Directing and Cinematography and Editing, Oh My!
Let's Have a Look at What These Things Really Consist Of
What do we mean when we say that a film is well directed? What do we mean when we say that the cinematography is wonderful, or that the editing is great? In some ways, these are easy questions to answer. We mean that the movie is emotionally powerful, looks good, and tells its story clearly and cogently.
But in other ways, these are enormously complicated questions, both because of the difficulty of these tasks and because unless you're there on set when a movie is filmed, or in the numerous small dark rooms in which that film is assembled into an actual movie during post-production, it's really hard to know who, exactly, is responsible for what.
I've been learning a lot of this on the ground during the past few years, in which I've been on set a lot. I've seen movies made in which the director really had no idea what they were doing, and so the cinematographer and camera team were responsible for virtually everything about that the film ended up being good; conversely, I've seen movies made in which the cinematographer was so wedded to their quirky aesthetic the they destroyed any possibility of things like pacing and tension (not to mention coherence) in the movie. I've seen films that were shot terribly, but saved by the brilliant work of an editor who rendered them watchable, and films in which the first editor had such a strange vision of the material that they had to be replaced, because the film they produced bore no resemblance to the film that the writer and director thought they were making.
And I'm actually engaging with this whole process in a personal way as we speak – or more precisely, as I write and you read – because I'm editing a short film that I recently made with some wonderful collaborators. It's going to turn out fine, I think, but every time I do this I realize how much of it comes down to small infuriating mistakes on the one hand, and wonderful fortuitous discoveries that weren't in the script on the other, and how infinitely complex a process making a movie really is.
All of which is a long way of saying that if we want to talk about movies as fans it can be worthwhile to learn to look at them closely enough to understand the details of what goes into them. Similarly, when we write about movies as critics – or when we read critics and judge them (as we should) on the helpfulness or interestingness of what they say – we stand to gain a lot by not just throwing around words like direction, cinematography, and editing, but actually thinking about the things that actually constitute them. (For the purposes of this discussion, I'm ignoring the enormous parts of direction that consist of things like working with actors and being a people and project-manager, and focusing on the visual aspects of the job.)
So, to this end, I thought I'd put down some notes about a short sequence – it runs about a minute and a half – from something I watched recently: the Marvel film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, directed by Sam Raimi. I'll paste the clip below, and then illustrate what I'm talking about with some screen shots.
On first watch, this probably seemed to you to be a pretty unexceptional sequence. Two people walking through a grove of flowering trees and talking to each other. But there's an enormous amount more here that's really fascinating when you start to focus on it.
You'll notice that we start with a common move, in which the camera is suspended on a crane arm, with some flowering branches in the foreground, and then drops down towards the ground level. As it does, Elizabeth Olsen gathers some branches and drops them in a crate; this is indicated with a second shot. Then we cut back to our first shot…no, wait, it's actually a third shot (more on this in a second), in which the actors walk all the way to the camera.
This sequence strikes me as slightly ungainly, in a way that really demonstrates the difficulty of filmmaking. The easiest way to put this is to note that the cut to the shot of the flowers being dropped into the crate doesn't quite work. (Watch it again, if it didn't catch your eye, and I think you'll see what I mean.) Why focus our attention on that? It's not like there's a bomb or a baby hidden in the crate, and the director's trying to help us remember it for later; nor do cut branches hold any special significance. Put differently, why do we need this shot at all? Wouldn't the scene work just as well, and perhaps better, if it all happened in one longer take, with the camera dropping, Olsen tossing the branches, and then the pair walking right past us?
My best guess is that, instead, this shot is there because the director and/or editor needed something there to make the sequence work. Maybe in the wider shots – the first and third – Olsen couldn't get the branches to land neatly in the box without either making the gesture look awkward or having the branches go all over the place. So, with time pressure mounting, they tried a few takes of doing that, and then decided to also shoot the insert – a name for a little clip of film that's inserted into a larger sequence – as a way to connect the first shot, with the camera coming down and in which Olsen is holding the branches, with the third shot, in which the actors are walking and she doesn't have the branches. Or maybe there's another possibility: they had a single take in which everything happened perfectly, but the editor thought that cutting the sequence this way might spice things up a little.
And in any event, who's responsible for this, good or bad? The director, who's working with the actors and making large-scale decisions, the editor, who's putting the footage together after the fact, or the cinematographer, who set the cameras up and oversaw the filming and was responsible for the lighting?
But the next section is where things really start to get tricky, because of the sheep and the ladder. To put it bluntly, these sheep and this ladder appear to possess magical abilities. I'm serious: if you watch them closely, you'll notice that they seem to be able to transport through space and time. If you doubt the abilities of these incredible creatures, go back and look at the screen-shots I posted above: in between the first and the third of those, the sheep have used their sorcerous powers to change locations! (This is, incidentally, how we know that the first and third shots of that sequence are not the same.)
And, then, almost immediately, they do it again! At the end of the shot when the actors are walking into camera, the sheep are a good fifty yards behind them; but in the next shot, while Benedict Cumberbatch is still delivering a sentence, these incredible sheep are moving with a purpose, have made up the entire fifty yards, and are seemingly about ten feet from the actors.
Which brings us to the ladder. As you'll notice in the above screen-shot, the actors have already passed by this curious device. But in our next shot, the ladder has teleported and is in front of the actors! And the sheep have turned invisible, the rascals. But wait! That shot continues, we dolly behind the mystical ladder, and here are the sheep again, running for their lives!
Once you become aware of this, it's hard to watch the sequence without noticing that the sheep and the ladder are just zooming all over the place, regardless of the actualities of the physical world.
