Recently for English class, I gave a speech about Akira Kurosawa and his influence as a filmmaker. One of my talking points during the speech was about Kurosawa's influential use of cutting between shots. During the speech, I touched upon how the cutting during an action scene within a modern day film differed in comparison to one of Kurosawa's films. After analyzing the two clips, I was curious to see if there was a similar difference for cutting between shots during dialogue. Dialogue generally doesn't seem to have changed much in formula over the years, but I still find it interesting to see if this filmmaking fundamental has changed at all overtime. For testing, I selected three dialogue heavy clips from Psycho (1960), Stand by Me (1986), and Joker (2019).
The scene that I analyzed from Psycho was the scene where Arbogast interrogated Norman in front of the motel. For the purposes of this analysis, I began the clip at twenty-five seconds within and analyzed up until the video's end card was displayed. Over the one minute and thirty-two second clip, the scene cut nineteen times between three different angles. On average, each scene lasted around seven seconds before cutting to the next scene. With Psycho being the oldest film out of the three that I selected, this number should serve as a baseline to compare to.
The next scene that I analyzed was from 1986's Stand by Me. Within this scene, Chris and Gordie discuss a story about Chris stealing milk money. The scene had a total length of two minutes and ten seconds. During the scene, the camera cut a total of sixteen times, between two over the shoulder angles. Unlike Psycho, the scene does not include a medium shot of both characters, instead entirely relying on the two over the shoulder shots. The total average length of each shot was around thirteen seconds before cutting. This number is almost double the length as seen in Psycho but might be caused by the use of only two camera angles.
The final and most modern scene to be analyzed was the Murray Interview scene from Joker. In order to keep the data more consistent, I chose to only analyze the clip from fifteen seconds in to two minutes and twenty seconds. Over the two minutes and five seconds that I analyzed, there were twenty-one cuts made. Unlike the previous two examples, Joker chose to have it's dialogue be extremely cinematic by never repeating the exact same camera angle. While some angles within the time period resembled each other, there was always something different within each shot that made it seem unique from the rest. In total, each shot lasted around ten seconds on average before cutting to the next shot.
After analyzing the clips from all three movies, my hypothesis that dialogue could have possibly progressed in a particular direction over the years seems to be proved false. While action scenes have moved from long shots of fighting to cutting after less than a second, dialogue scenes seem to stay faithful to their roots. Each of the three films had their average shot length fairly close to each other, being within around five seconds of each other. The amount of cuts in each also was very close to each other. The only real difference over time seemed to show with Joker's usage of a large amount of different camera angles. While I do feel that this experiment gives a good idea of what two expect, I'm sure that if I picked a different three movies, I could get entirely different results. Overall though, I feel that I can conclude that pacing for dialogue largely remains the same over all of these years.
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