Film Theory: Why Don’t We Notice All Those Editing Cuts?

電影理論：我們?yōu)槭裁醋⒁獠坏剿械募糨孅c？

Edits are cuts in the “reality” of a film or television show, so they should be jarring. So why don’t we really notice them?

剪輯指對電影或電視節(jié)目中的“真實”的剪切，因此它們令人震撼。那我們?yōu)槭裁床辉嬲X察到它們呢？

Bertolt Brecht is a well-known playwright and director of the early twentieth century. The Brechtian approach to theater alienated the audience to remind them that they were watching a production and not something real. This was a far cry from other playwrights at the time, who sought to immerse their audiences in their stories. A few of the techniques Brecht used included breaking the fourth wall, displaying placards that informed the audience of the location or time of the scene, and including song and dance.

貝爾托·布萊希特是二十世紀初遠近聞名的劇作家兼導演。布萊希特式的間離效果使觀眾陌生化，提醒他們自己正在觀看的是作品，而非現實。這與當時那些試圖將觀眾吸引到他們的故事中的劇作家的觀念相去甚遠。布雷希特使用的技巧包括打破第四堵墻、用標語牌提示觀眾場景的地點或時間，還包括歌舞。

These techniques kept the audience aware that they were an audience. And in film and television today, these techniques are standard practice. However, why is it that, unlike the Brechtian theater, these elements do not pull the audience out of a film? Surely such an intrusive element should have a disruptive effect? So, why don’t we notice edit cuts?

這些技巧使觀眾意識到自己即是觀眾。在當今的影視中，這些技術是常規(guī)技法。但是，與布式戲劇相反，為什么這些元素不會將觀眾從電影敘事中抽離呢？這類的介入元素必然會產生破壞性影響嗎？為什么我們沒有注意到剪輯點呢？
Of course, there are cuts we do notice — the bad ones. The edits that cut too soon or too often. We lose sight of the fight in action scenes when the filmmakers use quick cuts instead of showcasing a well-choreographed scene in its entirety. However, excellent editing goes unseen. After all, the editor’s job is to be invisible. The American Cinema Editors Association quite literally calls it the invisible art.

誠然，我們的確可以注意到——一部分失敗的剪輯點。這樣的剪輯點不是太早就是太過頻繁了。在動作場景中，如果電影制作者使用快速剪輯而不是全面展示精心編排的場景時，我們就失去了對于動作的視覺概念。盡管如此，出色的剪輯確實能夠不被發(fā)現。畢竟，剪輯師的工作就是要做到不留痕跡。美國電影剪輯協會將其書面用語稱為隱形藝術。
Still, the fact that we remain locked into the narrative when watching cuts of unrealistic viewpoints, such as a long shot of a tall bell-tower clock to a close-up of the ticking clock hand, is quite remarkable. Each of these actions is entirely alien to the real world. Famed editor and theorist Walter Murch puts it more poignantly: Every theatrical film, except perhaps Hitchcock’s Rope, is made up of many different pieces of film joined together into a mosaic of images. The mysterious part of, though, is that the joining of those pieces – the ‘cut’ in American terminology – actually does seem to work, even though it represents a total and instantaneous displacement of one field of vision with another, a displacement that sometimes also entails a jump forward or backward in time as well as space.

然而，當看到不切實際的視點（如從高大鐘樓的長鏡頭深入時鐘指針的特寫鏡頭）時，我們仍然會陷入敘事中不可自拔，這一事實確實令人矚目。每一個這樣的情節(jié)都與現實世界毫無關聯。著名的剪輯師和理論家沃爾特·默奇更加含蓄地說： “除了像是希區(qū)柯克的《奪魂鎖》這樣的作品外，每部院線電影都是由許多不同的片段組成的，它們首尾相連，構成一種影像的鑲嵌畫。不過，其中一個神秘的部分是，這些片段的連接，即美國術語中的“切”，實際上是有效的，盡管它表示一個畫面與另一個畫面的整體或瞬時的位移，有時這種位移還會導致在時間和空間上向前或向后跳躍?！?/p>

In the same chapter from his book In The Blink of An Eye, Murch goes on to say that it’s almost surprising that we were able to concede to the idea of editing without completely rejecting the disparity between two images conjoined to tell a story. That’s true. From the moment we wake to the moment we sleep, everything we see, even edited films, are in a single stream of continuous information.

在他的《眨眼之間》一書的同一章中，默奇進一步說明我們能夠接受剪輯的理念而又不完全拒絕兩個差異懸殊的畫面承接而成的故事，著實令人驚訝。確實如此，從夢醒時分到酣然入睡，我們所看到的一切，甚至是剪輯過的電影，都在一個連續(xù)的信息流中。
Although, is that the case? Well, using a similar exercise to the one that gave Walter Murch the idea of using the blink as an edit point, we can see that we often omit visual information to stop becoming inundated with useless data.

