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The "20 years" is an arbitrary figure but I have noticed that films tend to have way more cuts than they did in earlier days of film making. Sometimes there will be a conversation in the room and there is a cut for every person talking,the reaction shot and it starts to get difficult to watch.

The ultimate cuts tend to be on fight sequences. There are so many cuts that it is sometimes difficult to appreciate the fight for a fight as opposed to an exercise in how many times can the director/editor cut the scene.

Hitchcock did the ultimate 40 odd take cut scene for the shower sequence in Psycho but that was so natural it seemed like one scene. Yet movies today just seem to be one big MTV fest of cutting.

Is it simply because film is digital and it easy to do so they do it. Whereas in the "olden" days every cut meant a splice of a physical piece of film that took ages to do so the cuts where more thought through.

I like to have a scene, where there is a fixed shot, a long conversion, where the actor gets to exercise their craft in getting you involved in the story as opposed to telling the story with a cut every 5 seconds.

Why do they do it? It takes longer to make the film, and it really adds very little value. What caused this trend?

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    While being phrased borderline-subjective, the higher overall frequency of cuts nowadays and its reasons is indeed an iterresting question. Very tight +1 ;)
    – Napoleon Wilson
    Commented Mar 23, 2013 at 23:32
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    Subjectivity is the process of living on a planet and observing things. There is no borderline here, I believe if you research the matter surprisingly MTV comes up a lot. But then again research these days means going to google which is the ultimate subjectivity, you can't win ;)
    – user4371
    Commented Mar 23, 2013 at 23:50
  • I didn't say this observation is subjective (which it isn't, I also think it's a hard fact that cuts are overall more prevalent nowadays), only the rhetorical way in which it is presented. But like said, even this only borderline and still worth an upvote.
    – Napoleon Wilson
    Commented Mar 24, 2013 at 0:09
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    MTV is the primary reason for rapid editing, as user4371 suggests.
    – Nobby
    Commented Jul 21, 2013 at 12:30
  • I would also add that you are being generous with the 'cut every 5 seconds' comment. I've done some editing in my time, and it was generally acknowledged that cuts shorter than 4 seconds were a no no - but modern editors are happy to deal in frames, not seconds. It's not across the board, but this technique has certainly ruined some films for me.
    – Nobby
    Commented Jul 21, 2013 at 12:35

6 Answers 6

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I think it's a mix of a few things. The main two that come to mind is style preferences and technology. Taste and style change over time. Some directors are known for long single cuts (Quentin Tarantino for example), others known for many (Paul Greengrass).

In the technology realm, things have evolved quite a lot since the old days. Now most, if not almost all, film is digital and edited digital. It's cheaper and easier to record with a digital medium, allowing many takes to be done relatively quickly. With computers we can easily manipulate these takes.

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    Maybe the younger generation can cope with all those cuts, I just can't keep up. So taste might be a factor
    – user4371
    Commented Mar 23, 2013 at 6:07
  • Some would lay this right at the feet of the actors. My wife and I have discussed this with the thinking the actors just aren't as good as they used to be, where they could actually hold dialogue over a long back-n-forth without having to cut and make it believable.
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2
    Commented Jul 16, 2013 at 11:10
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    Something I'd throw in is that in the early films were heavily inspired by stage acting... where there are no cuts.
    – Liath
    Commented Jul 16, 2013 at 12:27
  • Answer fails to mention that splicing multiple shaky shots of a sloppily prepared sequence is easier than rehearsing and repeating in order to get it actually right.
    – Grimm The Opiner
    Commented May 24, 2017 at 8:40
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While I agree with DForck42's answer, I would really emphasize style preferences.

A long series of straight cuts ("straight" means no transition like a wipe, crossfade, blur, etc.) between camera angles does several things for the viewer's state of mind:

  • The viewer feels more omniscient
  • The scene's intensity seems stronger and more important
  • Concentrates (in the sense of juice concentrate) action or reaction
  • A stronger emotion is created, even if part of it merely comes from having one's mind crammed full of images, and just trying to keep up.

Fight sequences are most often shot for all those reasons plus performer safety. A fight sequence is usually broken down into a series of clips of no more than three "moves"—punch, block, dive for example. That way both performers can easily get the choreography entirely correct:   therefore safely performed. (I know this from being an extra in a Leverage episode laying on the ground beside Christian Kane (Eliot) as he has a sword fight with Noa Tishby.)

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I want to disagree with the assumption that the number of cuts in a film has increased over the last 20 years.

