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Cutting with Sidney
Notes on how film was cut when Sidney Lumet put his film together.
Image via Wikipedia
Cutting properly is an art that definitely helps to put the film together and takes the place of unnecessary words. A good cut can suggest a mood or necessary tension.
Directors like Sidney Lumet broke from theatrical mode and entered film mode by being able to call whatever angle he wanted spontaneously, scene after scene, at the flick of a switch. If he wanted to develop tension then he quickened his movement between two people talking regardless of who was talking. I get the feeling of less tension as he casually picked up Ingrid Bergman get to the train but with other more sinister characters like Anthony Perkins, I the cut of their image before they embarked was much more dramatic.
Maybe his urge to quicken the cut came from his experience in editing TV programs.
More than just having a flashback, which was already a common mode for film to relate the actor’s dive into a past memory Lumet went a step further. He utilized flash cuts, which metaphorically stood for the intrusion of a past memory in a present situation such as when Steiger was witnessing an apparent suicide in the Pawnbroker. He would end up experimenting and ending up on a formula of sequencing sufficiently short and longer cuts to get this intrusion out without irritating the viewer.
Cuts were applied in movies like the Pawnbroker to juxtapose events that did not sit well with the viewer; the coldness of which Steiger made love set along side a lovemaking scene between a sexier couple meant that his life was bleak and no words were needed. That bleakness was even further exemplified by a young prostitute looking for a trick as a reticent Steiger flashed back to being pushed to a see a German soldier lying beside naked women prisoner a concentration camp. Both events suggested forced situations outside his control and it was the cut between the present and past that completed that suggestion.
