Oneupsmanship

Is it wrong for me to laugh out loud at Jesus' line in the last panel? Remember, the Son of God has a sense of humor too.

Tonight, I went to my Media Aesthetics class for the first time in like four weeks. Like I said in the previous post, Michael Moore is gone and we have a new teacher for the rest of the semester. For tonight's session he talked about editing, and showed a lot of clips for examples.

1. "rhythm" in editing: the three-way duel in THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
2. cross-cutting (aka parallel editing): the christening scene from THE GODFATHER
3. fast edits (pre-MTV): the famous shower scene from PSYCHO
4. transition, compressing time (supposedly considered the "best" of its kind): a piece of bone turning into a space satellite in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
5. montage: Benjamin swimming and sleeping around with Mrs. Robinson in THE GRADUATE
6. more montage (classic style): the production of the hula-hoop in THE HUDSUCKER PROXY
7. no edits or cuts - long tracking shot: the beginning of TOUCH OF EVIL
8. no edits again: the beginning of THE PLAYER (interesting note: one of the characters actually reference TOUCH OF EVIL during this scene, a nice touch)
9. French new wave - jumpcuts: a scene from BREATHLESS by Godard. I must find and watch his films. And Trauffaut.
10. use of storyboards: the flood scene from O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?
11. micro-edits and quick-cutting: pretty much all of REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. He jumped around a lot of scenes.
12. dissolves and transitions: "the story of the apartment" from CITY OF GOD. I love that movie.
13. Then he ended the class with MOULIN ROUGE. I wanted him to show the tango scene (it's my favorite scene) but he showed the can-can sequence instead, in multi-angle format.

That was long, huh? Well, this is the kind of stuff I get excited about. School is fun again!