ABSTRACT
There are two hypothetical psychological effects of cutting itself (Carroll & Bever, 1976; Kraft, 1986; Penn, 1971). First, cutting may serve as cinematic “punctuation,” signaling the viewer to segment the ongoing stream of filmed activities, much as syntactic cues serve to segment language. Second, cutting may enhance viewers’ interest, enlivening the film. The most prosaic example of this second effect can be seen on television news; the director cuts back and forth between different camera shots of the newscaster, presumably to enliven a visually lackluster presentation. (Home movies are typically so boring, except to those personally involved, because there often is no cutting, just one long scene.)
Thus, cutting may serve a “syntactic” function by segmenting the flow of filmed activities, and a “rhetorical” function by influencing the connotative and affective characteristics of film sequences. Not coincidentally, these two psycho logical functions mirror the two cinematic strategies for cutting within a scene: “cutting to continuity” and “classical cutting.” Cutting to continuity involves abbreviating an extended sequence of actions while maintaining the fluidity of the actions, depicting the highlights while cutting out unnecessary information. For example, it may take 10 seconds for a man to climb a flight of stairs in real time, but on film, the action may be depicted coherently in less than 2 seconds. The filmmaker may present the man starting up the stairs in one shot, show a close-up of the man’s feet in the next shot, and then follow that with a shot of the same man entering a room at the top of the stairs.
