I feel more comfortable thinking of shots/cuts in terms of
harmonic resonancies. If you construct the liguistic parallels,
the variances in story constuction in terms of varying intensities
of layer, ie. do we focus on: the phonetic, the harmonic, the
tonal, the liguistic, the symbolic, the mythic, etc. functions of
shot to shot relationships, we are looking at a series of
wavelength progressions. these progogressions are certain to
function in tandem with each other - but this is not to say that
one understands, say the climactic scene in a narrative structure
as applying to a linear model... rather, just as in a novel,
the influence of events and the composition of the mood are
affective in the past and inthe future only because of an
understanding (most understood in a dark room where for some
strange reason everyone around you is dead quiet and staring at
alarger than life depiction) that is based on what i would
consider to be a very primitive and neurobiological fight or
flight anticipation of danger. The mood of this is augmented to a
great degree by the qualities of intermittant motion itself, which
as murch points out (_why do cuts work?_, p.5-6) are defined by
the in-between the frame space anyway. Well - this is totally
useless rambling. thats what i get for being an undergrad. But the
bottom line is, rather than a Question/thought, i would say a
shot/cut is
the length of waveform, and these waveforms are
interdependant (they resonate),
and that the fact that we may blink at the same time as a cut is
made is merely coincedental, since the real phenomenon is musical
(not that we can hear it all the time, it may lie above or below
our range). But we can certainly feel it, i think. As music
applied to language (especially poetic - i.e. Lyrical), the length
of the shot could be further decribed as the feeling derived from
the hearing the sound of a far-away scream, a sob, or a
laugh, a rasping breath, etc.

Jonny Estes
Fall 2002 AIMAC Co-Coordinator
Antioch Independent Media Arts Cooperative
Email: [log in to unmask]
Phone: 937-769-1484
GoTo: http://www.topica.com/lists/syxlyxyrtlyrthix

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"Am I learning anything? I'm not learning much beacuse there's so
much
to learn and there's so much to remember, I feel sure I forget
alot."

                - Michael Snow, from 'Passage (Diary)', 1971

*>->
*>->Thanks Mike. Questions, I would say, are thoughts.
*>->
*>->I suppose I would say that one long single shot is a single compound event represented by a single proposition. The same scene in many shots is many events represented by many propositions. They are not the same either stylistically (points of view change, rythmn changes,...) or logically.
*>->
*>->People often admire big single takes. I love the start of Touch of Evil, The Player, and the arrival at the restaurant scene in Goodfellas, and many more. They can be a sign of virtuoso style. They are propositions swelling to reveal their overarching character as arguments, like the long sentences so often displayed until that fell out of favour in twentieth century prose.
*>->
*>->I suppose there are as many thoughts/propositions in the Psycho shower scene, or in Moulin Rouge, or in Eisenstein's battle scenes, as their are shots, but they are like shouts and cries - ie like one word sentences.
*>->
*>->Perhaps one thing at issue here is the integrity of a shot. Anacoleuthic sentences - sentences that lose or wander beyond their grammatical way - lose their integrity. Their stylistic value is that their sense becomes more nonsensical. I am not sure whether there are anacoleuthic shots, but Murch seems to imply there are if the cut is made in the wrong place - or something like this. What is their stylistic value though?
*>->
*>->Perhaps Murch though is merely making a point about how style should work. Perhaps he is only turning a fact or a mistake about the natural size of thoughts into a norm.
*>->
*>->Ross
*>->
*>->
*>->