A Thousand Cuts

Like most people, I watch movies. I've heard of a particular film term that I never bothered to look up until just yesterday: the jump cut. Apparently, this idea was popularized by the French New Wave, films that often lacked a strong story arc, following wayward rebels doing whatever came naturally.

I finally looked it up--where else?--Wikipedia. Wikipedia gets a bad rap, and I have no idea why. I know that it's edited by people, and thus, anyone can put up anything. For the most part, they haven't, and so the content is reasonably reliable, especially for non-controversial topics.

A cut refers to a switch of scenery. For example, suppose you have two people talking to each other. You see one person's face, then another, then back to the original person. The two do not share screen time together. This is a cut. Or more drastically, you had a scene on Tatooine, and now you have a scene on a Star Destroyer. You cut from one to the other.

A jump cut is not exactly like that. The idea is to jump in time. It's still a cut because it's not continuous in time. For example, in Ocean's 11, there's a guy who's trying to tap the security cameras. As he's leaving, he realizes he's lost because the directions he wrote on the back of his hand are smudged, when he wiped his sweaty brow. So, he walks down one hallway, then comes back and walks a different hallway.

Now, this would normally take up quite a bit of time as he walked down and back, and that would leave the viewer impatient, so they skip little bits here and there, to show advancing of time. Usually, the jump in time is only a few seconds, skipping over "boring parts".

Although Wikipedia notes a related kind of cut called the match cut, the two are quite different. A match cut is also a cut, but it tries to relate two different scenes together by creating a similar scene. The most famous match cut (I'd imagine) is the scene in 2001 where an ape throws up a bone into the sky, as it flips end over end, and then melds into a lengthy space craft flipping end over end. The idea is that the bone has become a tool (in this case, a weapon) and similarly, the space station also happens to have nuclear weapons in it. It matches a weapon in the past to one in the near future.

I'm sure there are as many cuts as there are directors to imagine them, but I've always been curious about what a jump cut is. In the old days, I could look it up, but it would have taken some work. Now, I just get on a computer and look the information up, and indeed Wikipedia helps in situations like this.

I wonder what the next Wikipedia will be. Search engines are good, but lack a good way to organize the information. A colleague recently asked me whether baby drumsticks come from baby chickens. Apparently not, but if you look at the Wikipedia entry on chickens, it talks mostly about the kinds of chickens out there, and spends no time talking about the processing of chicken into food, despite the fact that chickens are one of the few domesticated animals that humans eat with regularity (others being cows and pigs).