Relationships Between Shots

This scene from Terence Davies' 1992 melodrama The Long Day Closes is interesting for its poetic, rather than strictly continuous, use of editing. The film, which consists of an impressionistic series of memories and dreams rather than narratively-organized scenes, frequently disobeys the rules of conventional editing to suggest the nonlinear flow of thought and emotion. This sequence opens up with a shot of the young protagonist Bud working on a bike with an older relative. The shot then cuts to an image of Bud's family cycling away on their bikes. Obviously some sort of jump has occurred--we've moved from inside to outside--but there's nothing to suggest what period of time has been encompassed in the jump. The two shots are associated by the symbol of the bike instead of any clear continuity. The subsequent two shots, which show Bud calling out to his family before cutting back to them cycling off, more clearly establishes a spatially consistent point-of-view through shot-reverse-shot editing. After this, Bud wanders downward toward the steps to the lower floor. He reaches his hands out toward a metal bar, and we dissolve toward an overhead shot, where he repeats the gesture, clasps the bar, and starts swinging. This discontinuity emphasizes the gesture and encourages us to share in the moment's emotional suspension. Finally, the camera tracks to the left of the frame. A series of graphically matched dissolves transforms the street into a movie theater, a church, a schoolroom, and finally the street again. These dissolves are very meticulously matched, suggesting an almost mystical link between these places as the center of young Bud's life. It's the clearest example of how Davies uses and breaks conventional rules of continuity editing to evoke not spatial or temporal consistency, but an abstract emotional continuity.