I'm obviously having some fun here, and the point isn't that this is some epitome of awful filmmaking. My suspicion is that it may have more to do with the working conditions at Marvel Studios than it does with the ability of anyone involved, and it's also difficult to overstate how hard it is to shoot a sequence like this so that it fits together coherently. Further, the vast majority of viewers will sail through it without giving it a second thought, ensconced as they are in the story.
But the point also remains that while we can certainly make some determinations here – the director is probably responsible for the set-up, in which the characters walk and talk, instead of, say, standing there petting the sheep while they have their conversation; the cinematographer, in coordination with the director, is responsible for camera movement and placement and lighting; and the editor is responsible for, at the very least, the initial rhythm and feel of the way the shots have been linked together (they may have been overruled in some decisions by the director or studio execs, or they may not have been) – while we can certainly make some of these determinations, making a final judgement about who's responsible for the goodness or badness of this sequence is really tricky.
And this is not even to mention the sneaky little technical mistake at the end of the clip.
The section after the magic sheep consists of some two-shots of the actors walking and talking. Then Cumberbatch stops, and Olsen walks out of frame. What's going on in the dialogue here is that he's learned she's lying to him; the director wants to emphasize this emotional moment by separating them. But it creates a big problem. In the first shots after they separate, Cumberbatch is looking at her, and from the angle of his gaze it's clear that she's off to his right. But then we cut to the shot with her in the foreground, and she's directly in front of him.
A regrettable choice crept in here. When the actors separate and are filmed in a pair of solo shots, it puts a lot of pressure on the camera crew – under the direction of the cinematographer – to make sure that when they film Cumberbatch, he's looking in the proper direction relative to the camera. But they failed at this in a couple of ways.
In the first shot, Cumberbatch is to the left of frame, looking right (meaning that he's looking to the right of the camera); in the second shot, he's slightly to the right of frame and looking left. This is what people mean when they talk about jumping the 180-degree line, and it virtually always makes for an awkward moment, because, spatially, the viewer has just jumped from one side of the action to the other. But more importantly, they didn't get the angle of his head right, and so the editor had to try to match a shot in which Cumberbatch is looking at Olsen to his right with one in which he's looking at her directly in front of him. (If you watch the clip again really closely, you'll see how the editor tried to save this as best they could.)
Again, this stuff is hard to do. Does it mean the film is terribly directed, or that the cinematographer and editors ought to be drummed out of town? Of course not! Importantly, as I said above, most viewers will not notice any of this, and one of the main points of movies like this is to entertain people, rather than put on a display of technical mastery. But it's a sequence that illustrates the ways that sometimes things just don't go right when you're on set.
And for the fan and critic, learning to be attentive to details like this can also help deepen your appreciation for things that are done really well. To that end, here are a couple of clips from other films for comparison.
The first is from Brian De Palma's The Untouchables. If you watch closely, you'll notice how De Palma uses the same idea about blocking (where the characters stand) that was at play in the Dr. Strange film: he has the actors separate and then move closer together depending on what's happening emotionally in the scene. But here there is no unnecessary confusion, because of how clear the camera work and editing are. There are no weird or unnecessary camera moves, and both characters are kept in frame in virtually every shot, which allows the actors (Kevin Costner and Sean Connery) to play off of one another and also helps avoid some of the time/space problems that cropped up in the other sequence.
The second is from Steven Spielberg's Jaws. You'll see that Spielberg, as is frequently his wont, shoots the whole scene in a single take. The camera is on a track, and it runs parallel to the actors, and then moves in closer to them, after which the actors move in closer to the camera; then they move away, and the sequence closes with the camera running back along the track in the reverse direction. This obviously makes any editing of the sequence a moot point, and ensures a sense of deep reality that can be threatened by too much cutting from shot to shot; the drawback from the filmmaking side is that doing things in this way takes a lot more time.
The actors can't just walk along a couple of times being filmed from different angles, providing shots to be cut into a sequence, as they did in the Dr. Strange film. Instead, they have to deliver every line cleanly, and hit their marks exactly; additionally, the camera crew has to master the movement and focal point issues that go along with the acting. All of this takes a lot of rehearsal and a lot of time, and in the movie business, more time equals more expense. But if you've got a little bit of money and a lot of inspiration, the results can be magical. Spielberg is arguably the greatest to have ever lived at doing this kind of stuff, and if you remove yourself a bit from the details of the story and just watch the beautiful way this shot is conceived and executed, I think you'll see why.
Enjoy this piece? If you want to support me, please share tylersage.substack.com with anyone you know who's interested in film, culture, or ideas. And if you've got thoughts about these clips, let me know in the comments!
Also, as this is an entirely reader-funded endeavor, I'd be eternally grateful if you'd consider subscribing for $5 a month. For this mere pittance, you'll receive every piece in full, get access to the archives of this site, and greatly contribute to my ability to keep writing and making movies of my own.
If you'd like to read more of my work, my book on William Klein's cult classic superhero film Mr. Freedom is now available from Liverpool University Press, and my novel The Committers is available here.
I would recommend reading Walter Murch's book "In the blink of An eye" and his theory. These little details and mistakes are not important. As you say nobody will notice them. It is the job of the director, dop and the editor that the feeling of the scene gets to the audience. I honestly don't get it why you would nitpick about these little details and didn't chose an example to talk about how the emotion gets translated to the screen instead of talking about the position of scheeps. Emotion is the most important thing, continuity not. Again, search for Walter Murch's Rule of Six. And even then! Later in that scène of doctor strange it is revealed that the whole field was artificially made by Wanda, something (I think) they wanted to to emphasize with the first insert.