Observations on Deleted Scenes
What are they and what do they do other than help resell a movie?
In this article, I will share my thoughts on a subject that is rarely considered in film studies - deleted scenes. Usually, deleted scenes are thought of almost exclusively in the commercial sense. This is understandable, given that they typically bolster the resale value of a given title in the home video market.*
But I am curious, as to how they can impact a film text beyond merely adding financial value to it. Among other things, I want to consider: “What do deleted scenes tell us about a film and its internal history? How do they affect the viewer? What is their relation to alternate versions of a picture?”
*Audiences are more likely to purchase subsequent video reissues of a film (eg. new digital remasters) if they contain new deleted footage - that is, footage that had never previously been made available. Some distributors, such as Disney, take advantage of this by holding back deleted scenes from initial video releases with the intention of including them in a future reissue, such as a box set.
A Personal Introduction:
I love watching deleted scenes, which tend to appear in the “special features” or “bonus materials” section of a movie or TV show’s home video release.
I’m not sure when exactly I first became aware of such a feature. I think it might’ve been around 1999-2000, when I was browsing the DVD of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me on my father’s laptop.* That disc had 20 minutes or so of scenes that were never in the film proper and I became quite intrigued. Some of them were very good full scenes, others were extensions of existing ones. One selection was a montage of random, disconnected bits of scenes set to music.
Whether or not this was my introduction to deleted scenes as a concept, I’d say the Austin Powers DVD certainly made me more interested in seeing deleted scenes in general and actively seeking them out whenever I acquired a new DVD.
Later, as a film and media scholar, I wanted to study and analyze deleted scenes, but sadly never found any pre-existing scholarly writing on this subject, with the exception of Brian Hu’s “Deleted Scenes and the Recovery of the Invisible,” which looks primarily at the ideological implications of a deleted scene’s accessibility. I will reference this text later in this article.
*At the time, if I recall correctly, this was the only DVD player we had. We were still very much VCR and VHS folks and hadn’t yet made the transition to the new platform.
What are ‘deleted scenes’ exactly?
A “deleted scene” is basically any scene that has been cut from a theatrical film in the course of post-production.* Absent from the theatrical cut of the picture, it is not a part of the causal chain of narrative events that compose it. The events it depicts can be considered in that regard “non-canon” in relation to the story the picture is telling.
The term, however, is often also applied to longer or extended versions of scenes present in the theatrical cut. In this case, the scene consists of both footage that is already available to audiences in the film proper and footage that is not.
By virtue of their relation to film texts, deleted scenes may be classified as “paratexts,” a term initially used by Gerard Genette to designate texts that “prepare us for other texts. They form, he notes, the “threshold” between the inside and the outside of the text...”1 In essence, a paratext is a subordinate text to the main text.
Jonathan Gray suggests that we can view all DVD special features, such as commentary tracks, documentaries, etc. as examples of paratexts, which influence our reading of a given film or TV program.2
*Naturally, this can also apply towards television or direct-to-video movies, TV episodes, videogames – anything that has undergone editing.
How do viewers gain access to deleted scenes?
While deleted scenes can be seen in a variety of ways, the most common one is home video. Based on my research, deleted scenes have appeared as a standalone “special feature” on home video releases since at least the days of laserdisc before becoming one of the most popular features on DVD. As the DVD format gained mainstream success, deleted scenes became far more widely available to consumers, spreading awareness of their existence.
Deleted scenes, however, do not always stand apart from the film. In many cases, they can only be seen within an alternate cut of the film, in which case they have been reinstated into the assemblage of the picture for post-theatrical exhibition. For example, television networks can reinstate deleted scenes into the broadcast version of a theatrical feature with the permission or participation of the distributor.*
* Though there can be different reasons for this, it is most commonly done in order to pad out a movie’s overall running time and so ensure it can fit into a designated time slot with commercials.This practice used to be especially common for movies produced by Universal Studios. Thus, when titles like Problem Child (1990) aired on TV, they could have multiple scenes that never appeared in theaters.
Technology-savvy film viewers can also turn available deleted scenes into digital files and use them in conjunction with the film footage to construct customized “fan edits” (unauthorized feature-length alternate cuts specifically made outside the official boundaries of the film industry) of the picture that fulfill their creative desires.
Why do deleted scenes exist and what do they tell us about the movie?
Deleted scenes point to the act of revision or, more specifically, editing that naturally occurs in the course of a film’s post-production. Quite simply, the presence of deleted scenes means that a film has been edited, that it has been assembled together by an editor or multiple editors from the available footage shot during a film’s production. Taking this idea further, we can infer that the film has undergone post-production and so possesses an internal history of revision.
