C.4) Transitions / Scene Lengths (General Editing)

As mentioned earlier in section b), Saturday Night Fever uses rather long lengths of time between the transition of shots for the opening scene. And for the most part, throughout the whole of the film.
This is in comparison to more modern movies in the same Genre i.e. Hairspray. One of the reasons that movies have shorter transition times nowadays is because people have less of an attention span - the 'MTV' generation can't focus on a certain shot or idea for too long. They require different angles, distances, parallel action shots in the case of dance scenes - there has to be something else going on at the same time as the dance and/or more than a single character participating. I debated mentioning these two in work of mine, however, High School Musical or Glee would not have been as succesful had there only been a single singer/dancer up on the stage. By having multiple different things to focus on the audience feels more involved and don't lose interest. While I'm not saying that people would lose interest during Saturday Night Fever, I'm simply saying that if it were to be made today its shot lengths would be halved or in the dancing segments cut into quarters (some individual shots are extremely lengthy, pushing 15 seconds) so that the audience could feel more 'excitement' and feel like there was a lot more going on than there really was. This can also be achieved by unnatural camera movement or sweeping shots.
Comparing the opening of a modern film 'Hairspray' (2007) and Saturday Night Fever shows how the shot lengths have changed. Hairspray's average 3.15 seconds/shot while Saturday Night Fever's average of 6.25 seconds/shot. Now, while these may not seem drastically different the fact that Hairsprays are pretty much half those of Saturday Night Fevers give you less time to focus on each action and wear your brain out faster. Had Saturday Night fever been made today there would have been faster cuts, more emphasis on the other people on the street and different angles shown of Tony and he'd have done more dancing than a simple bop.
For the sake of fairness Hairspray does begin with a dance as part of the opening, so to compare to the lead in and dance to a similar sped song from during Saturday Night Fever 'You Should Be Dancing' by the Bee Gees the shot length averages 6.05 seconds/shot. This allows un-interrupted focus on the dance.

Apart from the fade up of the films picture and a single fade transition between the two establishing shots the only transitions used between shots are cuts. Apart from the one later mentioned jump-cut all cuts are logical and do not distract the audience in any major way. Should the cuts have been jumpy and all over the place the effect of Tony's character mentioned throughout other parts of C would be lost as the audience would not be able to follow seemlessly with the walk and it would appear as though we keep jumping to different parts of the walk and it wouldn't flow correctly.

As a side note, i found these sets of rules by Edward Dmytryk entitled 'the seven rules of cutting.' Saturday Night Fever seems to follow them well:

"Rule 1: Never make a cut without a positive reason."
"Rule 2: When undecided about the exact frame to cut on, cut long rather than short."
"Rule 3: Whenever possible cut 'in movement'."
"Rule 4: The 'fresh' is preferable to the 'stale'."
"Rule 5: All scenes should begin and end with continuing action."
"Rule 6: Cut for proper values rather than proper 'matches'."
"Rule 7: Substance first—then form."


Couple of editing goofs that i noticed:
During the opening, there is a very irritating jump cut. This occurs while Tony's feet are shown and the title 'Saturday Night Fever' is neoned over the screen. The moment that title is removed from the screen the camera changes to one further back. I'm not entirely sure why this was in there and I hadn't noticed it until i properly focused on the opening with my face pressed a couple of inches from the scene, however now that I've noticed it it is the most irritating part of the opening.
Another interesting editing decision was that before Tony arrives at the street of his paint store the paths are dry, however after his boss is shown motioning him to use the back door the paths are wet. Due to his dryness, his hair still being perfect and the fact it was a beautiful sunny day moments before this big down-poor it would be fairly impossible for it to have actually happened. Since the opening scene would not have worked as well had it been raining it simply comes down to a poor editing choice on the part of the director and/or post-production persons.