Sightlines · a concept

interstice / the "AND"

a cut belonging to neither shot, a term in itself; relinkage not linkage.

On screen: cuts that join across a gap (the between), not by continuity

Un Chien Andalou (1929) — Cuts systematically violate continuity: a man falls in a room and lands in a meadow, a door opens onto a beach, the same figure is doubled — the join becomes an uncrossable gap rather than a…
Dead of Night (1945) — the closing accelerating montage drops Craig into the mirror's Victorian bedroom, then a prison cell with Hugo, then the hands of figures he has only heard described; the cut itself becomes the…
Night and Fog (1956) — The oscillating cuts between the color present and the black-and-white archive, joining two sharply distinct images across an unbridgeable gap rather than by continuity.
Tokyo Twilight (1957) — Ozu cuts between near-symmetrical frontal shots and 'crosses the line' of the 180-degree rule to follow a graphic logic of his own; scene transitions are straight cuts mediated by unpeopled…
Testament of Orpheus (1960) — The substitution splice — a cut inside a held frame that turns one thing into another — inherited from Méliès's stop-substitution grammar and used as the film's native means of metamorphosis; the…
Last Year at Marienbad (1961) — Cuts respect no temporal continuity — A's gown shifts white to black within an apparently continuous scene; the cut joins across a gap rather than by continuity
Take It All (1963) — Jutra's own editing: jump cuts within a single gesture, elliptical leaps across weeks, freeze frames, sudden accelerations, and associative inserts that erupt out of a conversation and vanish.
Pierrot le Fou (1965) — temporal ellipses so radical that whole days vanish between shots, the jump cut of Breathless pushed into cutting across a gap rather than tightening a scene
Simon of the Desert (1965) — The single unmotivated cut from the ancient column to a 1960s discotheque, roughly fifteen centuries in one join, substituting for the resolution the collapsed financing denied.
The Pawnbroker (1965) — The flash frame inserted for only a handful of frames joins camp and pawnshop across a gap rather than by continuity — the cut as the 'between.'
The Saragossa Manuscript (1966) — The Wild Strawberries debt — unmarked cuts between memory, dream and present with no optical dissolve — used by Has as the entrance to every nested layer, so descent costs nothing
Branded to Kill (1967) — the final duel edited non-spatially and durationally, cuts joining across gaps so place, order, and reality of the action are unlocatable
La Chinoise (1967) — Guillemot's editing juxtaposes fiction, documentary interview, lecture and theatrical performance so their incompatibility becomes the subject
Titicut Follies (1967) — The intercutting of the force-feeding with the preparation of the same man's corpse for burial: the two events did not occur in succession, so the relation belongs to the gap between the shots rather…
Two for the Road (1967) — Transitions made on graphic and gestural rhymes — a road, a door, a turn of the head, a line answered a decade later by a different version of the same person — with no dissolve, title or narration…
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — The match cut joins across a four-million-year gap nothing can bridge — a join across an interval rather than a continuity of 'then.'
Yellow Submarine (1968) — Within numbers, image ideas succeed one another by graphic rhyme or comic non sequitur rather than by continuity, and each song is a self-contained edited unit with its own visual world, joined to…
Easy Rider (1969) — The flash-forward stutter transitions — bursts of the upcoming shot punched into the present one before the cut lands — bonding images across a gap rather than by continuity.
L'Amour fou (1969) — Lubtchansky's cuts between 16mm and 35mm are unannounced and often mid-action, joining incommensurable materials across a gap rather than by continuity.
Satyricon (1969) — Mastroianni's hard cuts join scenes across a gap rather than by continuity, neither invisible editing nor Godardian reflexivity — the pure 'AND' between images
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) — Valušiak builds the film out of elision: a glance initiates a match that lands in an impossible place; an action begun in one costume completes in another; transitions classical cutting would smooth…
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) — the final crosscut between McCabe's gunfight and the church fire joins two actions with no causal connection — a non-convergent montage that forces the viewer to supply the irony, inverting…
Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) — Dede Allen cuts directly across eras on a graphic or aural match, making the gap itself the logic of the join rather than continuity, so the slippage feels involuntary
Soleil O (1973) — An animated title gives way to a staged baptism, then a job interview, then a song, then a monologue to camera; frontal theatrical tableaux against blank backgrounds alternate with handheld street…
The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) — Incompatible times are joined inside a single continuous camera movement through interlocking chambers rather than at an edit — the interstice folded into the take.
Touki Bouki (1973) — Memory, premonition, slaughter and present action are welded by association across a gap rather than continuity, in the manner of Un Chien Andalou's graphic matches.
Lenny (1974) — Heim's associative cutting collides bit, bust and testimony with no optical marking of the transition; the meaning sits in the gap, a grammar taken from The Pawnbroker's flash-cuts and Petulia's…
The Phantom of Liberty (1974) — Plemiannikov cuts in orthodox continuity with no dissolve, fade or music sting at the join, so the transfer between wholly unrelated episodes reads as ordinary coverage — a debt to the false…
Mirror (1975) — Feiginova's associative editing joins sequences by texture, color, or gesture across a gap rather than by story causality
Cria! (1976) — Temporal layers are spliced without dissolves or optical signals, so the viewer must continually reorient across the gap the cut opens.
