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It follows through, but is not true
As quoted in Nigel Andrews on Jaws: A Bloomsbury Movie Guide (1999), Verna Fields once told Steven Spielberg, "If clouds don't match or the water isn't exactly the same colour, people won't notice if you keep the rhythm . . . If you look carefully, you will see blue sky in one segment of a scene, cloudy sky in another; choppy seas in one scene, glassy in another." I have not had an opportunity to rewatch the movie since reading the book, but I believe her, not only because she won an Oscar for her editing of Jaws (1975), but because I just ran across an example of such an invisible mismatch in the wild while I was looking for Elisha Cook Jr.'s missing thumb.
Not to exaggerate, Elisha Cook Jr. was only missing half of his left thumb. As he told the story in a 1984 interview for Cinéma cinémas (1982–91), it got sliced off during a stunt on the set of John Ford's Submarine Patrol (1938), when the water-weight of a storm scene thundered the flailing actor right into a guy wire: "And so Mr. Ford came up to me, he said, 'Gee, that was a hell of a shot, Cookie.' I said, 'Yeah, it sure was, Mr. Ford, I just cut my thumb off,' and he passed out." He never hid it; he didn't need to. He was so expressive with props and gestures that I had been admiring his hands for years without noticing, long-fingered and nervous and what he did with them—turning over a cigarette lighter like a problem, drumming his second thoughts against his teeth—was patently more interesting than the number of his fingernails. I kept forgetting to see if it was visible in his movies even after I knew. When I finally remembered two-thirds of the way through rewatching Robert Wise's Born to Kill (1947), what I found instead was two different takes in the same scene.
I know that film is a whole lot of time out of joint pasted over with pattern recognition and the persistence of vision, but it's still instructive to spot an unintended seam. Cook is snowing Esther Howard, his foot in her door and his hat held over his heart like a Bible salesman before he turns on the preposterous charm that she doesn't trust for a second and so delights in: "Well, I'm not going to do much, so I won't need much. A C-note should make me very happy." The camera favors his performance first, then her callout of it, which gives him the chance to protest his crook's honesty, and between shots his hands jump from delicately fingering the brim of his fedora to folded businesslike across it, too completely for them to have come to rest of their own accord. The dialogue is uninterrupted and so is the actors' rapport, it's just the glitch of blocking that gives away that the reverse shot wasn't just another camera but another take. It slid past me the first time I saw the scene, while I was busy absorbing all kinds of other emotional, narrative, acting details; I caught it only because I was tracking Cook's hands more than his jaunty air or his teasing voice, the confidential flirt of his brows as he leans in for the ingenuous confession, "Through underworld connections, like it says in the newspapers. I'm a bad boy." Different rhythms than the ones which Fields was describing, but just as key to pulling an audience through the continuity of the story rather than the snags of the chopped-up instants which construct it on the screen. Even watching for the discrepancies, they disappear like blind spots the second a good line or a better expression comes along. Howard with her arms skeptically akimbo isn't quite as the camera left her, either, but her redoubtable, contiguous world-weariness means the disposition of her hands took me even longer to clock than her scene partner's. The other part of the illusion is how much you care about hair that was windblown in an exterior shot and re-tousled for the rear projection, a skip in the white noise of the room or the stages of the knotting of a tie, artifacts of the other kind of time in which the production was embedded, whose traces inside or outside the cutting room always remain. No style is invisible, only familiar. I have seen odd cuts go by in scenes before and only sometimes do I find out they marked a retake. But I missed the change of skies the first time I saw Jaws, even without the excuse of New England weather, and Elisha Cook Jr.'s hands make me wonder what other seamless gaps I don't see. He does a wonderful bit with his wristwatch as Mart Waterman, absently pleating the cuff of his shirt as he calculates the time; it's even better than his mime of just having been stabbed in the shin with a hatpin mid-murder. This note brought to you by my underworld backers at Patreon.
