Motion Picture Editing as a Hawkes Process

In this article I analyse motion picture editing as a point process to explore the temporal structure in the timings of cuts in motion pictures, modelling the editing in 134 Hollywood films released between 1935 and 2005 as a Hawkes process with an exponential kernel. The results show that the editing in Hollywood films can be modelled as a Hawkes process and that the conditional intensity function provides a direct description of the instantaneous cutting rate of a film, revealing the structure of a film’s editing at a range of scales. The parameters of the exponential kernel show a clear trend over time to a more rapid editing style with an increase in the rate of exogenous events and small increase in the rate of endogenous events. This is consistent with the shift from a classical to an intensified continuity editing style. There are, however, few differences between genres indicating the consistency of editing practices in Hollywood cinema over time and different types of films.