To say the number of edits has increased is to also say that film techniques have also changed, and while technology and style have changed. The basic techniques of filming have remained mostly intact. With the except of the few directors who challenge the norm (Quentin Tarantino as an example).

An editor tries to stay true to the script, and will make changes under the guidance of the director. The point here is the script. Scripts, how they are written, how they are structured has not changed much in the last 20 years.

While we can use MTV as an example of fast editing. Let's remember that most of the MTV style is copied from classic great directors. There are many films of the 1960s and 1970s that used fast editing to build drama, action and mood.

The central rhythm of a film is called its beat. Beats are specific, measured, and spaced to create a pace that moves the progress of the film forward. Script writers have been using beats long before films. Scripts for the theater contained beats.

To say films contain more cuts now than before, is to say that films have a faster beat now than before. That simply isn't true.

What has likely happened is that you are now watching more films that have a faster beat than you did when you were younger. So your perception is that films now have more cuts. There are many adult drama films being produced that have a slower beat that you are likely not watching.

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    Scripts don't specify how many cuts are in a scene, except for broad general progressions like establishing shot, medium shot, close up, long shot. Also a script beat—the pace of scene revelations—is much longer than a directorial beat, which is the rhythm at which actor reactions are delivered. There is often a relationship between both those kinds of beats and cuts, but they are not the same.
    – wallyk
    Commented Jul 21, 2013 at 17:43
  • The acceleration in the rate of cuts seems obvious to me. Look at the action sequence in a 1960s 007 film—state of the art stuff for its time—versus a modern film or TV show. There are at least twice as many cuts per minute than there were before. A Leverage fight sequence will have dozens and dozens of cuts. 007? Only 8 to 10 in the old days, and dozens now.
    – wallyk
    Commented Jul 21, 2013 at 17:47
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Because they can.

Movie post-production schedules usually have a finite window for editing; Non-Linear Editing allows for significantly more work to be carried out in that time window than the old physical splicing method. Thus those editors and/or directors who are inclined can edit more so do so.

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Some of it has to do with safety regulations of filming movies, specifically, fighting scenes. Fight scenes nowadays have an annoying amount of cuts, and it helps make the filming of potentially dangerous fighting scenes somewhat easier. In fact, the executives of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull wanted Harrison Ford to have a CGI whip. Ford thought this was extremely dumb, and refused. Safety regulations are getting out of hand.

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  • I realize now what I said about Indy doesn't pertain to my point.
    – Ethanial
    Commented May 8, 2017 at 18:23
  • How does the editing of a fight scene make it easier/safer to film? You'd still need to film it from multiple angles, which must present a risk?
    – Longshanks
    Commented May 8, 2017 at 18:25
  • Well if you film with fewer cuts, the actors are more prone to make mistakes or injure themselves. If you have an expert storyboard and director, you can piece together a dangerous-looking, complicated fight scene with multiple cuts consisting of just simple movements and basic non-linear editing.
    – Ethanial
    Commented May 9, 2017 at 13:30
  • I have disagree with your assumptions about injuries unless you can back it up with a source to help improve your answer? Do you have any examples of a long scene (i.e. the Oldboy corridor fight scene) causing more injuries than a rapidly cut scene (i.e. something from the Bourne series)?
    – Longshanks
    Commented May 9, 2017 at 16:02
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I think as a general rule, audiences need something to "happen" every 3 seconds or so. You can do this by scriptwriting something every 3 seconds... something interesting, and cutting only when it's difficult to orchestrate multiple stunts/happenings in the same shot (Indiana Jones). Or you can kind of cheat by cutting to a new view every few seconds, which the brain interprets as a "happening" even if nothing actually happened in the story (Fast & Furious). I prefer well-written/directed/orchestrated movies with fewer cuts but most people seem happy to be pseudo-entertained by a rapid succession of cuts in a less interesting story.

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    General rule by whom? Where does this three seconds rule come from?
    – MattD
    Commented Jun 19, 2015 at 19:46
  • I lucked out. I agree with this answer, the only one currently showing a negative score, so you take the fall for me. Audiences today would be bored by the static style of "older films" (produced in the 60's or 70's) because attention spans have dwindled. Fights filmed realistically, as in Five Easy Pieces, are (pardon the expression) strikingly slow by current standards, while films that permit a very short summary, like The Avengers, seem to keep audiences glued for hours, watching make-believe people punch each other through buildings in into orbit with a huge number of cuts.
    – Chaim
    Commented May 8, 2017 at 19:34

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