Cinema Report: "Dammit, Flyboy!"

Hey, lookit. Did up an average shot length (ASL) for the U.S. theatrical release of the original Dawn of the Dead (directed by George A. Romero) via cinemetrics:

Average shot length: 2.5 seconds
Length of the film: 125 minutes 15.3 seconds (closing credits not included)
Number of shots: 3017
Minimum SL: 0.2 seconds
Maximum SL: 24.5 seconds (opening shot)
Range: 24.3 seconds
Standard deviation: 2.2 seconds

Here's more or less what it looks like:


(Note the longer the shot, the further the white line hangs down from the x-axis.)

Couple of things to note:
1. I'll need to run through this again to doublecheck things.

2. Second longest shot, at around 20 seconds, was the slow zoom out from Fran and Stephen awake and motionless in bed, about 94 minutes in.

3. It seems to me this is pretty damn fast for an American feature film in 1978.

4. I'm pretty sure this is par for the course for Romero, probably up through Knightriders. I'll dive into The Crazies next. (The film that poses the question: "Why Are All the Good People Dying?")

5. I'll also need to check this against the remake. I have a hunch Romero's film is cut just as fast, on average, if not a little faster. I compared two sequences from the films a while back, an action scene from the remake (when the trucks pull up with more living folk), and a montage that just showed the zombies hanging out at the mall in the original, the "No discernible intellect" montage, and they both had an ASL around 1.8 seconds. I think Romero's montage was more like 1.87 seconds, but still, pretty fast for a more or less meditative scene.



6. This is actually lower than the ASL I found for Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005), which was at 3.4 s (1683 shots in about 94.5 minutes), and looked like this:

(Those lines running to the bottom of the graph are shots longer than 30 seconds. Just trying to keep the size of the graph down a little.)

There's still some very fast cutting in Marshall's film (like in the opening scene), but there are more shots, I think, which are allowed to play out a bit longer. This'll pull the ASL up a bit. For example, there are more shots in The Descent which run for 10 seconds or longer (with the longest at just over 52 seconds). In Dawn, by contrast, Romero's more likely to cut around rapidly even during a slower scene (Romero acted as his own editor on the film), and by my count, there were fewer shots which ran 10 seconds or longer, with the longest at a bit over 24 seconds. And this in a film with a 30 minute longer running time. (Along similar lines, note that shots in The Descent have a standard deviation of 4 seconds, versus 2.2 seconds for Dawn.)

7. This ASL is identical to the ASL Charles Leary found for Land of the Dead, released 27 years later.

(It can be found in the Cinemetrics database, along with the entries for the movies I clocked, over here. The program for doing this, developed by film scholar Yuri Tsivian and his programmer son Gunnars, can be found there as well, for the few people who occasionally read this blog who might not know about it.)

Which is interesting, given that one of the complaints made by Romero-faithful who hated Land was that Land had this sped-up, jerky editing style. Further evidence that it's not just the cutting pace which affects our reaction to the film, but the kinds of edits that are made. (Hm, Longest shot was much longer, over 56 seconds. But Leary found a standard deviation of 2.4 seconds, again very close to Dawn. And the longest shot, if I'm reading the data correctly, is again the first shot.)

8. By way of comparison, for those who never think about this stuff, a couple of other ASLs I found recently:
Days of Heaven (1978): 6.3 seconds.
Killer of Sheep (1977): 13.2 seconds.
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971): 12.4 seconds.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007): 6.8 seconds.

That last one feels a bit fast, but as far as I know, only one extra shot found its way into the count (gunshots can make the hand twitchy when counting), and during the few scenes of action (like the train robbery), there are some shorter shots in there. Still, that's lower than that of Munich, at 7.9 s. It's also well below the 12 second ASL Bordwell cited for There Will Be Blood in his recent article in Variety. Guess I should doublecheck Jesse James, but man, that was a marathon.

Okay, enough of that for now. I'd meant to end this post with the more important stuff I learned and/or rediscovered after going through Dawn for the umpteenth time, but it's late, and I'm more tired than the Resident Evil franchise, so, maybe tomorrow.

In the meantime, here's these: