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 throug...
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