Match cut
Encyclopedia
A match cut, also called a graphic match, is a cut in film editing
between either two different objects, two different spaces, or two different compositions in which an object in the two shots graphically match, often helping to establish a strong continuity of action and linking the two shots metaphorically.
, such as the ubiquitous use of match on action
. Continuity editing smoothes over the inherent discontinuity of shot changes to establish a logical coherence between shots. Even within continuity editing, though, the match cut is a contrast both with cross-cutting between actions in two different locations that are occurring simultaneously, and with parallel editing, which draws parallels or contrasts between two different time-space locations.
A graphic match (as opposed to a graphic contrast or collision) occurs when the shapes, colors and/or overall movement of two shots match in composition, either within a scene or, especially, across a transition between two scenes. Indeed, rather than the seamless cuts of continuity editing within a scene, the term "graphic match" usually denotes a more conspicuous transition between (or comparison of) two shots via pictorial elements. A match cut often involves a graphic match, a smooth transition between scenes and an element of metaphorical (or at least meaningful) comparison between elements in both shots.
A match cut contrasts with the conspicious and abrupt discontinuity of a jump cut
.
's 2001: A Space Odyssey
contains a famous example of a match cut. After an ape discovers the use of bone
s as a tool
and a weapon
, he throws it triumphantly into the air. As the bone spins in the air, there is a match cut to a much more advanced weapon: an orbiting nuclear weapons satellite. The match cut helps draw a connection between the two objects as exemplars of primitive and advanced tools respectively, and serves as a neat summary of humanity's technological advancement up to that point.
Michael Powell
and Emeric Pressburger
's A Canterbury Tale
is a predecessor for the 2001: A Space Odyssey match cut in which a fourteenth century falcon cuts to a World War II aeroplane. The sense of time passing but nothing changing is emphasised by having the same actor, in different costumes, looking at both the falcon and the aeroplane.
An early example comes from Orson Welles
's Citizen Kane
which opens with a series of match dissolves that keeps the lit window of C.F. Kane's in the same part of the frame while the cuts take us around his dilapidated Xanadu estate, before a final match dissolve takes us from the outside to the inside where Kane is about to die.
Another match cut comes from Lawrence of Arabia
(David Lean, 1962) where an edit cuts together Lawrence blowing out a lit match with the desert sun rising from the horizon. Director David Lean credits inspiration for the edit to the experimental French New Wave
. The edit was later praised by Steven Spielberg
as inspiration for his own work.
A match cut occurs at the end of Alfred Hitchcock
's North by Northwest
. As Cary Grant
pulls Eva Marie Saint
up from Mount Rushmore
, the cut then goes to him pulling her up to his bunk on the train. The match cut here skips over the courting, the marriage proposal, and the actual marriage of the two characters who had for much of the film been adversaries. Another Hitchcock film to employ the use of a match cut is Psycho
. Right after Marion Crane is murdered in the infamous "shower scene", the camera shows blood flowing down the drain of the tub, then cuts to a shot of Marion's eye.
German director Fritz Lang
provided early uses of match cuts in his silent and first sound films. In Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, he shows a circular casino from above and cuts to a circle of hands at a seance happening the same night involving Mabuse and others. This not only smoothly transitions into the simultaneous scene, but also links the two activities as "decadent" pastimes of the rich in pursuit of excitement and fashionability. Lang reused the technique in M
while cross cutting between the meetings of Schränker's criminal union and Inspector Karl Lohmann's homicide investigation squad. Schränker and Lohmann are matched both in movement and in dialogue (which is carried over the cut to form a coherent phrase) to illustrate their unlikely connection in a shared goal, to capture a serial child killer.
