take a look at this scene from Goodfellas and pay close attention to the cigar. Please come on, it's not even fair. No, it's a famous example of a continuity error, a visible break in the action or details of a film across connected shots or scenes. Movies are full of these, most of which we don't notice. There are big ones, like this moment in Apocalypse Now where you see the boat very obviously break, and moments later, there's no damage. There are slightly harder-to-catch details, like the fact that in Pulp Fiction, you can see bullet holes in the wall before Jules and Vincent are ever shot at. And there are very subtle ones, like in this scene from The Godfather where the movement of this hand doesn't line up from one shot to the next. But are all these errors actually mistakes? Would a good film editor knowingly leave in a continuity error? This video is sponsored by MUBI. Try it for free at mubi.com. Thomas flight. These errors can sometimes be fun to spot and discover the first

one I ever remember noticing on my own was watching this scene from Real Steel in 2011 when I saw the briefcase change position between this shot and this shot. 2011 was a different time for movies, and long before that, when I first learned about them as a kid, it was part of what awakened my curiosity to what was going on behind the scenes of a movie. Suddenly, the movie was no longer just the story that was happening on the screen. If you looked close enough, you could find these little flaws that gave you clues about how a movie was made. It was visible proof of how a scene was cut together from different takes. The language we have for discussing these breaks in continuity and popular culture is almost always negative. We call them continuity mistakes, or we say the editing has bad continuity. But the maker, the editor responsible for making this cut, would rank high on my list of the greatest editors of all time. She's been nominated for nine editing Oscars and has won three, which ties her for most of all.

time and her longtime collaboration with Scorsese has produced editing that is consistently engaging and inventive. A movie like Goodfellas sings with a kind of energetic intensity that, in my opinion, few other movies achieve. So why would such an incredible editor overlook such a seemingly basic error? She tells a story of going to the Oscars the year Goodfellas was nominated, and when it lost Best Editing to Dances with Wolves, the editor of that film came up to her and asked, Why did you make that bad continuity cut? To which she replied, Which continuity error? We have tons of them. Her and Scorsese do indeed have tons of them. In scenes from The Departed, a cigarette disappears out of a character's mouth, a window in the back of a van gets smashed, is magically fixed, and then is smashed again. In The Wolf of Wall Street, a cup gets knocked down and then reappears. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Looks like those ludes are working their magic on Donnie right now. And look at how this character's

position changes between this shot, this one, and the next course. I've been on one of these before. The entire length of this video could just be a supercut of shoemaker continuity errors, but these aren't editing mistakes. Her and Soresi know they're there and decide to keep them anyway. So, what gives? Why would you knowingly leave in a continuity error, and why do some filmmakers go a step further and intentionally create breaks in continuity? This book, In the Blink of an Eye, is one of the best books ever written about editing theory. In it, Walter Murch outlines his six criteria for the ideal cut. Most important, at the top of the list, is emotion, and sixth, all the way down at the bottom, is physical continuity. He says emotion at the top of the list is the thing you should try to preserve at all costs. If none of the other edits has the right emotion, then sacrificing spatial continuity is well worth it. The approach that Walter Murch describes is essentially the philosophy that Thma Shaker is applying to her

editing the reason she cuts from this take to this one, even though the continuity of the cigar doesn't line up, is because that was the best way to cut the scene for performance. In this case, they had one actor in the scene who was a professional, and so she might have had a more limited number of good takes to choose from. And faced with a choice between a worse performance and bad continuity in the final edit, she chose bad continuity. Even when they're working with experienced actors, Scorsese's tendency to use a lot of improvisation can mean that the final scene is stitched together from many different takes with differences in action or timing. For Shoemaker and Scorsese, cutting their scenes for the best performance and rhythm takes priority, and in my opinion, it works. Watching many of these scenes, you're so entranced by the performances that it's only if someone points them out to you or on multiple viewings that you eventually catch the breaks in continuity. Many parts of filmmaking are about making these kinds of subtle

compromises as much as some might try. A director can never have perfect, complete control over every detail. True perfection is an impossible standard. You might assert that Scorsese should be more careful about continuity on set with his actors, but again, everything in filmmaking is about a trade-off in using limited resources. By expending effort on making sure the actors are hitting the same timing with every little action, you can strain their ability to freely explore in the performance, and you might end up with performances that feel less natural or spontaneous. Or you spend so much time trying to get the little details correct that you go over budget and have to cut something else that's more important out of the film. But these are examples of a director consciously leaving in a continuity error as a pragmatic decision for the greater good of the story. What about times when directors intentionally break continuity? One of the most common ways you can see this in classic films is in the changing heights of actors between shots, often in a wide height difference between two

