Sightlines · a concept

weak links

events connect by chance or not at all.

On screen: slackened causality, elliptical cuts

A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (1923) — 'A Drama of Fate' runs on accident — a father's death that keeps Jean from the station, a telephone call that fails to land, a chance meeting in a Paris street — the confrontations deflate, the…
Toni (1935) — The circular train-station frame: ending on indifferent new arrivals slackens causality and converts a private tragedy into a recurring social fact
The Long Voyage Home (1940) — Dudley Nichols fuses four separate O'Neill one-acts into one voyage; the result is 'a series of self-contained movements strung along the arc of the voyage', episodes that sit beside each other…
Rome, Open City (1945) — The narrative logic is 'geographic and historical rather than strictly causal'; events unfold through the contingencies historical events actually take, with slackened causality between strands.
Paisan (1946) — Bazin's elliptical editing: sequences cut away before events reach dramatic resolution, leaving causal gaps the viewer must supply
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) — Slackened causality across the episodic, observational structure of small humiliations and accommodations rather than convergent incident
The Big Sleep (1946) — Slackened causality and elliptical hard cuts; the propulsive pace moves so fast viewers can't audit the plot logic
Bicycle Thieves (1948) — Each stop in the search discloses institutional indifference rather than a clue; events connect by chance or not at all, slackening causality on purpose.
The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) — The narrative is built as nine discrete, self-contained episodes without the causal chaining of classical dramaturgy — an assembly closer to an illuminated manuscript's sequence of exempla than to…
Early Summer (1951) — Major events — the 40-year-old associate's proposal, even the decision to marry Kenkichi — arrive obliquely, 'often reported rather than staged,' with emotional climaxes muted and structure cyclical…
I Vitelloni (1953) — Benedetti's episodic, vignette-based cutting refuses causal tightness — scenes expand and breathe, joined by recurrence and a retrospective narrator rather than by consequence
Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953) — The film is organized by day-units and the rhythm of hotel routine rather than by cause and effect; scenes are strung along a holiday's duration and punctuated by the dining-room gong and the radio
Pather Panchali (1955) — Episodic, cumulative structure with ellipses jumping across months and seasons so the children visibly grow; slackened causality
Aparajito (1956) — Dulal Dutta's unhurried, elliptical cutting and the handling of the Benares / village / Calcutta transitions as decisive narrative jumps, compressing years of a boy's life into gestural fragments.
Il Grido (1957) — Transitions between the episodes of Aldo's journey are elliptical, giving the drift a spatial and temporal vagueness that mirrors his aimlessness.
Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) — The narrative is 'a chain of misfires' — the scheme is inherited rather than caused, and scenes fail to produce each other with the tight causality the heist genre requires.
Nazarín (1959) — Carlos Savage's functional, unshowy cutting lays episodes end to end in a picaresque chain, each self-contained, so the film accrues its argument cumulatively rather than through tightening causality.
The 400 Blows (1959) — Decugis's cutting lets scenes breathe past the point where classical coverage would intervene with a reaction shot — slackened causality, accumulation over punctuation
The Great War (1959) — 'The loose, digressive rhythm of episodic comedy — sketches of malingering, foraging, romancing, and petty fraud' — causality slackened almost to the point of reorderability.
Breathless (1960) — the systematic jump cut (Patricia's head lurching through incompatible positions in the open car) abolishes continuity suture, foregrounding slackened causality and elliptical cutting
Cruel Story of Youth (1960) — Scenes begin late and end abruptly, transitions are deliberately jarring, and the film is a chain of encounters, beatings and negotiations rather than a rising dramatic arc — which is why the ending…
La Dolce Vita (1960) — elliptical cuts between episodes, sudden changes of light suggesting days skipped, slackening causality into repetition and entropy rather than momentum
Shadows (1960) — Slackened causality and elliptical cutting; scenes run past their narrative 'point' into awkwardness and silence, then jump
Shoot the Piano Player (1960) — slackened causality and elliptical cuts — the bumbling gangsters and jump cuts truncating dead time keep the crime machinery from fully engaging
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) — Naruse's extreme ellipsis: scenes begin after their premise is established and end before their consequence is stated; a confrontation is set up, then dropped, and the outcome surfaces two scenes…
A Taste of Honey (1961) — Antony Gibbs's editing works in ellipsis and tonal discontinuity, privileging mood over strict narrative continuity so causality goes slack
A Woman Is a Woman (1961) — Narrative causality is loose and subordinated to digression, mood and the pleasure of watching Karina; the thin premise is acknowledged as a pretext, with abrupt tonal switches and elliptical cutting…
The Misfits (1961) — 'On a whim, the three decide to move into Guido's half-finished desert home together'; the group is held by proximity and need, not by causal necessity.
A Kind of Loving (1962) — Expressive ellipsis around the courtship and its sexual turning points elides events instead of dramatizing them, slackening the causal chain
