TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

The success of Top Gun and other films whose mise-en-scène offers a similar syntax during certain sequences, such as Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander, also released in 1986, promotes the stylistic influence of the television music video within the Hollywood structure. One American television channel, which emerged in the 1980s and specialized in broadcasting music videos, would come to formally shape American cinema in the 1990s and 2000s: MTV. This formal influence operated at multiple levels. First, as we have seen, it affected studio filmmaking, which increasingly came to include one or more music video-like sequences. Beyond mise-en-scène, MTV also had a significant impact on American audiovisual narration. According to Doug Ibold, an editor on numerous American television series, the channel’s popularity influenced the sonic direction of films and television programs, in which songs, used to mark key moments, gradually replaced the use of an original instrumental score. One can now observe, for instance, the large number of television series episodes that conclude with a song rather than an original score.^[3] This observation highlights the formal impact produced by the MTV style, even as the commercial logic at work remains consistent with the promotional and sales-oriented objectives of album marketing discussed above.

New Artistic Trajectories in Hollywood

Moreover, in the 1980s MTV became a veritable “incubator of talent” for Hollywood production—a role highlighted by Debra Kaufman in her article “Video Spawned the Editing Star: What Hath MTV Wrought?”:

Jim Haygood, ACE, who won MTV Video Awards for directing Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up” in 1989 and Madonna’s “Vogue” the following year, emphasizes that, especially in the early MTV days, music videos were a “second-class citizen” of the filmmaking world. But that was a good thing. “Since there wasn’t the level of scrutiny, it gave a lot of us a chance to work and not go through the traditional film editor’s pathway from assistant to editor,” he says. “You got to just do it. It was a chance for cinematographers, directors and editors to work with real money and develop careers in something that was new. […] Haygood […] had cut some music videos for director David Fincher in the mid-1980s. He moved to Los Angeles and joined Propaganda Films, a powerhouse for music videos that proved to be an incubator for directors (Fincher, Bay, Domnick [sic] Sena, Nigel Dick and many others) as well as editors (Heldman, Robert Duffy, Tom Muldoon, Haines Hall, Angus Wall, John Murray) who all cut their editorial teeth there. And they all took their MTV experiences and training to the next level—feature films, television and commercials.^[4]

In this respect, MTV’s influence on 1990s–2000s Hollywood cinema appears self-evident. The type of editing developed for the music video by filmmakers such as David Fincher and Michael Bay—despite their very distinct styles—has had an impact on commercial cinema as a whole. The ASL of Michael Bay’s films hovers around three seconds, while the majority of David Fincher’s films have an ASL ranging between three and four seconds.^[5]

Beyond influencing mise-en-scène in cinema and serving as a generator of new talent for it, MTV would leave its strongest imprint at the level of editing. The experiments associated with music videos take various forms depending on the artists, directors, editors, and cinematographers involved, but rapid editing gradually established itself over the course of the decade, eventually becoming the defining feature of the so-called “MTV style.” As Kaufman explains, “When contemplating the impact of MTV on popular culture most people instantly think of fast cutting, montages and other oft-used music video conventions that are now routinely found in TV shows, feature films and even commercials.”^[6] Progressively, MTV productions thus became vectors of an intermedial standardization of editing practices, disrupting not only cinema’s relationship to time and rhythm, but more broadly transforming the mainstream audiovisual landscape. Kaufman, however, tempers the commonplace view that MTV-style rapid editing exerted a strictly negative influence on cinema, notably by invoking the opinions of Hollywood editors who followed the aforementioned career path and who, in a sense, defend their craft:

MTV, with its multiplicity of styles and endless experimentation, has had an impact on editing, but in a manner much more complex than just quick cuts. First, the channel played a role in audiences’ acceptance of then-new editorial styles. Some critics charge that MTV is responsible for all the bad, fast-paced editing, but Haygood has another point of view. “Sometimes, things do get cut too quickly, partly because that’s what the audience has gotten accustomed to,” he says. “Sometimes people say they hate dissolves, but dissolves have their place. So the fast cuts technique has its place too, but it’s about using good judgment. It depends on the content of the film. […] Berdan co-edited (with Hank Corwin, ACE) Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, a film often cited as an MTV-influenced. Never a big MTV viewer, Berdan […] says editing has been inspired by the culture overall. “We are inundated by so many images every day that we learn to take them in quickly,” he says. “MTV is part of that culture; it’s the same thing.”^[7]

Whether or not one chooses to qualify the harmful nature of the MTV style’s impact on film editing, it seems clear to us that it greatly contributed to the transition from the energetic editing of the 1980s to the ultrafast, “music video-like” editing that would characterize the 2000s. Martin Scorsese observed this evident acceleration of editing in American cinema as early as the beginning of the 1990s, around the release of Goodfellas (1990), as well as its implications for filmmaking practices: “I guess the main thing that’s happened in the past ten years is that the scenes have to be quicker and shorter. [Goodfellas] is sort of my version of MTV… but even that’s old-fashioned.”^[8] From that point onward, the 1990s and the following decade would become marked by a relentless pursuit of the most striking editing possible. The result was a constant decline in ASL and a general increase in the number of shots in Hollywood films, as summarized by David Bordwell:

At the close of the 1980s, many films boasted 1500 shots or more. There soon followed movies containing 2000-3000 shots, such as JFK (1991) and The Last Boy Scout (1991). By century’s end, the 3000-4000 shot movie had arrived (Armageddon, 1998; Any Given Sunday, 1999). Many average shot lengths became astonishingly low. The Crow (1994), U-Turn (1997), and Sleepy Hollow (1999) came in at 2.7 seconds; El Mariachi (1993), Armageddon, and South Park (1999) at 2.3 seconds; and Dark City (1998), the fastest-cut Hollywood film I’ve found, at 1.8 seconds. In 1999 and 2000, the ASL of a typical film in any genre was likely to run three to six seconds.

Today, most films are cut more rapidly than at any other time in U.S. studio filmmaking. […] Has rapid cutting therefore led to a “post-classical” breakdown of spatial continuity? Certainly, some action sequences are cut so fast (and staged so gracelessly) as to be incomprehensible. Nonetheless, many fast-cut sequences do remain spatially coherent, as in the Die Hard, Speed and Lethal Weapon movies. […] More important, no film is one long action sequence. Most scenes present conversations, and here fast cutting is applied principally to shot/reverse-shot exchanges. […] Editors tend to cut at every line and insert more reaction shots than we would find in the period 1930-1960.^[9]

This final passage leads us to clarify that rapid editing does not necessarily imply action in the strict sense of the term. Editing may instead be driven by sharp dialogue, and a low ASL may correspond to rapid-fire exchanges. During the classical era, Frank Capra’s screwball comedies already displayed a fast rhythm for their time.

Beyond films containing little action, such as Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000), cited by David Bordwell, a film like Goodfellas, which we mentioned previously, certainly includes sequences of action and violence; paradoxically, however, its most rapidly edited scenes depend more heavily on the rhythm of dialogue or on rock music.