The long take of Woltz waking up, discovering blood, and finding the horse’s head, all within the same shot, creates a sickening feeling that the audience can’t escape. Had Reynolds and Zinner employed quick cuts here, the horrific reveal of Woltz’s severed horse’s head would read as a modern-day slasher film, which Coppola specifically aimed to avoid so that The Godfather would not fall “oo much into the Corman Horror film tradition.” (Coppola, The Godfather Notebook) A lack of cuts is often more powerful than countless dramatic splices. It’s not the notes you play it’s the notes you don’t play,” and a similar principle applies to the language of film. Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis has suggested, famously, that “usic is the space between the notes.
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Similar to other parts of the film, it is a calm before a storm.Ī series of cross-dissolves uncut take of Woltz in bed, waking upĪfter the idyllic California cross-dissolve setup, the horse’s head is revealed through a long take. This establishes an idyllic morning before the horror. In the gruesome scene of Woltz finding his prized horse’s severed head at the foot of his bed, for instance, we open with multiple cross dissolves over exterior shots of his home, sprinkled with the sound of morning crickets. When those moments of violence arise, both the film and viewer are bombarded by a rush of adrenaline. This lulling and brooding ambiance causes the dispersed moments of violence to feel increasingly terrifying. In contrast to hard cuts, where there is no visual overlap, cross dissolves are a way to slow down action, creating a gradual and therefore comforting effect. A cross dissolve is the overlapping of two images in either two different scenes or the same scene. Within said rhythm, one editing tool that Reynolds and Zinner employ is the transitional cross dissolve. Rhythmically, the majority of the film exhibits this slow, brooding pace. As we sit in scenes for long periods of time-scenes in which no violence occurs-we fall into the balance of the Corleone family carrying out business. Coppola’s use of continuous action helps create his lulling ambiance. Rather than employ a non-linear editing style where time is out of order (as famously done in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction), The Godfather is edited in continuous action, with scenes passing in chronological order from start to finish. The rhythm of the film’s editing thereby mirrors the rhythm of the Corleone family, which strives to maintain an equilibrium but often resorts to violence in order to reach it. Through its varying rhythmic tools-from continuous action to hard cuts and cross dissolves- The Godfather lulls the audience into submission in order to intensify the impact of violent action when it arrives.
It’s the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.Ĭompleting their labyrinthine edit, Coppola and his team managed to create contrasting rhythms that amplified violent scenes. (Lebo 188) The work was an epic exercise in reduction that won Reynolds and Zinner a nomination for the 1973 Academy Award in Editing. Coppola’s biggest struggle, edit-wise, was to reduce the film to a length that Paramount Studios could stomach.Īccording to Harlan Lebo in The Godfather Legacy, “By the time principal photography was completed, Coppola had shot 500,000 feet of potentially usable footage, or more than ninety hours of material.” Coppola repeatedly removed and replaced scenes, often to “appease the studio,” resulting in the edit becoming a “maze,” with multiple scenes sliced and abandoned on the cutting room floor. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was written (and re-written) in the editing room by a total of six editors, only two of whom, William Reynolds and Peter Zinner, were credited.
A film is written thrice - in pre-production through screenwriting, in production through shooting, and in post-production through editing.
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