Salvatore Giuliano (1962) — Transitions are abrupt and unexplained, the connective tissue of cause and effect deliberately cut so the viewer must assemble the relations.
Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963) — Scenes are clipped before they resolve, time-skips left unmarked, and elliptical cutting forces the viewer to assemble events from incomplete pieces.
A Hard Day's Night (1964) — Slackened causality and elliptical cuts: dialogue cut mid-sentence once the energy transfers, scenes entered and exited at unexpected points, establishing grammar abandoned — Jympson's jump cuts…
Band of Outsiders (1964) — Agnès Guillemot's soft elliptical editing lets time drop out between scenes and treats narrative continuity as a convenience rather than a law, slackening cause and effect.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) — Each strand acts on incomplete information and slackened causality, isolated and unable to communicate, reaching disaster through steps 'almost rational' within each room
Pale Flower (1964) — Startling ellipses collapse time and jump across space without bridging coverage — the elliptical-cut technique inherited from Melville's Le Doulos — refusing to stabilize the viewer's temporal…
São Paulo, Incorporated (1965) — 'Causality is not narrated, it is implied by juxtaposition' — the montage is argumentative, and Carlos's inability to sequence his life is made indistinguishable from his inability to explain it.
Alfie (1966) — Slackened causality across loosely linked episodes punctuated by turns to camera, rather than a tightly plotted arc.
El Dorado (1966) — Leigh Brackett's method, carried over from The Big Sleep, dissolves Harry Brown's somber novel The Stars in Their Courses into a character- and behavior-driven string of scenes; the dossier calls the…
Masculin Féminin (1966) — Guillemot's cutting begins and ends scenes abruptly, inserts blackouts and intertitles, and slackens causality between the numbered episodes
The Brick and the Mirror (1966) — The transition from the night sequence to the following day is handled by an ellipsis that leaves the couple's shifting positions on keeping the child to be inferred from behavior rather than…
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) — Dede Allen's jagged, elliptical jump cuts (descended from Breathless) and the impatient short cuts of the opening, slackening classical cause-and-effect continuity
Weekend (1967) — Causality loosens into elliptical, station-to-station encounters; intertitles ('FAUX TRAGÉDIE') dispute the chronology they claim to mark
Stolen Kisses (1968) — Agnès Guillemot's editing: scenes entered late and left early, jobs beginning and ending within a few shots, whole weeks elided without announcement
The Party (1968) — No act structure; scenes chained by accumulation rather than causal necessity, chaos ratcheting upward gag by gag toward the flood
The Swimmer (1968) — elliptical transitions between pools — we rarely see the walk from one garden to the next, so the film advances in jumps with no connective tissue (three credited editors, contested post-production)
Easy Rider (1969) — Elliptical jump-cut grammar absorbed from Breathless and music montage cut for mood not information; slackened causality between scenes.
Invasion (1969) — Montauti's cutting is "elliptical to the point of hostility": scenes begin after their establishing information has passed, so causality is inferred from residue.
Satyricon (1969) — hard cuts with no establishing transition drop the viewer into the middle of scenes; episodes connected by associative rather than causal logic, modeled on Buñuel's Exterminating Angel
Five Easy Pieces (1970) — Structured 'less as a plot than as a drift,' elliptical and anti-climactic by design, scenes dissolving into one another without dramatic causality
M*A*S*H (1970) — Episodes connect by prank, surgery, the football game, the mock suicide — a loose accretion strung along the tour, with slackened causality you could reorder without structural loss.
Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) — elliptical cross-cutting between Japanese planning rooms and American code offices that never share a dramatic scene — slackened causality by design
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) — Lombardo's elliptical editing — scenes begin late and end early, the town grows in compressed time, significant events implied rather than shown — slackening cause and effect
Murmur of the Heart (1971) — Suzanne Baron's cutting accumulates episodes rather than building acts; scenes end on afterthoughts and nothing is stinger-cut, so causality stays slackened across the whole film.
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) — Hellman's unhurried, anti-sensational editing loosens causality — scenes drift, the contest diffuses, the rhythm follows mood not plot mechanics.
Jeremiah Johnson (1972) — An 'episodic, quasi-mythic mode rather than a tightly plotted one'; the cutting 'compresses seasons and years elliptically.'
Roma (1972) — The film's characteristic gesture of the unresolved exit — the fashion show, pensione dinner and brothel parades accumulate until they tip into hysteria and are abandoned mid-crescendo, another scene…
Amarcord (1973) — Mastroianni's editing builds pressure within an episode then cuts away before the climax, joining scenes by mood and visual rhyme rather than narrative logic — slackened, associative causality.
American Graffiti (1973) — Slackened causality and elliptical cross-cuts between cars and corners, held together by mood rather than consequence
Mean Streets (1973) — episodic structure built on jump-cutting and ellipsis, slackened causality inherited from Breathless where the cut is editorial argument, not invisible suture
Serpico (1973) — The editing elides confrontations and jumps forward across eight years, compressing the arc into implicating fragments rather than a taut causal chain