamless transitions between scenes. Notable examples include the cut from young Homer to current-day Homer in "Bart Star", the transition from Marge to the character in her novel, in "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife", and hundreds more. The usage of the match cut has ultimately become a major recurring trait of the series.
Tarsem Singh's The Fall features a match cut where the costume, hairstyle, and facial expression of a character was matched nearly perfectly to the background of the next scene, without the use of digital enhancement, as well as other examples.
In fiction, continuity is the consistency of the characteristics of people, plot, objects, and places seen by the audience over some period of time. It is relevant to many genres and forms of storytelling, especially if it is long-running.
Film editing is both a creative and a technical part of the post-production process of filmmaking. The term is derived from the traditional process of working with film which increasingly involves the use of digital technology. When putting together some sort of video composition, typically, you would need a collection of shots and footages that vary from one another. The act of adjusting the shots you have already taken, and turning them into something new is known as film editing.
The film industry is built upon many technologies and techniques, drawing upon photography, stagecraft, music, and many other disciplines. Following is an index of specific terminology applicable thereto.
The substitution splice or stop trick is a cinematic special effect in which filmmakers achieve an appearance, disappearance, or transformation by altering one or more selected aspects of the mise-en-scène between two shots while maintaining the same framing and other aspects of the scene in both shots. The effect is usually polished by careful editing to establish a seamless cut and optimal moment of change. It has also been referred to as stop motion substitution or stop-action.
Morphing is a special effect in motion pictures and animations that changes one image or shape into another through a seamless transition. Traditionally such a depiction would be achieved through dissolving techniques on film. Since the early 1990s, this has been replaced by computer software to create more realistic transitions. A similar method is applied to audio recordings, for example, by changing voices or vocal lines.
A jump cut is a cut in film editing that breaks a single continuous sequential shot of a subject into two parts, with a piece of footage removed to create the effect of jumping forward in time. Camera positioning on the subject across the sequence should vary only slightly to achieve the effect. The technique manipulates temporal space using the duration of a single shot—fracturing the duration to move the audience ahead. This kind of cut abruptly communicates the passing of time, as opposed to the more seamless dissolve heavily used in films predating Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, which extensively used jump cuts and popularized the technique in the 1960s. For this reason, jump cuts are considered a violation of classical continuity editing, which aims to give the appearance of continuous time and space in the story-world by de-emphasizing editing, but are sometimes nonetheless used for creative purposes. Jump cuts tend to draw attention to the constructed nature of the film. More than one jump cut is sometimes used in a single sequence.
A film transition is a technique used in the post-production process of film editing and video editing by which scenes or shots are combined. Most commonly this is through a normal cut to the next shot. Most films will also include selective use of other transitions, usually to convey a tone or mood, suggest the passage of time, or separate parts of the story. These other transitions may include dissolves, L cuts, fades, match cuts, and wipes.
Cross-cutting is an editing technique most often used in films to establish action occurring at the same time, and often in the same place. In a cross-cut, the camera will cut away from one action to another action, which can suggest the simultaneity of these two actions but this is not always the case. Cross-cutting can also be used for characters in a film with the same goals but different ways of achieving them.
In filmmaking and video production, a shot is a series of frames that runs for an uninterrupted period of time. Film shots are an essential aspect of a movie where angles, transitions and cuts are used to further express emotion, ideas and movement. The term "shot" can refer to two different parts of the filmmaking process:
In production, a shot is the moment that the camera starts rolling until the moment it stops.
In film editing, a shot is the continuous footage or sequence between two edits or cuts.
In filmmaking, the 180-degree rule is a basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object within a scene. The rule states that the camera should be kept on one side of an imaginary axis between two characters, so that the first character is always frame right of the second character. Moving the camera over the axis is called jumping the line or crossing the line; breaking the 180-degree rule by shooting on all sides is known as shooting in the round.
Continuity editing is the process, in film and video creation, of combining more-or-less related shots, or different components cut from a single shot, into a sequence to direct the viewer's attention to a pre-existing consistency of story across both time and physical location. Often used in feature films, continuity editing, or "cutting to continuity", can be contrasted with approaches such as montage, with which the editor aims to generate, in the mind of the viewer, new associations among the various shots that can then be of entirely different subjects, or at least of subjects less closely related than would be required for the continuity approach. When discussed in reference to classical Hollywood cinema, it may also be referred to as classical continuity.
In the post-production process of film and video editing, a dissolve is a type of film transition in which one sequence fades over another. The terms fade-out and fade-in are used to describe a transition to and from a blank image. This is in contrast to a cut, where there is no such transition. A dissolve overlaps two shots for the duration of the effect, usually at the end of one scene and the beginning of the next, but may also be used in montage sequences. Generally, but not always, the use of a dissolve is held to indicate that a time has passed between the two scenes. Also, it may indicate a change of location or the start of a flashback.
A flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point in the story. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story's primary sequence of events to fill in crucial backstory. In the opposite direction, a flashforward reveals events that will occur in the future. Both flashback and flashforward are used to cohere a story, develop a character, or add structure to the narrative. In literature, internal analepsis is a flashback to an earlier point in the narrative; external analepsis is a flashback to a time before the narrative started.
Classical Hollywood cinema is a term used in film criticism to describe both a narrative and visual style of filmmaking that first developed in the 1910s to 1920s during the later years of the silent film era. It then became characteristic of American cinema during the Golden Age of Hollywood, between roughly 1927 and 1960. It eventually became the most powerful and pervasive style of filmmaking worldwide.
This article contains a list of cinematic techniques that are divided into categories and briefly described.
Cutting on action or matching on action refers to film editing and video editing techniques where the editor cuts from one shot to another view that matches the first shot's action.
In the post-production process of film editing and video editing, a cut is an abrupt, but usually trivial film transition from one sequence to another. It is synonymous with the term edit, though "edit" can imply any number of transitions or effects. The cut, dissolve, and wipe serve as the three primary transitions. The term refers to the physical action of cutting film or videotape, but also refers to a similar edit performed in software; it has also become associated with the resulting visual "break".
Articles related to the field of motion pictures include:
Post-classical editing is a style of film editing characterized by shorter shot lengths, faster cuts between shots, and containing more jump shots and close-ups than classical editing characteristic of films prior to the 1960s.
This glossary of motion picture terms is a list of definitions of terms and concepts related to motion pictures, filmmaking, cinematography, and the film industry in general.
References
↑ Hayward, Susan (2013). Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. Routletge. p.213. ISBN978-0-203-12994-4.
↑ Prunes, Mariano; Michael Raine; Mary Litch (27 August 2002). "Part 4: Editing". Film Analysis Guide. New Haven, CT: Film Studies Program, Yale University. Retrieved 28 July 2014.
↑ Agel, Jérôme, ed. (1970). The Making of Kubrick's 2001. Signet Film Series Volume 4205. New York: Signet. p.196 and caption in photographs section. ISBN9780451071392. OCLC109475.
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