At the 46th Academy Awards, "Deception" won a total of seven awards including best film and best director. It is worth mentioning that this includes the best editing award. I've seen very few of the reviews on this movie talking about editing, it seems that people think the editing of this movie is not worth mentioning? Is the editing of this movie good? My answer is undoubtedly "yes", and then I will talk about how it is good.
Let’s start with a clip using cross-cutting: in the shut-out part of the latter part of the film, Hooker, the male protagonist who slept carelessly at night, knocked on the door of a woman, the woman let Hooker into the room, and after closing the door, the camera shot Dissolving, another bedroom emerges, we see Gondorff sitting on the bed smoking an afterlife cigarette, and then the woman next to the quilt straightens up... So what Hooker did this night we didn't know . The picture is superimposed again. In a dim room, the camera shakes, and we really see Hooker's naked upper body... Then, the viewpoint retreats out of the window and takes the mirror again, and the audience finds himself watching the street through the window. For men and women...the curtains are drawn, one hand turns off the light, and the shut-out is over.
In the soothing background piano sound, from editing to shot movement to scene scheduling, the director implicitly creates an atmosphere of ambiguous harmony that will be completely subverted in the sting at the end.
The editing style of "Cheat Within Cheat" actually belongs to the classic coherent editing. Adopting this style avoids the audience being distracted by editing. It requires the camera to change as the character's focus changes. The characters here can be movie characters: Hooker goes to Gondorff's room to find him, at first Hooker looks around the room, the camera is a medium shot that shows Hooker's movements, suddenly he hears a grunt, looks back at the bed, and the camera turns to Hooker's eyes are focused; another example is the close-up of Gondorff's hands when he looks down carefully at the cards. The character can also be an imaginary audience: in a station chase scene, Hooker climbed to the ceiling of the platform while fleeing. At this time, the audience will be concerned about the reaction of the police under his feet, so the camera timely switches to the ceiling, The audience can see that the policeman did not follow Hooker up to the ceiling, but followed the footsteps and ran in the same direction as Hooker. Another most common example is the front and back shots: when two people chat, the camera constantly switches to the speaker.
At the same time, it is worth mentioning that there are some camera switching tricks in the movie: circle, wipe, dissolve, etc. Dissolving, which has been mentioned in the example of cross-cutting above; Wiping, which often appears in the switching of scenes, implying changes in space; as for the circled example, see the tale part: when Hooker came out after visiting Lonnegan, passing by When there is a car, the picture is zoomed in, we see a right hand with black gloves in the window, and then the picture gradually shrinks in a circle with the glove as the center... The director uses this to imply that this person is different Ordinary identity, maybe he is the mysterious killer Salino who is chasing Hooker?
Unexpected montage techniques can arouse the audience's doubts and then generate thinking, while the harmonious and smooth way of switching shots can prompt the audience to organize the picture into a coherent process, unconsciously ignoring that it is just a product recorded by the camera and then artificially collaged. A fact that makes people imagine that this is a story that really happened on the other side of the world. Those edits that look smooth and natural to you are actually the result of careful design, and not a lot of effort. If you don't see any way out, it's probably because you're bewitched by the director's elaborate illusion of realism.
Another starting point for creating realism is to use a long lens. In scenes such as corridors and fields, we can often see such sequences: the camera moves with the character, and the frame continues to advance, especially when the photographer uses a handheld camera, the lens moves along with bumps, and the frame becomes The horizon is presented on the screen as if a pair of eyes are always watching, and the viewer feels like he is there.
Different from the push-up photography that moves the camera position as mentioned above, the common long shot in this film is the panning shot with the camera position unchanged and the angle changing, and it appears in the chase scene. We often see that today's movies use short shots and fast rhythms to create the atmosphere of chasing and fighting, but the director of "Cheat in Deception" first gives a big panorama of the street, and by properly rotating the camera angle, shows a large number of characters in one shot action. A typical example is the first time Hooker meets the pursuer: the viewpoint is always fixed across the street from Hooker's residence, the first thing you see is Hooker escaping the house, the two pursuers then rush out of the door, and the camera rotates to follow them. One person, this person rushed to the road, a car (garbage truck?) drove off the screen, the person ducked back, and at the same time, the picture was occupied by this car, the vehicle slowly passed by, we saw from the other side of the street Hooker is crawling on the side of the car, and the camera pans to follow Hooker, so we see Hooker just run away under the eyes of two pursuers with limited vision. The whole scene only uses one shot, but it has excellent comedic effect.
The long shot is also a big test of the actor's acting skills. Several of the film's leading actors are extremely good actors, especially the pairing of Gondorff (Paul Newman, who is so handsome in this movie) and Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) playing cards on the train. The brilliance of their acting skills is difficult to describe in words. Here I can only say that their performance is the key to determining whether a movie is fake or not.
The director tried his best to make the film appear real in the artistic details, and he didn't neglect other aspects. Strippers, merry-go-rounds, old ladies in phone booths, and so on are life-like (not oriental, of course) details that add to the realism of the film - but they do more than that, so don't forget that it's a A movie about deception. Even if such a film makes itself appear real, it is still fundamentally different from a realist film; the purpose of the latter is to show more reality, while the purpose of the former is to make a fake as realistic as possible, first to make you believe it is true and then to tell you you were tricked. Various foreshadowings and hints are hidden in the details of life, but there are also misleading details hidden in them, which mislead both the characters and the audience. The three intricate narrative clues in this film have certain misleading content in the liar's revenge, the killer's pursuit, and the police's pursuit, not only the language of the characters is misleading, but also the language of the camera lens. All the truth will be revealed in the sting at the end— - It's a spoiler, so I won't say more here. But I'm sure I can even write another article on the film's narrative and misleading analysis. Then
again, it's not appropriate to just comment on "Deception" as a film about deception. Another striking theme in the film is the loyalty of friends. The whole revenge plan was started because of Hooker's loyalty, and it was solved because of a group of loyal elders. Even Erie (the boy who played the robber at the beginning, a friend of Hooker and Luther, appeared many times later, but the tragedy was that I didn't recognize him several times when I watched it for the first time) This character is specially used to express Such kindness. Considering that this film was filmed in 1973, we can comment that it is the ancestor of thousands of art films and even all gambling films, with many creative elements (if anyone knows of earlier similar films, please let me know). We can also analyze the symbolism of elements such as merry-go-round, lameness, etc. It is also an option to analyze the dark humor of the film in connection with the historical background...
In short, I recommend this film to you, whether for the wonderfulness of the film itself or for its place in film history. Even if you have watched too many similar movies and TV works (especially the first episode of hustle), you can no longer get freshness from this film, just to appreciate Paul Newman's demeanor is worth it.
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