Patterns of Editing in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
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	Narrator: Although it is set in the 1930s, nothing felt more contemporary than Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde when it burst on the screen in 1967.  Dede Allen’s editing turns this tragic comedy about the notorious outlaws’ crime spree into a visceral experience capturing the restless energy of a country divided by generation, race, and political ideology.
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	Narrator: The film opens with a series of still snapshots edited together as a documentary photo montage, implying that these lifeless images cannot tell the whole story until they are animated and edited together in a meaningful way.
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	Narrator: Bonnie and Clyde frequently uses continuity editing to give clear spatial and temporal cues.  For example, in the scene showing the couple’s first small town bank robbery, we are first shown a long shot of their car parked outside the bank followed by a shot from inside the bank showing the car parked outside; this shows us the geography of the scene as well as what’s happening during these linked shots.  But at other times the film’s editing emphasizes psychological or emotional effects over realism.  For
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	example, Bonnie is first introduced with an extreme close-up of her lips.  The camera then pulls back as she turns right to look in a mirror.  This is followed by a cut on action as she stands and looks back over her shoulder to the left in a medium shot and then by another cut on action as she drops to her bed, her face visible in a close-up through the bed frame which she petulantly punches.  She pulls herself up and looks out between the bars of the bedframe.  With another
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	cut she rises from the bed with her back turned toward us and reaches to the right for her dress.  This central character is described by a series of jerky shots: her boredom and frustration are also built into the editing through cutting on action.  The lack of an establishing shot combines with the multiple framings to emphasize the claustrophobic mise-en-scéne, taking us right into the character’s psychologically-rendered space.  The meeting with Clyde comes next and
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	the editing indicates the break he represented from the trap Bonnie feels herself to be in.  She goes to her window and then a point-of-view construction spots a strange man near her mother’s car.
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	Narrator: She comes downstairs to investigate and her conversation with Clyde is handled in a series of shot/reverse shots, starting with long shots as she comes outside, and proceeding to closer pairs of shots.  The two-shot of the characters together is delayed.  The way this introduction is handled emphasizes the inevitability of their pairing.
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	Narrator: Because Bonnie and Clyde is a gangster film in which cars and guns figure prominently, complex spatial connections are repeatedly set up between the pursuers and the pursued.
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	Narrator: Editing on movement pervades the film.  Its stop-and-go rhythm is probably one of the most striking features.  As the Barrow gang flees from the police in one car chase, shots alternate between the police and the gang.  Intercut, as a parallel action, are interviews with witnesses to the robbery who brag about having been part of a Bonnie and Clyde caper.  The influence French New Wave storytelling and editing is apparent in this ironic counterpoint.
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	Narrator: The film was probably most well known for its climactic sequence in which Bonnie and Clyde are gunned down.  It is, in fact, two discrete scenes—distinguished by changes in action.  But it is the changes in pacing in these two scenes that leave viewers feeling as if they too have been ambushed.  In the first scene, Bonnie and Clyde pull up beside the broken down truck of the man who has been sheltering them.  His anxiety about having betrayed them to the
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	cops is signaled by a quick glance at the bushes followed by a point-of-view shot in which a flock of birds suddenly rises.  Bonnie and Clyde are each shown following his gaze in eyeline matches.  The collaborator takes cover and a remarkable series of shots ensues alternating rhythmically between close-ups of the lovers’ faces as they look at each other in alarm, realizing they are surrounded.  Then the shooting begins.  Next, accompanied by the staccato of machine gun bullets, Bonnie’s and Clyde’s
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	deaths are filmed in slow motion; their bodies reacting with almost balletic grace to the impact of the gunshots and to the rhythm of the film’s shots, which are almost as numerous.  In nearly thirty cuts and approximately forty seconds, the film alternates between close-ups of the two victims’ spasms and bodies and medium to long shots that re-establish the scene of their deaths.  The sense that their deaths are
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	happening in slow motion is created by overlapping the action.  For example, Clyde’s fall to the ground is split into three shots.  The hail of bullets finally stops and the film’s final minute is comprised of a series of seven shots of the police and other onlookers gathering around without a single reverse shot of what they are seeing.
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	Narrator: For linking sex with violence, glamorizing its protagonists through beauty and fashion, and addressing itself to the anti-authoritarian feelings of young audiences, Bonnie and Clyde is among the most important US films of the 1960s.  It heralded the beginning of a new, youth-oriented film market—one that revisited film genres of the past with a modern sensibility.  There’s no doubt that the climactic linkage of gunshots with camera shots profoundly
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	influenced the editing of the blockbuster action movies that would follow.