15 Great Films That Let Your Eyes Do The Editing

Created by Igor_Brynner.

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Since the birth of cinema the average shot length (ASL) of films has been getting shorter and shorter, and when we talk about ASL (if you don’t know) we’re talking about how long a shot lasts before cutting. The lower the ASL, the more separate shots a film contains. To give you a practical example, Spun (Jonas Åkerlund, 2002) has an ASL of around 1.2, meaning that the average duration of a shot before cutting is a mere 1.2 seconds long, whereas Some Like it Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959) has an ASL of around 12.4.

As a general guideline, ASLs for all films were much longer in the past, and over the decades people like Barry Salt have done exceptional work tracking the changing form of cinema, and looking at how films feature more and more cuts, and shorter and shorter takes as the medium has developed.

Editing is something that we’ve become impatient for these days: we see the object, recognise its significance, and move on as quickly as possible. And this is something we’re taught to do: ‘keep it tight’, ‘cut, cut, cut’ and so on. But there’s an interesting conversation to be had about what happens when an audience is presented with a sustained frame, one that they are allowed to edit with their eyes by choosing where to look.