Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

210 Marshall Deutelbaumthat he turns a minor traffic stop into a confrontation with police becauseof his need to finally assert his dignity. Crash’s plot lines are so tightly interconnectedthat only Tommy Hanson’s chance arrival at the scene defusesthe confrontation, and in the process, as it were, allows Hanson to atonefor his silence the previous night when he watched John Ryan humiliateCameron by groping his wife. Later that night, however, when Hanson fulfillsRyan’s warning, he realizes that his atonement was illusory. In contrast toCrash, the motivations and situations of the characters in The Day a PigFell into a Well are not tied to a single theme, nor are their plotlines intertwinedto so thoroughly.Just as they differ in their narrative structure, the films differ in theirstyles of editing. Unlike Hong’s film, Crash not only adheres consistentlyto the long-established principles of continuity editing that audiences followso effortlessly, at times it uses editing to smooth the transition fromone plot to another by eliding the beginning of an action or sound at theend of a scene in one plotline with its apparent conclusion at the beginningof a scene in a different plotline. Thus the gun-shop’s door that beginsto swing open at the end of the film’s first sequence, which introduces theplotline that follows a Persian convenience shop owner, seems to completeits opening at the beginning of the next sequence as two carjackers in adifferent plotline are introduced as they finish pushing open the door ofa restaurant they are leaving somewhere else in Los Angeles. At the end ofanother sequence, a locksmith’s van that backs out of a driveway late atnight becomes a stolen SUV when it begins to move forward as the narrativeswitches to another plotline. Even though darkness and motion obscurethe transformation of the vehicle, much of the illusory continuity thatsmoothes over the change of shot is created by a song on the soundtrack,begun in the van and continued in the SUV without a missed note.Because The Day a Pig Fell into a Well frequently ignores the conventionalpatterns of continuity editing with which viewers are familiar,even the simplest spatial and temporal relationships between charactersbecome surprising and even confusing. For example, a series of shots whenHyosup meets Minjae in the coffee shop in the first part are only partiallyedited in the traditional way: while Minjae reads a manuscript he wantsher to edit, Hyosup gets up from their table, telling her that he is goingoutside. The next two shots show him outside the restaurant. The fourthshot returns to Minjae, reading. But 10 seconds after the shot begins, wehear Hyosup, off-camera, asking her what she thinks of the manuscript.The next shot reveals what the soundtrack has already signaled: contrary