The enemies of editing: Enemy of the State (Tony Scott, 1998) (Week 6)

 This week during the cinema screening we viewed Enemy of the State directed by Tony Scott and edited by Chris Lebenzon and starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman. We looked deeper into the way the high tempo, extremely 1990 stylized film was edited. The editing was rapid and many drone shots were used to portray the big brother styled surveillance view with rapid cross-cutting to represent the amount of surveillance which takes place and the lengths which are taken to track one wanted suspect. As a viewer, particularly in this film we notice when the cutting is very fast, during the chase scenes. As an editor for all films the amount of footage to sift through is immense and to find the best frames to cut at the perfect times to create meaning and build suspense and realize tension can affect the effectiveness of a scene. Once the material is selected, the editor joins the shots, the end of one to the beginning of another. The most common join is the cut. A cut provides an instantaneous change from one shot to another. There are many quick and rapid cuts from one angle of the action taking place to the other, in an Enemy of the State for example when Will Smith’s character is being chased through the tunnel by two cars, there are over 7 edits all of Will Smith running, mostly shaky hand held shots and tracking shots but the rapid edits for just one form of action is quite astounding.

A fade-out gradually darkens the end of a shot to black, and a fade-in lightens a shot from black. This can usually release the tension in the scene and resolve the scene or do the opposite and leave the scene open for interpretation and surround the ending of the scene with ambiguities and expectations.

We’re accustomed to seeing a scene present action only once. Occasionally, however, a filmmaker may go beyond expanding an action to repeat it in its entirety. The very rarity of this technique may make it a powerful editing resource. The opening scene of Enemy of the State shows the councilor being murdered by corrupt members of the NSA, this vision from a long shot is repeated again and again and again throughout the film whenever the disk or the incident are brought up. This can remind the audience of the significance of the disk and why the NSA and targeting Will Smith’s character, and it also reminds the audience who are the corrupt agents and who are the people that we can trust.

 We’ve seen that when a film technique is chosen and patterned to fulfill certain functions, a style emerges. Continuity editing offers a good example. It’s a patterned use of a technique, based on filmmakers’ decisions, that’s designed to have particular effects on viewers. As its name implies, the continuity style aims to transmit narrative information smoothly and clearly over a series of shots. This makes the editing play a role in narration, the moment-by-moment flow of story information. The continuation and repetition of the green square target dragging across the screen targeting Will Smith’s character and others who are vulnerable to surveillance, which shows how invasive and powerful surveillance tools, are. It also hints at why it is being used but mostly as an editing in Enemy of the State it is used as an interval between the action and the control room’s perspective on the action.  Editing is used effectively in Enemy of the State and the editing portrays the actin genre as a variety of rapid cuts keep the narrative and action flowing so it is enthralling and exhilarating. The editing shows down to longer held shots and slower edits when information is given by the main characters and then rapid edits when the action begins, these patterns are repeated through this film and films similar to this in the genre of action/thriller.