actors will be pretty noticeable, but then when the camera moves closer, the shorter actor stands on something to cheat them higher, so the difference is less noticeable. Filmmakers regularly cheat blocking, props, and light because they know how an individual shot looks is often more important than these tiny differences in continuity. Wes Anderson will often break continuity blatantly just because he thinks something looks better a certain way for the shot, like in this scene from The Grand Budapest Hotel where the shape of this window changes from one shot to the next, or in this scene he cheats the size of the painting Agatha is carrying by using one that is smaller than the prop used in the rest of the film, simply because it looked better to have her carrying a smaller painting. Sometimes an editor might break continuity in a noticeable way for a narratively motivated reason. I've talked before about how Joe Walker does this in Dune to help clue us into the fact that we're transitioning in and out of visions that Paul is having. Jump cuts are a type of

intentional continuity break in time that can be used for a narrative reason in this scene from the Irishman. Hello, hello, Joe. Joe. The jolt of broken visual continuity helps convey how emotionally disjointed the moment is for the character, but they can also just be a stylistic approach to cutting a scene. This technique originated with the French New Wave directors like Godard in the '60s, but in the '90s, you can find it being used in the NBC Network police drama procedural Homicide: Life on the Streets. Rick or Ray, he was driving a black 280Z or a $60,000 custom Loot. And today, it's commonly employed in all kinds of movies. In many Jackie Chan films, you can see continuity broken when the same stunt is shown from multiple angles in quick succession, and you can often find continuity intentionally broken to create a kind of surrealism. If you want a master class in this kind of editing, watch the wonderful surrealist short film Meshes of the Afternoon. But you can also find this surrealist broken

continuity and much more mainstream work, like in the dream sequences you see in The Sopranos. Although there is, I guess, the question of whether or not this is actually a break in continuity or just a continuous depiction of a dream space that has no continuity. It is possible to push these boundaries even further across Terence Malik's filmography. Continuity becomes more and more abstract. Sometimes we can see two characters that are facing each other in a scene. Both have the sunlight positioned directly behind them. In this scene from a hidden life, a single conversation seems to have no continuity of location. The conversation takes place inside and outside and all around the church, with no clear indication of when or how the characters are moving between these locations. Harmony Karin, AKA Dark Side Malik, also does something similar in his film. She's 16 years old. She doesn't know what love is. She's too young to get married. She's 22. Moon dog, 22, whatever. In Spring Breakers, when these girls are planning a robbery, their conversation happens nonlinearly across

several different locations. This way of constructing a scene is more impressionistic. Are we seeing a fractured memory? Does this represent the effects of the drugs that characters are consuming, or is it giving the impression that these conversations might have happened multiple times over the course of different days or meetings? Christopher Nolan also pushes the boundaries of continuity of time in many of his films, but breaking continuity can go even further than this. These filmmakers, like Malik, Karin, and sometimes Nolan, are occasionally almost crossing the line into what film scholars call non-continuity editing. David Bardwell says, Powerful and pervasive as it is, continuity style remains only one style, and many filmmakers have explored other editing possibilities. The idea of a continuity error, as we understand it, presumes that the film is trying to portray continuous action from one shot to the next and that this continuous action is what conveys the story and the film's meaning. Non-continuity editing starts with a different assumption. In the early 1900s

when what we call continuity editing was being invented and slowly adopted as the language of mainstream cinema, there were other filmmakers who were exploring entirely different ways of thinking about editing. Instead of using multiple shots to create one continuous action across the scene, these filmmakers sought to convey the meaning of their story through the symbolic relationship between disconnected shots. Here's one famous example: in Sergey Eisenstein's 1927 film October, he shows a new provisional government coming to power in Russia. When it does, the Russian soldiers begin to celebrate, thinking they'll no longer be fighting in the war, but the government decides to keep fighting. Eisenstein depicts it like this: he shows the government delivering a notice, then bombs falling on soldiers in trenches, and then he intercuts between the soldiers looking up into the air in fear and the large iron wheel of a cannon descending from the sky. These two actions of the iron wheel and the soldiers looking upward have no established relationship within time and space, within the action of the story, but

the symbolic relationship here is pretty clear. It's as if the soldiers are being crushed by the Iron Wheel of a war machine. Another example of non-continuity editing can be seen in the work of Soviet filmmaker Ziga Vertov's 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera. Here, the story is told not by following the continuity of action of a single character or group of characters, but instead with a montage of images that construct meaning through how the shots relate thematically and symbolically. In Man with a Movie Camera, the story represented happens on the scale of the community. This style requires the viewer to do a certain amount of decoding. The viewer must see the meaning in the relationship between the shots rather than in the actions of the individuals within the story. In non-continuity editing, though, it's not just the thematic relationship between the shots that matters; sometimes, it's also the rhythmic or visual relationship between the shots. When I edited my experimental film Labyrinth ion, I was essentially experimenting with non-continuity editing, trying to find these

