The Art of Motion Picture Editing: An Essential Guide to Methods, Principles, Processes, and Terminology

Introduction

This is a why to book about the art of motion picture editing. Learning the tools, computer platforms, such as Avid or Final Cut Pro, or traditional film devices, such as the Moviola or the flatbed table, will teach how to operate editing apparatus, but not how to edit.

Tools can be learned in a finite amount of time. For the beginner interested in how to tools, there are many books and classes that teach these skills. On the other hand, art, process, and aesthetics keep the practitioner a perennial student. This book teaches the concepts of process, editorial language, structure, and pacing. In this book the storytelling aspects of this sequential art are analyzed, explained, and demystified. Practice and experience will develop basic skills and then put one on the road to exploring the art of editing. Once the tools are learned, a lifetime of study and knowledge lies ahead. As movies change and evolve as an entertainment and art form, editing must also change. Editorial language and grammar adapt to new ways of making movies. Like words, edits are units to be structured for meaning, content, and narrative (or nonnarrative) recognition.

There are editors who can cut a motion picture, short or long, but don’t know why to edit. Pushing buttons and operating an editing machine of any sort does not make one an editor. Why to edit takes place principally in the mind and through close observation of the material at hand, inspired by the vision of the director or creator. Editing is a craft and art. The craft—manual dexterity, the physicality of executing a film splice and running an editing machine—is a technical skill. For digital editors, electronic editing involves general computer literacy as well as the application of the mouse, keyboard strokes, and digital media interface. The art of editing is the manipulation, orchestration, and choreography of picture and sound to tell a sequential story with image and audio. A story can be told in traditional three-act structure, a nonlinear form, or through poetic imagery, related actions, emotions, moods, symbols, and signs.

The tools of editing must be understood and mastered before one can edit, but the aesthetics, grammar, process, and language of editing are not only necessary but also the heart of the art of editing. Editors learn about editing with each film they edit. It’s a lifetime of education, because every motion picture story has its own challenges, and the storytelling nature of the cinema is constantly changing and reacting to society, technology, and the evolution of the medium itself.

READING THIS BOOK

The spirit of this book lies in the phrase, Editing is Editing is Editing. Images are edited on film, on video, and in digital form. There are tools for all three of these formats. Film editors edited on sprocketed film using such tools as a viewer, Moviola, flatbed editing table, and a splicer. Videotape editors used electronic video editing devices that built a sequence one shot at a time in a linear fashion. In digital editing, digitized video images are manipulated on an Avid or Final Cut Pro station (or other digital tools). The digital editor can edit and employ graphics, effects, and a myriad of image manipulation techniques. One can be a film editor, a videotape editor, or a digital editor. They all do the same thing—they edit. Whether you drive a Ford or a Toyota, you drive a car. Whether you cook on a gas or electric stove or over a charcoal or gas grill, you are cooking. This book deals with the principles of editing. To edit images is an art and craft in its own right—the tools don’t define the practice, they just facilitate it. In the end, editing takes place in the mind and eye and is executed by the hands. The tools require different techniques; the materials have their own physical properties, but the basic principles of editing remain the same.

Throughout this book, the terms motion pictures, moving images, and the project are used because they embrace all the technologies concerned. The words film, video, and digital are used directly to refer to those formats and mediums. This has become necessary because of the generic use of the word film when talking about video, film, or a digitized image. Movie and motion picture are words generally linked to the Hollywood Classical Studio System, but they still apply today and may be used occasionally here with accuracy and without sidetracking the discussion to such age-old debates as What’s better, film or video? or the older arguments concerning oil and acrylic paint, pencil or ink, or electric or acoustic guitar. These terms still refer to painting, drawing, and music, in the same way that the three motion picture mediums (as well as the Internet) are all motion pictures.

