Yuri Tsivian (Chicago)

CineMetrics

The subject of this proposal, an online application called Cinemetrics (see http://www.cinemetrics.lv/index.php), is intended for further study and analysis of cinema. Cinemetrics is an open-access interactive website designed to collect, store, and process scholarly data about films. Its ultimate goal is to create an extensive multi-faceted collection of digital data related to film editing. At the moment Cinemetrics is programmed to handle the aspect of editing known in film studies as cutting rates.

What are cutting rates? A peculiar thing about the film medium, noticed by many, is that it bridges the gap between spatial and temporal arts. On the one hand, filmmakers, like painters or architects, deal with recognizable spatial shapes; on the other, films unfold in time, as do poems or musical compositions. Though we tend to perceive their unfolding as continuous most films consist of segments called shots separated by instant breaks called cuts.

With rare exceptions, films contain a number of different shots. Shots differ in terms of space and in terms of time. We know enough about space-related distinctions between shots. Time-related differences between them are more elusive and harder to talk about, for, unlike in music or poetry with their scaled feet and measures, variations in shot length are not ones of distinction, but ones of degree. The only distinction a critic is safe to make when discussing shot lengths is between brief and lengthy.

Shot lengths are sometimes convenient to present as the frequency of shot changes, or cuts, hence the term “cutting rates.” The shorter the shots the higher the cutting rate. Unsurprisingly, cutting rates are linked to the story and its space-time articulations: car chases are cut faster than park rambles, conversations shot in close-ups faster than medium-shot; likewise, montage sequences meant to cover larger spaces of story time will have higher cutting rates than will sequences shown in real time.

The method which film scholars interested in the history of cutting have been using for more than 30 years is based on calculating the Average Shot Length (ASL) of a film – an index obtained by dividing the length of the film in seconds by the number of shots in it.

Rather than calculate average shot lengths arithmetically, Cinemetrics does so by taking and storing the time-span of each separate shot. Distinct from the arithmetical ASL, which is a single datum, Cinemetrics treats each film as a database of shots highlighting its individual features. Specifically, it tells us about the film’s cutting swing (standard deviations of shorter and longer shots from ASL), its cutting range (difference in seconds between the shortest and the longest shot of the film) and its dynamic profiles (polynomial trendlines which reflect fluctuations of shot lengths within the duration of the film).