Enemy of the State. Regarded by many as ludicrous and non-sensical, especially given Will Smith’s transition from everyday lawyer to Bruce Willis action hero in minutes, however, the film is in fact an homage to another of Gene Hackman’s films, Francis-Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Critically, the film is regarded as a very typical Tony Scott film with lots of flashy, fast paced cuts, intense action and lacking plot. Yet, as an action film, which is what it is, it doesn’t disappoint, looking particularly at the editing, we can see Tony Scott’s definitive hand on the work. Film Art essentially describes editing as juxtaposition of shots. Meaning is created through this juxtaposition. It continues to describe several types of edits. Aside from the regular cross-cut, match-cut, shot-reverse-shot edits which fall into the graphic relations category.

But Film Art also describes three other types of edits within the taxonomy of editing: Rhythmic Relations, Spatial Relations and Temporal Relations. These, aside from rhythmic relations describe the locus of a shot within the diegesis. Rhythmic relations describe the tempo of an edit or series of edits, whereas Temporal Relations and Spatial relations describe the time and place of an edit within the broader corpus of the film itself.

In Enemy of the State, the scene in which “Brill” and Robert Dean first meet in the elevator is a fast paced scene full of cross-cuts through space but relatively continuous in time. These cuts most often last for less than three seconds, some shorter than a second. The pace of the edits is used to heighten excitement and suspense, the rhythmic relations of these shots are very tight and fast paced with a very small temporal duration. Yet the dynamic created, I would argue is much less about the relation between the shots in terms of time and space and more the shots themselves and the tension that the fast cross-cutting of shots creates.