Editing can be an often overlooked attribute of a film. In fact, it is most often not even recognized except for when something remarkable happens. In 2006, something very remarkable happened as Crash won not only the Academy Award for Best Picture but also for Best Achievement in Editing.
The film itself takes place in only a 24 hour time period. With the sheer amount of plot development, dynamic character interaction, and significant social discourse, this alone makes the editing worthy of praise. As Wallace Katz (2006) describes: “…everything happens in so many places simultaneously that, without necessarily losing context, it’s as if one were traveling in space from planets near the sun to those far away, and at the speed of light. It is the Los Angeles context, in fact, that accounts for and is reflected in the film’s extraordinary velocity from scene to scene…” (p. 122). So let’s take a look at some of the striking characteristics of the film’s editing that accomplished this.
The viewer’s eyes are dazzled right from the very start. Crash begins with a chilling and provocative opening sequence. We see blurry head lights moving on screen, old ones dissolving away while new ones appear in their place. The credits drift in and out ethereally, not drawing significant attention to themselves. Even as the film begins to unfold, the opening scene of a car accident fades in and out to black. This first scene appears unstable in this way, and we are soon tossed backward in time to the day before. This is the only flashback in the entire film, but it lasts for the entire duration of the film, and it is complete with a flash forward and denouement during the film’s final minutes.
The use of match cuts is prevalent early in Crash. As a whole, the film is a mosaic narrative- a seemingly disconnected series of stories that intersect at various parts, and not until you examine the whole do you see the entire picture or theme of the film. Along the same reasoning, film critic Hsuan Hsu (2006) refers to the film as an ensemble film, comparing it to Robert Altman’s Nashville and Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic. Regardless of the terminology used to describe it, the match cuts in Crash help to maintain fluidity in an otherwise disjointed narrative, mosaic and/or ensemble, and they make the transition from one story to the next easier and more interesting to the viewer. According to Brian D. Johnson (2006), Crash makes an effort to unite all the pieces of it’s world, and it accomplishes this through the smooth editing. Some prominent examples include: the switch from Dorri pushing open the door to leave the gun shop becoming Anthony shoving open the door of a restaurant; a stolen Suburban driving through the screen becoming a cop car passing Don Cheadle’s detective character Graham Waters at another crime scene; and Matt Dillon angrily leaving an insurance agent’s office turning into a delivery boy at the locksmith office. These match cuts are especially important and common in the film’s exposition stages, setting up the trajectories of each individual story. After we have been introduced to the key players, more traditional editing styles are used.
However, there are still a few flares added in to keep things interesting. There is one identifiable example of an audio match cut, when a sound from the end of one take begins the action in the second take. As the door to detective Graham Waters house is slammed, we’re immediately transported to Matt Dillon’s bedroom, as police officer John Ryan. He was startled awake not necessarily by a slamming door but by some other sound made by his ill father, who is out of bed and struggling in the bathroom.
The film also provides an example of elliptical editing, a tactic used to make an action on screen appear shorter in duration than the amount of time it actually took in the story. As the Persian convenience store owner Farhad cleans up his business after a break-in, the camera slowly and inexplicably focuses in on a bag of trash tossed into the dumpster. Just when the viewer thinks this lingering moment must be a mistake in editing, Farhad reappears and begins hurriedly digging through the garbage. We see a few jump cuts as side-effects of the elliptical editing. Farhad continues to dig, and through the editing we know that it continued for longer than we are shown. However, the brevity is appreciated because we are nervously awaiting what he may be looking for inside the bag. He makes the discovery of the receipt from the locksmith, Daniel, providing the inciting incident for a powerful scene later in the film.
Finally, we reach out flash forward, back to present-day. The transition is marked by a dissolve, an effect not seen since the opening sequence of the film. To make sure we fully understand and are not overwhelmed by the two hours of footage to this point, editors provide us with an example of overlap editing. This style is recognized as the end of one shot is partially repeated at the beginning of a following shot. Despite the lengthy amount of film in between, our flashback is bookended by the same few seconds of a scene, Graham Waters at the location of a crime. We hear him ask a fellow office for a cigarette, again, walk down the hill to the body, again, and begin to examine evidence, again. It is a reflection of what we witnessed earlier, but the scene will continue on this time as the story continues to unfold.
Sometimes the editing in Crash is so seamless that as a viewer, I did not notice a change of scene until an unseen character makes a new appearance. As Farhad lurks outside a home in Daniel’s neighborhood, he looks out his car window. From the point of view of someone looking outside of a window, we see a Suburban drive down the street. The next shot puts us inside the Suburban, which just happens to be the one belonging to television producer Cameron, and suddenly, we have moved on to a different plot line without any such warning. This occurs again at the film’s ending when Matt Dillon, as Officer Ryan, drives his car out of the right side of the screen, and Ryan Phillipe, as Officer Hanson, drives his car into the left side of the screen. Until Hanson picks up a hitchhiker and we are shown that he is the driver, one is under the impression that it was the same car. But that just is not the case. What is the case is the kind of clever and understated editing that earns films an Oscar.
References:
Hsu, H. L. (2006). Racial privacy, the L.A. ensemble film, and paul haggis’s crash. Film Criticism, 31(1/2), 132-156.
Johnson, B. D. (2006). The collateral damage of crash. Maclean’s, 119(14), 56-57.
Katz, W. (2006). Crash: Film noir in post-modern LA. New Labor Forum (Routledge), 15(1), 121-125.
A Decade of Academy Award Winning Films 