For his 1986 fantasy film, Highlander
, director Russell Mulcahy
employs multiple match cuts to indicate movements backwards in time and forwards again to the present day, telling the story of an immortal
who relives episodes from his past in the ancient Highlands of Scotland (and later across Europe
), as he faces his final challenge in modern New York City
. Examples include a WWF match contrasted with the bloody clan
battles of his youth, a fish tank cutting back to an experience in a boat on a loch
and an emotional face in the past dissolving into a giant NYC advertising hoarding showing the impassive Mona Lisa
. In the case of this film, the match cut is integral to the storytelling, as a potentially confusing back-and-forth narrative is thus held together; with the denouement's final cut to Scotland cleverly revealled to be not a jump in time, as previously, through the inclusion of a modern fighter jet in flight over the Highlands
A match-cut can be found in The Gold Watch segment of Quentin Tarantino`s
Pulp Fiction
where a young Butch Coolidge grabs his father’s gold watch from Captain Koons (Christopher Walken
), we then hear a boxing bell and the film cuts to the adult Butch (Bruce Willis
) waking from his dream/memory. This is done to symbolically link the story just told about his father’s experience in a Vietnamese POW camp with the following events of the film where Butch and Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames
) gets trapped by the rapists in the Mason-Dixon Pawnshop. As mentioned by film analyst Rob Ager, Butch`s battle with Marcellus and the rapists is his own personal war, and his way of carrying on his forefathers virtues of courage and honor during wartime.
Yet another example of a match cut can be found in the final episode of the first season of David Lynch
and Mark Frost
's television show Twin Peaks
. In the opening moments as Dr. Jacoby is struck down by a masked assailant and rolls over onto his back, the camera zooms in onto his eye which slowly fades away to a roulette wheel in One Eyed Jack's casino. This transition is a key moment in the episode as it connects two very different story lines together through a strategic cut.
Film editing
Film editing is part of the creative post-production process of filmmaking. It involves the selection and combining of shots into sequences, and ultimately creating a finished motion picture. It is an art of storytelling...
between either two different objects, two different spaces, or two different compositions in which an object in the two shots graphically match, often helping to establish a strong continuity of action and linking the two shots metaphorically.
Wider context
Match cuts form the basis for continuity editingContinuity editing
Continuity editing is the predominant style of film editing and video editing in the post-production process of filmmaking of narrative films and television programs...
, such as the ubiquitous use of match on action
Cutting on action
Cutting on action or matching on action refers to film editing and video editing techniques where the editor cuts from one shot to another view that matches the first shot's action. Although the two shots may have actually been shot hours apart from each other, cutting on action gives the...
. Continuity editing smoothes over the inherent discontinuity of shot changes to establish a logical coherence between shots. Even within continuity editing, though, the match cut is a contrast both with cross-cutting between actions in two different locations that are occurring simultaneously, and with parallel editing, which draws parallels or contrasts between two different time-space locations.
A graphic match (as opposed to a graphic contrast or collision) occurs when the shapes, colors and/or overall movement of two shots match in composition, either within a scene or, especially, across a transition between two scenes. Indeed, rather than the seamless cuts of continuity editing within a scene, the term "graphic match" usually denotes a more conspicuous transition between (or comparison of) two shots via pictorial elements. A match cut often involves a graphic match, a smooth transition between scenes and an element of metaphorical (or at least meaningful) comparison between elements in both shots.
A match cut contrasts with the conspicious and abrupt discontinuity of a jump cut
Jump cut
A jump cut is a cut in film editing and vloging in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions that vary only slightly. This type of edit causes the subject of the shots to appear to "jump" position in a discontinuous way...
.
Notable examples
Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
's 2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel...
contains a famous example of a match cut. After an ape discovers the use of bone
Bone
Bones are rigid organs that constitute part of the endoskeleton of vertebrates. They support, and protect the various organs of the body, produce red and white blood cells and store minerals. Bone tissue is a type of dense connective tissue...
s as a tool
Tool
A tool is a device that can be used to produce an item or achieve a task, but that is not consumed in the process. Informally the word is also used to describe a procedure or process with a specific purpose. Tools that are used in particular fields or activities may have different designations such...
and a weapon
Weapon
A weapon, arm, or armament is a tool or instrument used with the aim of causing damage or harm to living beings or artificial structures or systems...
, he throws it triumphantly into the air. As the bone spins in the air, there is a match cut to a much more advanced weapon: an orbiting nuclear weapons satellite. The match cut helps draw a connection between the two objects as exemplars of primitive and advanced tools respectively, and serves as a neat summary of humanity's technological advancement up to that point.