One thing to keep in mind is that films, after all, are often cut and recut for many different reasons. A film literally takes shape in the editing room and, as a previous article has outlined, goes through multiple cuts and iterations before arriving at the one that comes out in theaters.
Factors that can influence the editing typically include but are not limited to:
the intentions of the filmmaker(s)
the demands of the studio
the clarity of the narrative
the pacing of the picture
the available durational limits of the market in which the picture is exhibited
the cultural standards and values of the time it is made in
the MPAA rating
feedback from test screenings
time and money available for post-production
Deleted scenes often result from or are informed by these factors. Their availability on home video or in another cut of the picture can thus provide insight to the viewer about how the film was made and how it changed over the course of post-production.
Do Deleted Scenes Affect the Plot of a Film?
If by the “plot of a film,” one refers to the causal chain of narrative events that a motion picture depicts onscreen, then deleted scenes do not impact it. They are outside the bounds of that causal chain and so do not impact it.
So, basically, whatever we see in a deleted scene is deleted from the movie. It is consequently not canon to what the movie depicts.
However, by seeing them, we can understand how the plot has been changed in editing, how it evolved from an earlier state. Sometimes, deleted scenes can reveal radical differences between what the film’s narrative began and ended up as, thereby demonstrating how fluid and unstable a film text can be. In that regard, they highlight the connection between editing and storytelling in cinema.
What is the connection between editing and storytelling?
Editing and storytelling are directly intertwined in film, not to mention in other visual media. I find that Jane Stadler and Kelly McWilliam provide an excellent description of this connection in their book Screen Media: An Introduction to Film and Television Analysis.
As they put it, “…the editor drives the vehicle of the plot. The screenwriter creates a map of the terrain over which a story will travel and the director rides shotgun—giving directions—but in the final cut it is the editor who skids into a spin at turning points in the story, throws us into reverse with a flashback, and shifts up a gear, then floors the accelerator to make our hearts race through the major obstacles and suspenseful moments of a narrative.”3
All this occurs because the “main functions of editing include selecting, trimming and arranging shots into sequences and scenes, thereby establishing associations and relationships between shots and determining the dynamics of a screen text’s structure, space, pace, continuity, rhythm and point of view.”4
Finally, they reference Quentin Tarantino’s likening of editing to writing and vice versa on the DVD extras of Death Proof: “‘The final draft of the script is actually the first cut of the movie and the final cut of the movie is the last draft of the script.’”5
Tarantino’s apt comparison makes evident that an editor effectively rewrites and revises the movie in the course of post-production. Major and minor changes alike can be made to the overall plot, characterization, tone, etc. Entire characters and subplots can be removed. Conversely, new scenes and subplots can be added thanks to reshoots.
Deleted scenes are the direct results of such revision. As such, they provide a window into how the story of a film transforms in the course of its making.
What are the effects of deleted scenes on the viewer?
In a classical narrative film, editing is essentially supposed to be invisible, helping to create a sense of continuity between disparate shots, scenes, and sequences. By not drawing attention to itself, a film’s assemblage helps viewers become immersed within the picture. The film thus creates an illusion of reality – it ideally convinces viewers that what they see on-screen is real, to forget they’re watching a “film” at all.
From this perspective, deleted scenes arguably work against viewer immersion in a picture by making the editing process visible to the audience. The notion that a picture is edited comes to the foreground when one sees what was cut from it. And so, the construction of the motion picture in turn becomes exposed.
To put it another way, watching deleted scenes reveals and accentuates the fact that what one sees on screen is indeed a film, a construct. And in turn, it leads one to consider the creative rationales behind the choices of what to include in/exclude from the film and why.
I thus agree with Brian Hu’s statement that deleted scenes “not only draw attention to film’s constructedness but also film’s de-constructedness (the act of exclusion). Equipped with access to these deletions, the spectator can actively discover, interrogate, and interpret what had been made invisible.”6
Doing so can potentially compel the viewer to imagine other ways that the picture could’ve been assembled, such as with the cut scenes included. In effect, it suggests the existence of alternate versions of the film that contain differences in terms of narrative, dialogue, characterization, etc. In this sense, deleted scenes show viewers what a movie could be/could’ve been.
Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 25.
Gray, Show Sold Separately, 81-116.
Jane Stadler and Kelly McWilliam. Screen Media: An Introduction to Film and Television Analysis (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2008), 94.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Brian Hu, “DVD Deleted Scenes and the Recovery of the Invisible,” in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Vol. 20, No. 4 (Routledge: December 2006), 500.
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