Comparison Essay

How are the sequences from “Pillow Talk” and “Fringe” different? Discuss the

differences in pace and style of editing as well as the effect the editing has on

Meaning the audience’s reception of the extracts.

The “Pillow Talk” extract is from the film which was a romantic comedy that was made in 1959. The “Fringe” extract is from a science-fiction, thriller television series whose first broadcast was in September 2008. Except the fact that these extracts were made over 50 years apart, there are many other differences.

Firstly, looking at the cuts in the extract, after looking at both, I noticed that Pillow Talk had a split-screen cut to show a two-way conversation that was taking place over the phone. This was done mainly because technology was not as advanced as it is today and so the discovery of being able to have a split screen in a film was exciting for the editors of the film but more importantly the audience. The split-screen’s meaning allowed the audience to watch both character’s reactions and what they were both doing at the same time making the scene different and interesting. 

Thinking about meaning, this cut in the scene does affect the narrative of the storyline as we are not mainly seeing the story from one character’s point of view, but all characters as a whole.

This particular cut was also one of the longest in the sequence which would have lost the interest of modern audiences even though both extracts were probably aimed at similar age groups around the time they were shown. However, as the editing process took longer around the time that the film was being made and so the audiences back then were used to having such long cuts in the scenes. Therefore, an audience’s response to this “old-fashioned” extract would be different today then it would when the film was first shown.

 In “Fringe”, being a modern television series, the cuts are much shorter so that the attention is not lost from the audience and it was a good way to build up tension in the extract when necessary. This is referring particularly to the end scene where a man is being interviewed; as the scene progresses the cuts become quicker and more frequent, showing the increasing intensity of the conversation. This also makes the extract seem a lot more dramatic to modern audiences.

The split screen also continued in the next cut of “Pillow Talk” but there was a close-up onto the character’s faces. This allowed the audience to have a better view of the character’s emotions and reactions to each other therefore making it easy for the audience to understand how the character is feeling. This is one of few similarities that this sequence has with “Fringe”; although not as few as “Pillow Talk”, it had a mixture of mid-shots and close ups in a two-way conversation in a scene, making it more interesting to the audience and easier to relate to. “Fringe” close ups were slightly different in which the camera was zoomed in much closer and so it was easier for the audience to see and understand the emotion experienced from the characters. 

The other editing technique that I noticed was the fade out shot that took place around the 23^rd second of the extract of “Pillow Talk”. This is done to imply to the audience that this scene is taking place quite a long period after the previous. This style of editing is rarely used in modern films as modern audiences are used to being able to assume that the next scene is set at a later time which is why the style was not used in “Fringe”.

Secondly, looking more closely at the different styles of the extracts and focusing on the elements of mise-en-scene, the extracts are very different mainly because of the time period in which they were made. Because coloured films had not been around for very long, the use of colour in film was not experimented with as much as it is today. In “Pillow Talk” the use of colour almost gives the scenes an artificial look but ,again with the limitations of 1950’s technology, the audiences were used to seeing colours as bright as that on television. The film’s genre was also a romantic comedy and so the bright colours were appropriate. “Fringe”s use of colour was a lot darker to reflect the situations in the scene and to reflect the genre of science-fiction and thriller. This also applies to the lighting in both extracts; in “Pillow Talk” the lighting is always bright (even when sitting at a bar in the evening) and in “Fringe” the lighting gives the scenes a slight darkness to then (especially when a short cut was shown outside during the day) this gives the similarity of both extracts having the suitable colour and lighting or their genre.

The elements of mise-en-scene also reflect on how we, the audience, see the characters. The brightness of “Pillow Talk” gives the connotation with the characters being fun, happy and charmingly witty characters and the darkness of “Fringe” makes the audience think that the characters are evil, depressed and/or extremely emotionally complicated.

Both extracts are very different to each other but so were the audiences at the times they were both being made; “Fringe” being a modern television series to us has a positive emotional and dramatic response from modern audiences as did “Pillow Talk” when it was first released in 1959.  Therefore, the audience reactions would have been quite similar; interested and excited about the new “modern” editing styles