Michael Powell
Michael Powell (director)
Michael Latham Powell was a renowned English film director, celebrated for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger...
and Emeric Pressburger
Emeric Pressburger
Emeric Pressburger was a Hungarian-British screenwriter, film director, and producer. He is best known for his series of film collaborations with Michael Powell, in a multiple-award-winning partnership known as The Archers and produced a series of classic British films, notably 49th Parallel , The...
's A Canterbury Tale
A Canterbury Tale
A Canterbury Tale is a 1944 British film by the film-making team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It stars Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, Dennis Price and Sgt. John Sweet; Esmond Knight provided narration and played several small roles. For the postwar American release, Raymond Massey narrated...
is a predecessor for the 2001: A Space Odyssey match cut in which a fourteenth century falcon cuts to a World War II aeroplane. The sense of time passing but nothing changing is emphasised by having the same actor, in different costumes, looking at both the falcon and the aeroplane.
An early example comes from Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
's Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film, directed by and starring Orson Welles. Many critics consider it the greatest American film of all time, especially for its innovative cinematography, music and narrative structure. Citizen Kane was Welles' first feature film...
which opens with a series of match dissolves that keeps the lit window of C.F. Kane's in the same part of the frame while the cuts take us around his dilapidated Xanadu estate, before a final match dissolve takes us from the outside to the inside where Kane is about to die.
Another match cut comes from Lawrence of Arabia
Lawrence of Arabia (film)
Lawrence of Arabia is a 1962 British film based on the life of T. E. Lawrence. It was directed by David Lean and produced by Sam Spiegel through his British company, Horizon Pictures, with the screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson. The film stars Peter O'Toole in the title role. It is widely...
(David Lean, 1962) where an edit cuts together Lawrence blowing out a lit match with the desert sun rising from the horizon. Director David Lean credits inspiration for the edit to the experimental French New Wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
. The edit was later praised by Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
as inspiration for his own work.
A match cut occurs at the end of Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
's North by Northwest
North by Northwest
North by Northwest is a 1959 American thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason, and featuring Leo G. Carroll and Martin Landau...
. As Cary Grant
Cary Grant
Archibald Alexander Leach , better known by his stage name Cary Grant, was an English actor who later took U.S. citizenship...
pulls Eva Marie Saint
Eva Marie Saint
Eva Marie Saint is an American actress who has starred in films, on Broadway, and on television in a career spanning seven decades. She won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the drama film On the Waterfront , and later starred in the thriller film North by...
up from Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore near Keystone, South Dakota, in the United States...
, the cut then goes to him pulling her up to his bunk on the train. The match cut here skips over the courting, the marriage proposal, and the actual marriage of the two characters who had for much of the film been adversaries. Another Hitchcock film to employ the use of a match cut is Psycho
Psycho (1960 film)
Psycho is a 1960 American suspense/psychological horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins. The film is based on the screenplay by Joseph Stefano, who adapted it from the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert Bloch...
. Right after Marion Crane is murdered in the infamous "shower scene", the camera shows blood flowing down the drain of the tub, then cuts to a shot of Marion's eye.
German director Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...
provided early uses of match cuts in his silent and first sound films. In Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, he shows a circular casino from above and cuts to a circle of hands at a seance happening the same night involving Mabuse and others. This not only smoothly transitions into the simultaneous scene, but also links the two activities as "decadent" pastimes of the rich in pursuit of excitement and fashionability. Lang reused the technique in M
M (1931 film)
M is a 1931 German drama-thriller directed by Fritz Lang and written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou. It was Lang's first sound film, although he had directed more than a dozen films previously....
while cross cutting between the meetings of Schränker's criminal union and Inspector Karl Lohmann's homicide investigation squad. Schränker and Lohmann are matched both in movement and in dialogue (which is carried over the cut to form a coherent phrase) to illustrate their unlikely connection in a shared goal, to capture a serial child killer.
For his 1986 fantasy film, Highlander
Highlander
-In regional cultures:* Highlander, a person from the Scottish Highlands* Highlander, person from the Scottish Gaelic culture of Gàidhealtachd in the Scottish highlands and islands* The Górale, lit. "Highlanders", a culture in southern Poland and northern Slovakia...
