Research Statement

The copious wipe transitions across the Star Wars films always puzzled me. Not only the sheer number of them, but why certain wipes were used in some moments of narrative transition but not in others. I was left with the impression that they were entirely random. However, as I began research for a dissertation chapter focusing on the Star Wars franchise, I refused to accept that something so integral to the franchise was devoid of intentionality. Therefore, when presented with the “Videographic Dissection” exercise (Avissar, 2024) by the Reframing the Argument workshop organisers, I felt it was the perfect opportunity to make some sense of Star Wars’ transitions.

My decision to work with Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) was largely based on the Star Wars media I could access at the workshop: The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977). Although A New Hope contains more wipe transitions (50 compared to Empire’s 42) and even boasts an Academy Award for Best Film Editing, I was curious to see what effect the wipe had on a film that was darker in tone. A New Hope’s optimism and happy ending make these transitions feel less obtrusive. How can the wipe, a supposedly kitschy transition, become integral to a film that pits hope against an overwhelming and all-consuming evil?

By the time Lucasfilm released A New Hope in 1977, wipe transitions had largely fallen out of use. As James Cutting explains, by the 1960s, “it would seem that as viewers became more educated to cinematic storytelling devices, the wipes, dissolves, and fades were no longer needed. Perhaps they were thought to draw too much attention to themselves—lumps too obvious in the smooth flow of the movie” (2021: 109). As filmmakers and editors turned to cuts instead of the more visually obvious wipes, dissolves, and fades, these latter transitions obtained a kitschy or gimmicky quality. In their video essay, “The Return of the Star Wipe,” Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková (2025) examine the relevance, history, appeal, and gimmicky nature of the often-derided star wipe transition. Using videographic techniques, Anger and Hanáková explore how this specific wipe “endures as an emblem of childlike playfulness, a pure excess devoid of instrumentality and functionality” while simultaneously revealing both aesthetic and political importance (2025). In line with this work, my dissection explores the intricacies of the Star Wars transitions at work in Empire to uncover what it is about the various wipes that solidifies their status as a staple of the franchise and challenges the idea that the wipe is merely an outdated editing technique that remains relegated to the past.

Given that audience members in 1977 would have been accustomed to cut transitions, the use of wipes in A New Hope and, eventually, Empire read less as a necessity for narrative coherency and more a mark of style. Paul Hirsch, the lead editor for A New Hope and Empire, recalls Star Wars creator George Lucas being largely hands off when it came to editing, and only voicing a preference for soft focus wipe transitions over the hard focus of a bold line (Williams & McAlister, 2020). As a result, Hirsch used his own judgement on where to place wipes throughout the films and which wipes to use in each instance. For Hirsch, “editing is not only about smooth cuts and exciting montages. It’s also about helping create the whole package” (Hirsch, 2020: XVIII) and, when it came to Star Wars, using wipes “just seemed natural” (Williams & McAlister, 2020).

Furthermore, the wipe’s abundance across the franchise signals the wipe not as a mere editorial quirk significant to Hirsch, but a necessary component of Star Wars’ brand identity. Despite shifting ownership to Disney in 2012, the franchise would continue to use wipe transitions in the sequel trilogy and television series like The Mandalorian (2019–2023), if to a lesser extent. A 2017 Vanity Fair article (Stefansky, 2017) notes Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson’s dismay that his film would only contain 12 wipe transitions—a far cry from the 102 wipes in Revenge of the Sith (Leong, 2017).¹ Although the decline of wipes in Disney’s Star Wars points toward contemporary filmmakers’ resistance to the transitions, their continuous use situates the wipe as an indispensable part of the franchise. What is it about the Star Wars wipe that ensures it stands the test of time?

When starting this exercise, my plan for dissection involved a consideration of chronology. Because transitions connect sequences and advance narratives, I was curious to see if the Star Wars wipe transitions had any temporal pattern. To do so, I placed the entire film in the timeline and isolated each instance of a wipe transition. Before reaching the halfway point in the film, it was apparent that there was no pattern in how the transitions were spaced throughout the film. Some wipes were separated by as few as four seconds, while others were separated by over ten minutes.

Next, I colour coded each wipe transition based on the direction and pattern of the wipe. Doing so highlighted the diversity of transitions used across the film. Although wipe transitions draw attention to themselves, I had not realised the extent to which they vary in Empire until I started dissecting and organising them within the timeline. Across the 42 transitions, there were 17 different wipe variants, including shrinking irises, growing irises, wipes that mimicked windshield wipers, and diagonal wipes appearing from every corner of the screen, among others. Identifying coherency among these wipe transitions occurred amid another failed attempt at organisation. In working to connect the transitions through a use of sound, whether diegetic or non-diegetic, I realised that several of the transitions emphasised the framing and movement of characters or objects.

The wipe transitions in Empire signal not only a change in narrative time or space, but, through dynamic shapes and multi-directional movement, also largely complement characters and icons in the closing and/or opening shot. Hirsch explains that wipes can be “very useful in making a transition from one static shot to another. If you introduce movement in the transition in the form of a wipe, it helps” (Williams & McAlister, 2020). Although these transitions do largely accompany static shots, my dissection reveals that the wipes not only introduce movement, but also consistently mimic or highlight character and object movement in the incoming or outgoing shot. For example, the most abundant transition was a shrinking iris wipe, occurring seven times across the film. In all but one of these instances, the circle shrinks to focus on a stable central character. The only outlier is the closing wipe of the film, which shrinks to reveal the film’s credits. In another example, a diagonal wipe from the top left tends to follow the downward movement of characters on screen, such as Luke being dragged off-screen by a wampa or Darth Vader bowing to Emperor Palpatine. In other cases, the transitions mimic shapes found in the set or ship design, such as a wedge-shaped wipe revealing and mimicking the front of an Imperial Star Destroyer or a shutter-like wipe mimicking the bars of Chewbacca’s cell in Cloud City.

The consistency of this movement and shape-based motivation did not become fully apparent until I moved away from chronological examination. Taking advantage of the timeline to reshape and reorganise the wipes based on wipe variant allowed me to recognise the film’s emphasis on movement-focused transitions. Although the timeline was initially helpful in cataloguing and compiling the transitions, the real benefit of the exercise arose in rethinking the relationship between the transitions by taking them outside of their placement within a specific sequence set by the directors and editors. Viewed in chronological order, the transitions may appear random. Reorganised in consideration of wipe variant, however, they reveal a subtle pattern in which we see characters driving both physical and narrative movement.

Rather than moving away from the wipe transition due to overt visibility, Empire leans into the visual qualities of the wipe to enhance the kinetic movement of its images rather than simply gliding past them. As a result, the wipes serve a dual role of both narrative transition and emphasis. As this pattern continues across each instalment, the wipe becomes an integral part of Star Wars’ identity. Whether viewed as cheesy or nostalgic, one cannot think of Star Wars without recalling their reliance on and commitment to the wipe.

AI Declaration

The authors have no known or substantial use of generative AI to declare.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.