Question 140·200 Super-Hard SAT Reading Questions·Craft and Structure
Film scholar Nia Calder observes that director Lena Vos retains eyeline matches and shot-reverse-shot patterns, devices that ordinarily let viewers infer spatial relations across cuts. Vos, however, postpones each scene’s establishing shot. Viewers can therefore track who looks at or responds to whom while remaining uncertain whether an offscreen glance crosses a room or merely a table; only a later wide view settles such questions. Calder notes that no individual cut violates familiar continuity principles, yet the cuts collectively make those principles sustain tentative local inferences instead of immediately confirming a stable overall layout. Calder describes Vos’s method not as a rejection of continuity editing but as a ______ of it.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
For a difficult words-in-context question, distinguish the precise nature of the change from its effects. Check whether each choice adds an unsupported evaluation, describes only a consequence, or overstates the scope of the change; then select the word that accounts for both what is preserved and what is altered.
Hints
Separate the local and overall effects
Consider what viewers can infer from one cut to the next and what they cannot determine until the wider view appears.
Distinguish the system from its outcome
Determine whether continuity editing itself is postponed or whether its familiar devices remain active while one result they ordinarily produce is delayed.
Step-by-step Explanation
Identify what Vos preserves
Eyeline matches and shot-reverse-shot patterns still allow viewers to follow local relationships across individual cuts. Thus, Vos continues to use recognizable continuity-editing principles.
Determine what Vos changes
By delaying the establishing shot, Vos makes the familiar devices support only tentative local inferences at first rather than immediately establishing a stable spatial layout.
Compare the choices precisely
Although the stable overall layout is deferred, continuity editing itself is not: its familiar devices remain active throughout the scene. The method changes how those preserved devices function together without improving or reversing the system, so “reconfiguration” is the most precise description.