, director Russell Mulcahy
Russell Mulcahy
Russell Mulcahy is an Australian film director. His work is easily recognized by his use of fast cuts, tracking shots and use of glowing lights.- Music videos :...
employs multiple match cuts to indicate movements backwards in time and forwards again to the present day, telling the story of an immortal
Immortal
Immortal, Immortals or Immortality may refer to:-People:* Thirty-six Poetry Immortals, a group of medieval Japanese poets* Immortals , members of the Académie française...
who relives episodes from his past in the ancient Highlands of Scotland (and later across Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
), as he faces his final challenge in modern New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. Examples include a WWF match contrasted with the bloody clan
Clan
A clan is a group of people united by actual or perceived kinship and descent. Even if lineage details are unknown, clan members may be organized around a founding member or apical ancestor. The kinship-based bonds may be symbolical, whereby the clan shares a "stipulated" common ancestor that is a...
battles of his youth, a fish tank cutting back to an experience in a boat on a loch
Loch
Loch is the Irish and Scottish Gaelic word for a lake or a sea inlet. It has been anglicised as lough, although this is pronounced the same way as loch. Some lochs could also be called a firth, fjord, estuary, strait or bay...
and an emotional face in the past dissolving into a giant NYC advertising hoarding showing the impassive Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa is a portrait by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is a painting in oil on a poplar panel, completed circa 1503–1519...
. In the case of this film, the match cut is integral to the storytelling, as a potentially confusing back-and-forth narrative is thus held together; with the denouement's final cut to Scotland cleverly revealled to be not a jump in time, as previously, through the inclusion of a modern fighter jet in flight over the Highlands
A match-cut can be found in The Gold Watch segment of Quentin Tarantino`s
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
Pulp Fiction
Pulp fiction
Pulp fiction may refer to:* pulp magazines, short stories presented in a magazine format, printed on cheaply made wood-pulp paper* Pulp Fiction, a 1994 film directed by Quentin Tarantino...
where a young Butch Coolidge grabs his father’s gold watch from Captain Koons (Christopher Walken
Christopher Walken
Christopher Walken is an American stage and screen actor. He has appeared in more than 100 movies and television shows, including Joe Dirt, Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, The Prophecy trilogy, The Dogs of War, Sleepy Hollow, Brainstorm, The Dead Zone, A View to a Kill, At Close Range, King of New...
), we then hear a boxing bell and the film cuts to the adult Butch (Bruce Willis
Bruce Willis
Walter Bruce Willis , better known as Bruce Willis, is an American actor, producer, and musician. His career began in television in the 1980s and has continued both in television and film since, including comedic, dramatic, and action roles...
) waking from his dream/memory. This is done to symbolically link the story just told about his father’s experience in a Vietnamese POW camp with the following events of the film where Butch and Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames
Ving Rhames
Irving Rameses "Ving" Rhames is an American actor best known for his work in Bringing Out the Dead, Pulp Fiction, Baby Boy, Don King: Only in America, and the Mission: Impossible film series.-Early life and education:...
) gets trapped by the rapists in the Mason-Dixon Pawnshop. As mentioned by film analyst Rob Ager, Butch`s battle with Marcellus and the rapists is his own personal war, and his way of carrying on his forefathers virtues of courage and honor during wartime.
Yet another example of a match cut can be found in the final episode of the first season of David Lynch
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound...
and Mark Frost
Mark Frost
Mark Frost is an American novelist, television/film writer, director, who is best known as a writer for the TV show Hill Street Blues and co-creator of the show Twin Peaks.-Personal life:...
's television show Twin Peaks
Twin Peaks
Twin Peaks is an American television serial drama created by David Lynch and Mark Frost. The series follows the investigation headed by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper , of the murder of a popular teenager and homecoming queen, Laura Palmer...
. In the opening moments as Dr. Jacoby is struck down by a masked assailant and rolls over onto his back, the camera zooms in onto his eye which slowly fades away to a roulette wheel in One Eyed Jack's casino. This transition is a key moment in the episode as it connects two very different story lines together through a strategic cut.
Further reading
- Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art (8th edition), chapter six.
- Hayward, Susan. "Cut," "Editing," "Jumpcut" and "Matchcutting." Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (2nd edition).