Development of drama

Producers of drama and film can choose between using cuts or more prolonged scenes to gain a reaction from the audience. Different shots and cuts are added in during the editing process to help the development of drama. The editor will put different cuts in depending on how he/she wants their audience to feel when they are watching a film. Western audiences tend to ‘need’ cuts to remain attentive to the text. Years of numbing from Hollywood has arguably established this need for cuts. In contrast non-western texts such as Iranian film do not rely upon editing to develop the drama. Rather they use prolonged static shots to make western audiences feel uncomfortable to ‘feel’ the drama. For example in the film Ten (Abbas Kiarostami ) the producers use longer scenes without cuts to make the western audience feel the oppression women are going through. The director does not believe that editing is required to develop the drama. In the case of most Hollywood and mainstream films narratives will have a combination of different scenes and a wide variety of cuts within those scenes to develop the drama. There are various reasons for this: the relatively young mainstream audience watching the film might become bored and unengaged if a wide variety of shots were not used; A list stars often expect a scene to lead to a close-up where they deliver their best performance; scenes in action films have a tendency to follow standard model, we start with big sequences with a lot of production value and we lead up to the intensity of action shots. An example of a film that has used a variety of different cuts would be CSI. This particular drama uses a range of shots and cuts; this is done to establish all the characters and the setting. If there were minimal cuts the audience would become uncomfortable with not being able to see all of the characters talking and engaging with other characters.

As you can see from this link there are a variety of cuts to establish all of the action happening and being able to follow it.

David Mamet an acclaimed theatre and film director in "On Directing Film" says that the way to develop a drama is through cuts, specifically through a "juxtaposition of images that are basically uninflected" images can be inflected or unrelated. Agreeing with the great soviet master of montage editing Sergei Eisenstein, he says that the best image is an uninflected image. He gives us the following example A shot of a teacup. A shot of a spoon. A shot of a fork and a shot of a door. Mamet advises us to let the cut tell the story because otherwise we do not have dramatic action we just have narration.