Then there’s the issue of form: feature film, television, commercials, music videos, experimental films, documentaries, etc. In the largest sense, they are all edited, and the principles, concepts, and ideas applied within lead to all roads traveled. The history of editing and some of its greatest examples and practitioners are investigated. This study enlightens and reveals layers of art embedded within every edited film. Foremost, editing is the art and craft of structuring individual shots into scenes, shaping scenes into sequences, and building those sequences into an overall form constructed of image and sound. Editing is the heart and soul of motion picture storytelling.

. . .

Tom Robbins’s (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life with Woodpecker, B Is for Beer) hope for a grammatically correct solution to the literary prison of masculine pronouns and nouns has not yet arrived. My preference for gender-neutral job titles like editor, cinematographer, or sound recordist over cameraperson or soundperson is still intact, as are my feelings that all crafts people are filmmakers and this book, like The Filmmaker’s Guide to Production Design (2002), is for filmmakers.

Words in boldface type indicate their importance in understanding the art of editing, and most can be found in Appendix C, the Glossary, along with other helpful and useful terms that may not appear in the text but relate in some way to the editing or filmmaking process.

CHAPTER 1

What Is Editing?

One of the goals of this book is to answer this question in the Zen tradition of total physical and metaphysical un-derstanding, rather than in the manner of an uninformed layman, who believes the principal role of the editor is to cut things out. The latter is true but limited, inaccurate, and demeaning to the art and craft of editing.

During the sixties and seventies, it was fashionable to pronounce a single mystical phrase in all-knowing terms as the essence of editing: The film (also known as ‘the material’) will tell you how it wants to be edited. This was often supported by the equally cosmic A shot has an exact in-point and out-point. These notions have some truths to decode and fully understand, but only after a thorough investigation of the grammar and process of editing.

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF EDITING AS A BUILDING PROCESS

When builders construct a building, they do it one brick at a time. Eventually a completed structure materializes. When a book editor revises an author’s writing by taking out words, phrases, or sentences or by reworking the language, making the text longer or reshaping chapters and structure, it is the literary equivalent of the editing process in filmmaking. The book editor has a limited degree of control, because, to varying degrees, the editor must communicate with and answer to the author, who is the creator of the work. The editor’s ultimate constraint is the original material the author has imparted. In the same way, the film editor can have significant influence by taking things out, reworking shot structure and sequences, and reshaping and rearranging scenes, but the editor is limited by the original material, including the amount of coverage, the quality of the sound and images, and the performances by the screen actors. Editors can apply many techniques to maximize the material, and by utilizing their craft and the intangible art that they bring to the tasks at hand, they can make a unique contribution to the success of the finished project.

There are many answers to the vital question, What is editing? Each answer is a piece of the whole. Over the course of countless interviews and discussions, many editors have shared their thoughts with me. Here are some of them:

It’s a mosaic—the editor is given all the pieces and must find how they go together to tell the story at hand.

• Visual storytelling.

• Sequential storytelling.

• Structure—construction—a narrative or nonnarrative building process.

• A collage of images in time and space.

• Compression—taking massive amounts of moving images and tightening them as well as reducing them until they reflect the unfolding of a movie as the creator envisions his creation.

• The only cinematic craft created and invented specifically for the movies.

• The heart of the moviemaking process.

• The final rewrite of a movie.

• When the director and crew shoot on set and location, they are gathering the material that will ultimately be made into a movie in the editing room.

• Cutting things out by selectivity, dramatic necessity, and to expand the universe of a motion picture story through clarity.

• Editing is Editing is Editing—a manipulation of picture and sound whether on film, on videotape, or in digital form with artistic intent to create a motion picture.

• People shouldn’t be too aware of the editing process. When you sit down to look at a movie, you should be able to look at it as one piece of cloth, one piece of film.

As you move through the editing process, you will develop your own definition of editing.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MOTION PICTURE EDITING

The invention of motion pictures began with the camera and projector. Sequential frames advanced the action aided by persistence of vision, which allowed the flickering pictures to be received by the brain and viewed through the eyes as steady moving images. During film projection, the screen is dark half the time due to the flickering, causing a psychological dreamlike experience for the viewer.

