Editing blog task

The Baptism Murders - The Godfather

I choose a clip from the 1972 movie ‘Godfather’. It’s the popular clip of baptism where we see a great editing skills where Coppola combines the peaceful scene of baptism with

many dreadful scenes of murder.

The clip starts off with a close up on our main character. The priest asking him if he ‘renounce satan’ (the writer wanted to be ironic in some way) before it’s suddenly cut off by the middle shot of men in a lift, then he middle long shot of a man kicking them back to the lift and shooting them. We don’t actually see the people being shot, just a middle long shot of the murderer. That builds up the madness of the murder and leaves us with only the idea of them being dead. Also the music in the background is a diegetic  sound of the scene from the baptism and we can hear the volume increase when someone is being murdered. That builds up the tension and helps us understand that all of this is happening at the same time. It’s also a contrapuntal sound for the scenes of the shootings. After that we’re back with the main character saying ‘I do renounce them’ in the same close up. After that short cut we are introduced to an over-the-shoulder shot of  another character opening the door to a massage room. Then there’s a close up laying on a massage bed reaching for his glasses. This shot is a little longer then the rest and builds up the tension. When he finally puts on the glasses, that’s when the other man shoots him right through the glasses in the right eye. This shot was filmed all in a close up and had no cuts. This time we can’t see the shooter, but the victim, but we know who was the one that fired the gun. After that scene there’s just a two second shot on the main character maybe just to let us know that he knows what is happening or the opposite- that it’s so tragic that he doesn’t suspect a thing when a mass murder is happening at the same time. The shot after that is a long shot of a man smoking a cigarette, then putting it down and going up the stairs and changes to a middle/long shot of the other man coming into spinning doors.  The man from the stairs approaches him and traps him inside the doors. There’s a middle shot of the victim to see closely his frightened expression and a quick swops between this shot and a POV shot of the victim as he’s being shot. The POV shot at the end have an effect of the camera being shattered.  That makes the whole scene more dramatic and makes the audience feel more connected to the victim. Then we’re again back with the main character accepting the baptizing. Then the shot switches to a long middle shot of men busting through the door to a room. This is more of a jumpcut where the scene switches to a very unexpected, chaotic shot. Then we see the victims under covers there the bullets come through, leaving a hole with blood around, which makes the shot even more vivid and traumatizing because that’s how the bullet wounds look on their bodies. Then we’re back again with Michael (the main character) saying ‘go in piece’ which is, again, ironic, we swop to the long shot where a fake policeman shoots a few men on the stairs on the entrance of the building. After killing two men he aims for the third on top of the stairs shooting him in the back multiple times. We can see the wounds as the man collapses and falls down the stair.

At this point we can clearly see how Coppola slowly introduced us to the violence of this part of the film.  At the begging all we see is a man shooting to the elevator, but when we see the other scenes there’s more and more violent, where at the end we see blood and lots of bodies on the stairs. The point of this is to show how a mass murder increases the brutality and viciousness of a shooting and create a more effective presentence of the whole situation. At the point where Michael says ‘I will’ and we see the baby there are shots from various angles showing most of the dead bodies left after the massacre, with a very similar framing kind of showing the ‘before and after’ effect, leaving everything quiet and peaceful just as we see Michael looking deep in thoughts at the candle as if knowing what had just happened. At the very end the priest ends his speech with the word ‘amen’ as if for the people that had just died. 

If that's ok I also wanted to analyse one of my favourite movie clips that is exactly the opposite of the godfather montage but at the end leaves us with the same emotions. 

Ida by Paweł Pawlikowski (2013) - The suicide

This clip has only three shots: one is a middle shot of the woman's back, sitting in a bathtub, then a close up of the her face and the other one is a long/long middle shot of her in a living room. As we can see she disappears ones or twice in the last shot that lasts almost a minute. The lack of any action, even from the camera, makes us a little anxious and we can sense that something is wrong but it's still a surprise when after a minute and twenty seconds the woman jumps out of a window. The simplicity and directness of these few shots leave us speechless as we look at now even more empty living room, listening to the music. 

    These two shots are a great example of a completely different editing with the same result in the final seconds- the peace after death.