Not to exaggerate, Elisha Cook Jr. was only missing half of his left thumb. As he told the story in a 1984 interview for Cinéma cinémas (1982–91), it got sliced off during a stunt on the set of John Ford's Submarine Patrol (1938), when the water-weight of a storm scene thundered the flailing actor right into a guy wire: "And so Mr. Ford came up to me, he said, 'Gee, that was a hell of a shot, Cookie.' I said, 'Yeah, it sure was, Mr. Ford, I just cut my thumb off,' and he passed out." He never hid it; he didn't need to. He was so expressive with props and gestures that I had been admiring his hands for years without noticing, long-fingered and nervous and what he did with them—turning over a cigarette lighter like a problem, drumming his second thoughts against his teeth—was patently more interesting than the number of his fingernails. I kept forgetting to see if it was visible in his movies even after I knew. When I finally remembered two-thirds of the way through rewatching Robert Wise's Born to Kill (1947), what I found instead was two different takes in the same scene.
I know that film is a whole lot of time out of joint pasted over with pattern recognition and the persistence of vision, but it's still instructive to spot an unintended seam. Cook is snowing Esther Howard, his foot in her door and his hat held over his heart like a Bible salesman before he turns on the preposterous charm that she doesn't trust for a second and so delights in: "Well, I'm not going to do much, so I won't need much. A C-note should make me very happy." The camera favors his performance first, then her callout of it, which gives him the chance to protest his crook's honesty, and between shots his hands jump from delicately fingering the brim of his fedora to folded businesslike across it, too completely for them to have come to rest of their own accord. The dialogue is uninterrupted and so is the actors' rapport, it's just the glitch of blocking that gives away that the reverse shot wasn't just another camera but another take. It slid past me the first time I saw the scene, while I was busy absorbing all kinds of other emotional, narrative, acting details; I caught it only because I was tracking Cook's hands more than his jaunty air or his teasing voice, the confidential flirt of his brows as he leans in for the ingenuous confession, "Through underworld connections, like it says in the newspapers. I'm a bad boy." Different rhythms than the ones which Fields was describing, but just as key to pulling an audience through the continuity of the story rather than the snags of the chopped-up instants which construct it on the screen. Even watching for the discrepancies, they disappear like blind spots the second a good line or a better expression comes along. Howard with her arms skeptically akimbo isn't quite as the camera left her, either, but her redoubtable, contiguous world-weariness means the disposition of her hands took me even longer to clock than her scene partner's. The other part of the illusion is how much you care about hair that was windblown in an exterior shot and re-tousled for the rear projection, a skip in the white noise of the room or the stages of the knotting of a tie, artifacts of the other kind of time in which the production was embedded, whose traces inside or outside the cutting room always remain. No style is invisible, only familiar. I have seen odd cuts go by in scenes before and only sometimes do I find out they marked a retake. But I missed the change of skies the first time I saw Jaws, even without the excuse of New England weather, and Elisha Cook Jr.'s hands make me wonder what other seamless gaps I don't see. He does a wonderful bit with his wristwatch as Mart Waterman, absently pleating the cuff of his shirt as he calculates the time; it's even better than his mime of just having been stabbed in the shin with a hatpin mid-murder. This note brought to you by my underworld backers at Patreon.
no subject
I think it's fair to be alarmed by deepfakes: people have been manipulating tapes and photographs as long as the technologies have existed, but it's a sea-change to be able to fabricate a moving image from whole cloth and have it be indistinguishable from unedited news, especially since we have enough problems with ordinary disinformation already. But filmmaking is a definitionally weird art form. You put a whole lot of real time together and you get something that never happened. It comes built-in haunted.
There was never a seamless story; it was always a mosaic. (I know there are exceptions, movies and reportage that don't involve takes or cuts, but as a rule.)
Editing is one of the elements of filmmaking I find most interesting and in some ways know the least about, because the underlying mechanisms make intuitive sense to me and I am not sure I have any creative instinct for the techniques; I have never, for example, wanted to learn how to vid. There are so many ways in which I am not audiovisually oriented, except I am interested by movies.
I knew a guy who had sliced off the top part of his thumb...
On a Hollywood set or just cutting himself a bagel?
no subject
On a Hollywood set or just cutting himself a bagel? --I believe he did it on some sort of factory-type equipment, but he also was quite young when it happened. I knew him when he was a teenager (I was an adult; he lived in the neighborhood), and it had already been that way for a long time.