Stone, in his use of pace, seems to be the direct descendant of Sergei Eisenstein by way of Sam Peckinpah. Perhaps no filmmaker best encapsulated both of these agendas-excitement and insight-as did Oliver Stone in his 20 years of work as a director, from Salvador through Natural Born Killers. In each genre and film, a different purpose might be served, but, in general, the mix of excitement and insight into the fragmented psychology of the main character captures the intent. At this point, pace seems to affiliate with particular genres-the police story in The French Connection, the gangster film in Scarface, the thriller in Jaws, and the war film in Apocalypse Now. Building out from the death scene in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, the massacre that ends in the death of the final four members of The Wild Bunch seems the ultimate use of pace to mesmerize and simultaneously horrify its audience. Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, particularly in its opening and climactic set-pieces, a robbery and a massacre, relies on modulation of pace to create a sense of the chaos of violence. The next step in the use of pace seemed on one level a reversion to the ideas of Eisenstein. After A Hard Days Night, commercials and feature films were cut faster. There is little question that the effective use of pace in these films accelerated-dare we say it-the pace of pace in film. Their dynamic mixture of movement, jump cutting, and variations in point of view (performers, audience, and the media) created a filmic persona of youthful energy and joyful anarchy. The next significant development in the use of pace was seen in the work of Richard Lester in the Beatles films A Hard Days Night and Help!. In the case of Hitchcock, the shower scene in Psycho has become the second most famous set piece in the history of film, and at its editing core it is the changes in pace that move the sequence from anticipation, to the violence of the killing, to the stillness of death. Kurosawa's main editing device to underscore the differences in view is variation in the pace of each of the four stories. In Rashomon, Kurosawa presents four versions of the same story, each from a different person's point of view. In that decade, with Akira Kurosawa's dynamic use of pace in Rashomon-together with Alfred Hitchcock's set pieces in The Man Who Knew Too Much and, in 1960, Psycho-new pathways emerged, suggesting that pace could be used for more diverse purposes. The great leaps forward, however, would await the 1950s. And Frank Capra used pace to energize his dialogue-heavy narrative in You Can't Take it With You. Walter Ruttmann used pace to capture the energy of the city in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. King Vidor effectively used pace to build an aesthetic tension in the march through the woods sequence in The Big Parade. Eisenstein opened the door on the issue of pace and a wide variety of filmmakers walked through that door.
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