kinds of connections in unrelated pieces of abstract footage I had shot in order to create the impression of larger movements, actions, and ideas. While non-continuity editing like this has never reached the level of prominence that continuity editing has, it's far from just an artifact of film history. There's a whole tradition of documentary films that employ the style of editing Ziga Vertov was using in Man with a Movie Camera, and non-continuity films in editing have had a big influence on mainstream continuity filmmaking. The Bear is probably one of the most famous shows recently that frequently uses bits of non-continuity editing. When the show uses these quick momentary cuts to an insert of flames or a character's face, it's using non-continuity editing more symbolically to represent what the character is thinking or feeling in that moment. The first episode of the show's third season is constructed almost entirely in a non-continuity style of editing. Beyond those examples, you probably see way more non-continuity editing than you even realize. It's a

style that's used by many music videos, commercials, and pieces of Internet content. I think it's just as valid a form of editing language as continuity editing, and it's one that I think the audience understands almost as intuitively. It's just that we've come to expect continuity editing in most narrative filmmaking, but whether or not continuity is even important for your film has everything to do with the story you're telling and how you want to convey that story. I think a certain style of Internet criticism ended up placing too much emphasis on continuity errors as a bad thing, and I've even played into this at times in some of my older videos. I've pointed out fractures in continuity as a sign of bad editing, and sure, sometimes continuity errors can be distracting and take you out of a scene, making it feel clunky, but these days I feel like if a continuity error is super noticeable, it's more a sign that something else about the scene or story isn't working properly. How noticeable a continuity error is is

often more a symptom of a problem than the problem itself. The advent of digital media allowed viewers to pause and examine movies frame by frame, and the advent of Internet message boards and videos like this one allows people to catalog and share these kinds of filmmaking details, which, as I said, can be a fun activity that helps highlight the complexity of the craft of filmmaking and helps us learn about it. But I think it also helped create a way of thinking about movies that treats them as objects to be dissected and discussed afterwards rather than stories to be felt and experienced. This can lead some viewers to judge the quality of a film based on a tally of smaller details rather than on the quality of the film as a whole. In this way of thinking, good storytelling ends up being judged more based on an absence of mistakes or plot holes rather than the story's ability to move you, transport you, or allow you to see the world in a new way. It emphasizes technical perfectionism over felt impact. Some continuity errors are just mistakes.

that slip by the filmmakers, and it's good to avoid these when you can. But I think talking about every continuity error as a mistake or something bad misunderstands the context in which many of them exist and how sometimes knowingly including one can be the best choice you can make for your movie. And while most people don't sit down and watch entire films that are shot and edited in the non-continuity style, we still understand this language, and the fact that it also works as a way of conveying meaning through film helps us understand why bad continuity isn't always so bad. Our brains are built to look for meaning, to find connections between things when we watch a film. Our brain isn't looking for what doesn't line up; it's looking for how things relate. A character looks across a room, the filmmaker cuts to a new shot, and we instinctively understand that we're now seeing what the character was looking at. We don't just make these connections between shots spatially; we're unconsciously looking for the

connections between shots visually, rhythmically, emotionally, and thematically as we're watching a movie. If we're following and engaged with one of these threads, the discontinuity of the others becomes invisible. If you want to watch a newer documentary that follows in the tradition of non-continuity editing, you can check out Terren Malex's Voyage of Time, available to watch in the US on Movie, my sponsor for this video. Movie is an online hand-curated cinema with a bunch of exceptional titles from all around the world. They have festival favorites, classics, and a bunch of independent cinema. They also put out movies of their own in theaters. Just last night, I watched The Substance, which is a wild new body horror film starring Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid, and Margaret Qu. It's really out there. It has some fantastic commentary about beauty standards in Hollywood, and you can watch it everywhere in theaters now. It'll eventually be streaming on Movie, so go check out their library there as well. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial.

by using my link mubi.com/thomasl. If you're Ed in watching more movies with non-continuity editing, most of that style has been developed in International Cinema outside of Hollywood. Movie is hands down one of the best places to watch contemporary and classic International Cinema online. So go sign up for your free trial today by going to movie.com/thomasflight. Thanks again to Movie for sponsoring this video.

Why They Just Don't Care About Continuity

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