This is a natural editing style designed to hide all the cuts in the footage so that the viewer sees the film with maximum fluidity, as if it were shot using a sequence shot. Invisible editing, present in the classical cinema of every era and habitually used in all genres, is the opposite of "visible" editing where the rules of the classical grammar are violated, seeking to make the transitions clear to the audience, mostly with a certain visual aggression.
Practically all the most commercially successful films, including the blockbusters, are assembled in accord with the rules of invisible montage from Gone with the Wind to Avatar
Learning how to edit consists largely in knowing how to make cuts invisible. There are three guidelines for this: the narrative (staging what is called for by the narrative at any moment), kinetic (cutting during a movement or just before it occurs, starting the shot in movement) and auditive (the sound rides on the back of the cut point). Visible editing seeks to undermine the smoothness and fluidity of invisible editing and is typically found in experimental cinema and had a notable impetus with the new cinema fashions of the sixties. Some of the breaks applied to invisible editing (such as the "jump cut") have over time been incorporated into conventional classical editing. Almost all of the most commercially successful films, including the blockbusters, are edited according to the rules of invisible editing, from Gone with the Wind (1939) to Avatar (2009), Casablanca (1942), Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), Jurassic Park (1993) and Titanic (1997).
Hellzapoppin’
Hellzapoppin’ / Hellzapoppin | H. C. Potter, 1941, U.S.
The film itself warns us about this in its opening credits: "any similarity between HELLZAPOPPIN’ and a motion picture is purely coincidental." This warning helps us to deal with this anarchic festival of surreal humour, metalinguistic gags, plot chaos and generic mess, a true exercise in cinematic terrorism in its purest form. From the beginning we know we are being treated to a film within a film which, rather than adapting the original musical comedy which the duo Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson played on Broadway to the big screen, uses this as a simple excuse to do away with as many rules of films and "realistic" temptations as possible. Thus, its protagonists not only know that they are in a film, but also interact with chaotic determination with the clumsy projectionist, the bewildered audience (an audience member is sent home), their own acting partners, their disorientated screenwriter, their conservative producers and even with all these strict codes that prevent the different genres confusingly spinning against each other. A crazy cross between the anarchy of the Marx brothers, the most extreme slapstick, the musicals of Busby Berkeley and the revelations of the cartoon understood in the insane way of Tex Avery, Hellzapoppin’ (symptomatically written by Nat Perry, also screenwriter for the implacable Duck Soup) is a parody of everything from Citizen Kane by Welles to the most canonical Westerns, not forgetting the strict "Motion Picture Production Code" or Frankenstein's monster himself. Of course, here the plot is really not the main concern.
