Editing an Emotional Jolt: WITNESS

The way this scene uses angles and cuts — particularly the way it edits between a few key frames — emotionally underscores how John Book (Harrison Ford) feels about hearing some horrifying news.

Setup

The establisher of Book in a phone booth is fairly bright. The red-white-and-blue of the flag in the background and giant Coke vending machine in the foreground stand out against Book’s plain clothes and ideals of the Amish community, but also set us up for the colour and lighting change to come.

Creeping Dread

When Book senses something wrong, the shot moves to a closeup with smooth, continuous editing which carries his body positioning over the cut.

Book feels something is off, but doesn’t know what. The closeup shot depicts this by making his worried face fill the majority of frame, but also showing only darkness behind him even though it’s sunny outside.

This so far is a ‘typical’ edit — it feels smooth because the continuity of how Book is holding the phone is close, shot angles stay on one side of the 180 line, and the sound editing has no break in it.

Punch in the Guts

When the voice on the other end of the line informs Book his partner is dead, the shot moves only slightly; it’s the same size and angle, moved just somewhat to the left.

The jarring effect is caused by a jump cut, as Book has changed positions entirely. The shot now shows us only the back of his head, along with the phone booth’s inner black wall.

We go from left frame to right frame in a split-second:

The jump cuts suggests the sort of psychic ‘break’ or shock which can happen with sudden bad news.

For the rest of the conversation, the shot stays on the back of Book’s head.

Getting Out

When Book hangs up, he turns and stares for a moment.

The next scene is a smash cut to a different phone in a wildly different place.

We don’t see Book processing his news, or making a decision of what to do next, we don’t know if this new scene comes ten seconds or ten minutes after Book got the bad news, but the jarring edit which yanks us out of the scene is yet another reminder of the shock Book is experiencing.

Takeaways

An unusual or ‘technically wrong’ edit can still be emotionally right for a character or scene.

I don’t know if director Peter Weir always intended to do this, or perhaps Harrison Ford was moving in a way which felt natural and Weir and/or editor Thom Noble ‘found it’ in the editing process, but it’s a wonderfully evocative use jump cuts within a sequence — and indeed a movie — which otherwise uses more typical editing.