ASPECTS OF ELLIPTICAL EDITING

TEMPORAL OMISSION AS A NARRATIVE DEVICE IN FICTION FILM

Abstract

"Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden“ (Bresson). Temporal omissions can be found in the most diverse manifestations of various genres and film cultures. However, the ellipsis as a narrative tool has seldom been addressed in film theory, and when it has, it has tended to be treated in a manner of purely instrumental qualities of skipping the unimportant parts of a plot, to cover vast stretches of story time or as a pure mean of scene transitions.

By contrast, I argue that temporal omissions have the potential to be a key creative tool in a filmmaker’s arsenal. I will investigate on how temporal ellipses are used in films and through this analysis I will discuss about how it can serve as a dramaturgical feature in narrative film.

Questions I want to occupy myself within this dissertations are: What characterizes temporal omission in film? Is there different types identified and how can they be distinguished? Is there a phrase catalog, a standardized vocabulary? How is elliptical editing influential in a story’s structure and hence can it contribute to a high dramaturgical quality of a narrative?

This paper is an attempt to depict the terminology, identify and differentiate scopes of elliptical editing but moreover it is an investigation on the temporal ellipsis and it’s means of aesthetic construction to create a receptive stimulus for the narration in fiction film.