Btw I had the laser Thunderball edition some years ago, and in the audio commentary Peter Hunt (as the film editor on Thunderball) had some fascinating things to say about film editing in general, and I'll never forget hearing from him the word 'jump cut' for the first time.
If I shoot a film of one person who rears back with his fist and then lunges forward and belts a person in the mouth, I have a 'full cut' of the film of that person in action. But say I want to speed him up a bit and to make the action more jolting and exciting—what a film editor could do (which is what Peter Hunt created) is cut the middle action (maybe a number of frames) of the man lunging forward so that what you only see is the man rearing back and then as he go into his lunge the cut ‘jumps’ to the end of his lunge as he smacks the guy in the mouth creating a jolt for that image--more faster and violent than the original full cut. Peter Hunt called this a ‘Jump Cut’.
You can see obvious examples of it in the final action scene in Thunderball where Bond is fighting Largo and his men in the speeding boat. You can also see it used in the beginning where bond is fighting the spy dressed as a women. And of course Hunt also used it in in the Bond/Grant fight in From Russia with Love, and it was also used extensively in OHMSS.
Peter Hunt did editing jobs for the Bond films for Dr. No and all the other early Bonds right up to You Only Live Twice--and then of course he directed OHMSS. After Hunt left the James Bond series the 'Jump Cut' technique doesn’t appear again until another editor brought it back for use in ‘the Spy Who Loved Me’.
(Btw, the worse use of 'Jump Cuts' I've ever seen was in Batman Forever where the jump-cutting is used so much and so heavily in the action sequences that you can't even see what's going on or figure out what is happening--it looks like complete visual confusion.)
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Last edited by starwing on Apr 1st, 2005 at 06:21 AM
Film censors use the jump cut extensively too. The problem being, in their case, whole scenes vanish. The British Board of Film Censors are notorious for this. The viewer can more times than not see the cut and are left frustrated.
I remember watching EXTERMINATOR 2 years ago with a mate and it was so badly cut that we ended up seeing who could shout CUT!!! the fastest everytime one occured!
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Mar 30th, 2005 10:30 PM
that would explain some of those "jumps" I always thought was due to "fastforwarding" of the editors or something