One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977) — The La Pointe Courte two-strand method reprised: the scripted story of Pomme and Suzanne threaded through footage of real 1970s abortion-rights protest, neither strand absorbing or authenticating the…
Hitler: A Film from Germany (1978) — Editing that juxtaposes registers with deliberate harshness, moving from a comic monologue to a recitation of camp statistics with no transitional cushioning.
The Shout (1978) — Barrie Vince cuts on sound and association rather than continuity; images from the tale intrude on the cricket-match frame and figures at the ground correspond to people in the story
Ballad of Tara (1979) — The ghost's appearances arrive as edits alone: a figure simply present in a shot where he was not, with no dissolve, superimposition or lighting change, joined to abrupt percussive cuts that break…
Kummatty (1979) — The transformations are achieved with cuts, framing and real animals rather than optical printing: the change exists only in the gap between two shots, completed by the viewer's willingness
My American Uncle (1980) — Four kinds of image interleaved — the three stories, Laborit's lectures, lab footage of rats, clips of movie stars — so that a human gesture rhymes with a rat pressing a lever or a screen hero's…
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) — Transitions that join across a gap no continuity rule covers: a cut on a gesture completed in the other era, a line of dialogue begun in one century and finished in the next, a sound bridge arriving…
Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) — Hambling's match cuts between live action and cel animation, where a wound, a wall, a marching mass or a flower migrates across registers — a join across a gap, not a continuity link.
Born in Flames (1983) — Cuts between a state surveillance report, a radio broadcast and quasi-newsreel street footage join arguments rather than adjacent spaces, driven by the post-punk pulse instead of continuity.
Stranger Than Paradise (1983) — Each take dissolves into black leader and the next emerges from it — a gap put where the classical join would be, connecting scenes by quarantining them rather than bridging them.
The 4th Man (1983) — The premonitory eye/castration cutaways (the Un Chien Andalou debt) are 'linked by image rather than plot' — cuts that join across a gap instead of by continuity.
City of Pirates (1984) — Sarmiento's editing holds a composition until it completes a strange internal movement, then cuts across a gap: scenes begin after their beginning and end before their end, and a character crosses a…
Once Upon a Time in America (1984) — The ringing telephone carries across scenes and decades, joining shots across a gap; descended from 2001's bone-to-satellite match
The Element of Crime (1984) — Gislason joins scenes by association, matched movement, or the recurrence of an object or sound rather than by an investigation advancing; ellipses are frequent and unmarked
Brazil (1985) — Julian Doyle's abrupt, undissolved cuts between dream and reality, joining the two registers across a gap and preventing the audience from trusting either state
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) — Chandler's continual intercutting among three registers with no transitional smoothing, so that fiction, memory and present-tense action comment on one another across the gap between shots.
Vagabond (1985) — the right-to-left tracking shots, each ending on an object the next quietly picks up — shots joined by a relay belonging to the film's system rather than to continuity of action
Dust in the Wind (1986) — Liao Ching-sung cuts on ellipsis: A-yun's marriage to the postman, the proposal and the decision are all omitted, and time jumps across the splice so the viewer reconstructs the catastrophe from its…
Terrorizers (1986) — The cross-cutting between strangers' apartments and strands, where nothing carries over the cut; the relation exists in the gap, not in continuity.
Landscape Suicide (1987) — Hard, unornamented cuts with no dissolves between a road and a face; landscape and testimony blocks are held apart so the viewer has to do the joining.
Repentance (1987) — Guliko Omadze's editing refuses conventional transition markers, sliding from courtroom to field to nightmare without warning, so the join is a gap the viewer must cross.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) — Transitions treated as deliberate ruptures — besieged city to Sultan's court to lunar landscape with no connective travel — so that "and then" carries the whole burden of causation.
Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988) — Zwerin makes no attempt to blend the monochrome 1967–68 coverage with the evenly lit color mid-1980s interviews; the dossier calls the visual seam 'the film's argument.'
American Dream (1990) — Kopple takes Peter Davis's Hearts and Minds device of letting collision at the cut do narration's work, but withholds the synthesis: the crowded hand-lettered union hall and the carpeted, depopulated…
Days of Being Wild (1990) — The final scene — Tony Leung preparing to go out — joined to the film across a gap of ambiguous narrative relation, a door onto the unmade sequel
A Scene at the Sea (1991) — Transitions elide the connective tissue a mainstream film would supply; the pivotal event is the gap itself, the film joining before and after across an absence rather than by continuity.
Jacquot (1991) — The associative cut that welds the aged Demy's face to the child actor's reenacted scene, using the editing grammar Hiroshima mon amour invented; the join belongs to neither shot and spans registers…
Night on Earth (1991) — Between segments the film uses hard structural breaks — clock face, globe, next city — that are "not dissolves or match cuts seeking continuity" but chapter markers, closer to the blackouts of…
Hyenas (1992) — The Touki Bouki grammar carried over: jump cuts and dislocated sound bridges yoking unrelated images (livestock, ocean, machinery) into a rhythmic commentary track that joins across a gap instead of…
The Crying Game (1992) — The film is 'two films spliced at the spine' — hostage drama and London melodrama joined by a genuine rupture that Jordan and Pan stage so the audience's disorientation mirrors Fergus's.