A words in context question that sums up a method tests whether you can name what the whole passage shows. Read the whole text, looking for a turn from the usual practice. Words like but and yet signal a difference, so ask what changes and what stays the same. Then predict the blank in plain words and check each word’s meaning. A choice can describe one detail without describing the method as a whole.
Hints
- Hint 1
The final sentence asks for a label for Vos’s method. Read back to Calder’s sentence about the cuts to find the reason for that label.
- Hint 2
Check what viewers can and can’t tell before the later wide view. How does that compare with the usual job of eyeline matches and shot-reverse-shot patterns?
- Hint 3
In the sentence with yet, compare what each cut does with what the cuts do together. What label would cover both parts?
Step-by-step
Find the clue, then test the label
Step 1Find the familiar tools
Vos retains eyeline matches and shot-reverse-shot patterns, so the blank describes a method that still uses familiar editing tools. What do these usually help viewers do? They let viewers infer spatial relations across cuts, or how people are placed from one shot to the next.
- Step 2
See what the delay changes
What changes when Vos postpones each scene’s establishing shot, the shot that shows the whole setting? Viewers can follow looks and replies, but they don’t yet know whether a glance crosses a room or a table. Since only a later wide view settles such questions, the cuts show who responds to whom before viewers know the whole layout.
- Step 3
Predict the method’s meaning
Calder says no individual cut violates familiar continuity principles, yet describes a change in how those principles work across the sequence. How can both be true? Each cut follows the rules, but together the cuts make those rules sustain tentative local inferences rather than confirm the whole layout immediately. Predict a changed way of using the same editing system.
- Step 4
Test the labels precisely
Deferral means a delay, but continuity editing is already working while the establishing shot waits. Refinement means making something better or more exact, which the passage doesn’t say Vos has done. Inversion means a reversal, but the cuts still connect looks and replies in the familiar way rather than reverse those links. Reconfiguration means a change in how a system is arranged, so it names Vos’s changed use of familiar principles across a whole sequence of cuts. Choice D.