這就是真實情況嗎？那么，使用與默奇的以眨眼作為剪輯點的想法做類似的練習，我們可以看到通常情況下被忽略的視覺信息，以免被無用的數據淹沒。

First, find an area of the room away from your monitor or phone to focus on. It could be a mirror, a television, a lunch menu — anything. After reading this sentence, look at the object, hold your focus for a few moments, then come back to the article. Unless you’re superhuman, all of the information between looking from the screen to the other area of the room gets omitted. And we’ll blink often while looking at the two points of focus, just like an edit cut.

首先，找到房間的某個區(qū)域，使其遠離監(jiān)視器或手機以進行對焦。它可以是任何東西，比如鏡子、電視、或是午餐菜單等等。讀完這句話之后，看一下被攝對象，將焦點保持一段時間，然后將視線轉回到這篇文章。除非你是超人，否則從屏幕上到房間其他區(qū)域之間的所有信息都將被忽略。而且，當我們關注視線聚焦的兩個點時，我們會經常眨眼，就像剪輯的剪切一樣。
It’s not only the blur between focus points that we systematically edit out. Everyone makes the mundane commute from point A to B, whether it’s for work, school, or traveling to the airport, and these are the elements often “edited” out from our recollection of that day. It’s easy to recall what happened at work, or how great the holiday was, but remembering the drive to the point of interest gets left on the cutting room floor. And of course, it bears pointing out that often in film and television, unless a meaningful conversation is taking place inside a car, these traveling scenes from A to B are very rarely in the script.

不僅僅是視線焦點之間的模糊被有序地剪輯了。無論是工作、上學還是去機場，每個人都在A點到B點之間進行日常通勤，這些都是我們在回憶某一天時經常被“剪輯”的元素。回憶起工作中發(fā)生了什么或者假期有多么美好是很容易的，但關于去往興趣點的路程的記憶卻被遺忘在大腦的剪輯室里。當然，需要指出的是，在電影和電視中，除非在汽車里進行了有意義的對白，否則從A點到B點的行駛場景極少出現在劇本中。
However, our brains are also editing what we see to help us process what comes next.In 2014, Wired published a series of articles exploring the science of cinema and the nature of perception. One report, “Cinematic Cuts Exploit How Your Brain Edits What You See,” by Greg Miller, delves into how we digest visual information, and it includes a section about psychologist and author Jeff Zack‘s work: His research suggests our brains are constantly dividing up the torrent of information streaming in through our senses into more manageable chunks in order to help us make sense of what’s happening around us and predict what’s likely to happen next . . . He thinks this is a manifestation of our brains’ never-ending effort to predict the future. We have a mental model of what’s happening that we use to predict what’s likely to happen next. ‘You do this because it’s super adaptive,’ Zacks said. ‘If you can anticipate what’s coming up in a few seconds you can react adaptively.’ But whenever the action changes — when the stoplight turns from red to green, say, or when your boss suddenly appears at your desk — you have to update your mental model to reflect what’s happening now.

但是，我們的大腦也在剪輯我們所看到的內容，以幫助我們處理接下來發(fā)生的事情。2014年，《連線》（是一份在全美國發(fā)行的彩色月刊雜志。該雜志于1993年3月開始發(fā)行，著重報道科技對文化、經濟和政治的影響。）發(fā)表了一系列文章，探討了電影的科學原理和接受的本質。格雷格·米勒撰寫的一份名為《電影剪輯如何利用大腦編輯你所見之物》的文章深入研究了我們如何消化視覺信息，其中包括有關心理學家和作家杰夫·扎克的作品的部分內容： 他的研究表明，我們的大腦會不斷將感知中迸發(fā)的信息流劃分為更加易于管理的數據塊，以幫助我們了解周圍正在發(fā)生的事情，并預測接下來可能發(fā)生什么……他認為這是我們的大腦對未來進行不懈努力的預知的表現形式。對于即將發(fā)生的事情，我們可以通過心智模式來預測它。扎克斯說：“你這么做是因為它具有超強的適應性。如果你能預料到幾秒鐘后會發(fā)生什么，你就可以做出合適的反應?！钡侵灰獎幼靼l(fā)生變化——比如當信號燈從紅色變?yōu)榫G色時，或者是你的老板突然出現在辦公桌旁的時后——你都必須更新你的心智模式來應對當前的狀況。

Editing is unnoticeable because, to an extent, it’s built on the foundation of how we perceive the world around us. While we don’t cut from location to location, we do neglect the non-important visual cues, and we delegate moments of time into event boundaries, like scenes, which allow for greater memory recall.

剪輯之所以不可忽視，是因為它在一定程度上建立在我們對周圍世界的感知基礎之上。 雖然我們不會在各個地點之間硬切，但我們的確會忽略無足輕重的視覺提示，轉而將時間分配到事件的銜接點（例如場景）上，以增強記憶喚起。