From Electronic Editing to a Digital Ben-Hur - Text 4
What might be revealed by a consideration of the four Ben-Hur adaptations is how little has changed in terms of the editing choices made when composing a scene like the chariot race. The most significant difference is between the first version, made in 1907, before editing existed as it is understood today and has been understood since at least 1920, and the subsequent three versions. On the whole, the editing of the chariot scene in the 2016 version is not very different than what is on display in the 1925 and 1959 versions. In all three cases, a variety of perspectives is offered, linked to various characters, or from an “objective” narrative view, switching between close-ups and long-shots, with often dynamic moving shots tied to the movements of the chariots themselves – all providing the sort of synthetic, synoptic, analytical account of a complex event, rendered as a more or less coherent and comprehensible visual representation, that editing has made possible since the basic conventions were established a century ago.
That there seems (arguably) to be a decline in the quality of the editing in the three films released at significant moments in the technical history of editing systems is likely coincidental (and may have more to do with the limitations of the “re-make,” and the common tendency to recreate what was thought to have made the original a success, without seeking new formal approaches). The failures of the last two versions are also likely the result of attempts to bring new technologies together: widescreen technology and the flatbed editors in 1959, and the use of so many different cameras, on the mistaken belief that more footage made more dynamic scenes, in 2016.
In the 2016 version we may see the manifestation of what David Bordwell has called “intensified continuity” editing[7]. But this, like the elaboration of shifting perspectives in the 1925 version, is likely the result of other more immediately relevant causes – social, cultural, formal, aesthetic – than an effect strictly of the possibilities created by a particular editing system. A certain “intensification,” a more rapid editing pace, may indeed have become a more widely-desired formal goal during the contemporary era, for whatever broader reasons that would have to be traced back to other more diffuse causes, including the influence of television production. Such “intensification” may well be easier to achieve in the era of digital editing, but it has not obviously been caused by the advent of such new technologies: rapid, or “intense” cutting is likely to be found in films of many different times and places before digitization. Thus, rapid editing is not obviously a hallmark or a stylistic consequence of the digital age, but such techniques do tend, often, perhaps typically, to precede the ultimate technical development that makes them easier to achieve.
It is perhaps impossible to establish what causal role technological change plays in any straightforward sense. Claims for a more direct causal effect of technological change on stylistic techniques may seem more reasonable when made about a change that is apparently much more extensive, and therefore more consequential than minor incremental alterations, such as the incorporation of digital technologies into the filmmaking apparatus, which are seen by many to have altered the very nature of the cinema. Yet, despite its being more extensive, the same principle applies to “digital editing” as to the developments of new, dedicated editing systems, like the Steenbeck, and the Moviola.
A partial historical sketch of the various adaptations of Ben-Hur suggests that the relation between technology and form, between technical change and formal, stylistic, and aesthetic possibility, is far more complicated than is often suggested, and that a theory of the role of technology in the cinema depends on a more basic theory of cinematic representation – or a theory of cinematic expression, which would account for the more or less invariable aspects of expression, which do not change wildly from one era to another, especially in a relatively conservative context like Hollywood filmmaking, or which at least cannot be understood to be constrained or unleashed in particular and specific ways by either “pre-digital” or by “digital” technologies. Such an account of the expressive function of the cinema is based on an explicitly “functional” analysis of the cinema as a technology, according to which artistic “expression” and narrative storytelling are among the many possible, if most historically significant, functions of cinematic technology.