Just before the dawn of the twentieth century, Thomas Edison and his company began filming scenes that were viewed in single uninterrupted takes. Concurrently, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, in France, brought their camera into the streets and carefully composed their movies as one-shot films.

Prior to 1902, the one-shot film was the medium of choice and practice for motion pictures. The early experimenters filmed as long as they were interested, until the action was complete, or until they ran out of film.

INTERCUTTING

William S. Porter is credited as the first person to shoot a film in separate planned shots to create a story. Life of an American Fireman (1903) used the editing technique of intercutting to show the firemen and the burning building in sequential order, relating the two actions and constructing an attachment of meaning in the viewer’s mind. Cutting the individual shots on film and gluing them together created a cinematic story and revealed the power of editing. Film was no longer a novelty, but now, through editing, revealed endless storytelling possibilities. Also in 1903, Porter created The Great Train Robbery, widely considered to be the first film to tell a story.

D. W. Griffith expanded greatly on Porter’s techniques and delved into the psychological and emotional impact that editing could produce. Griffith developed American film grammar by discovering the close-up and many camera and editing techniques that gave birth to the art of film. His most significant works, Birth of a Nation (1915) (although highly controversial due to its point of view toward racial issues) and Intolerance (1916), expanded cinematic grammar.

Editing at this point was invisible. Matching action allowed the viewer’s eye to be led gently from cut to cut. This philosophy became the driving force behind classical Hollywood filmmaking. Unfortunately, the idea of invisibility carried over to the perception of the film editor. They were called cutters, which detracted from the fact that they were editing, creatively bringing their art to the resultant storytelling. Before the film viewer apparatus was invented, editors ran the cut film between their fingers to judge the work. This may have been a great limitation, but it allowed the editor to have a highly sensitized perception of what was happening frame for frame. Close examination of the film showed exactly which frame was ending one shot and which was beginning another after the cut.

Editors held up a cut to a light to check their work. They ran it through a projector in search of a suitable working method. Eventually film viewers were introduced, and editors could run the film through the light box, watch the movement of the cut film, and make changes accordingly. The Moviola, a stand-up editing machine invented by Iwan Serrurierran, allowed film to run forward and back at speed and was the next step in the evolution of editing technology in practice from the 1920s to the 1990s.

MONTAGE

During the 1920s, the Russians revolutionized editing, inspired by political and artistic fervor. Sergei Eisenstein (Ten Days That Shook the World [1928], ¡Que Viva Mexico! [1932], Ivan the Terrible: Part One [1944]) developed the theory of montage, which was driven by the collision of two joined shots, suggesting that in editing one and one produced not two, but a third meaning. Lev Kuleshov proved this in a landmark experiment called the Kuleshov Effect in which he filmed an actor in close-up without any visible emotion registering on his face. Then he filmed a hot bowl of soup, a funeral sequence, and a young child. When intercut and viewed for an audience the reported results demonstrated that juxtaposition created a relationship between the scenes and the man. The audience reported the man looked hungry when he saw the soup, sad at the funeral, and joyful at the sight of the child. Kuleshov understood that it was the audience’s emotional expectations that caused them to make the specific observations they recounted.

In Hollywood, films were made using the factory assembly-line concept similar to the way Henry Ford produced cars. This industrial system produced entertainment later considered an art. Each craft had its own department. Editing, like the others, was headed by a supervising editor who gave out assignments and watched over the postproduction of all the films released by the studio. Editors were on staff and cut one film after another.

For almost thirty years, women dominated the editing rooms. The male executives looked at the editing process as housework no different than knitting and sewing; therefore they perceived women were the best workers for the job. The downside of this chauvinistic decision was that the women were taken less seriously than the men who worked in such areas as cinematography and production design. The positive result was that women became very proficient as film editors, and many rose through the ranks and led successful and meaningful careers. Margaret Booth became a powerful force at MGM, where she supervised production for thirty years. Each edited film required her stamp of approval. She had the complete confidence of the front office and often demanded changes she deemed mandatory to the success of the film in the marketplace. The studio brass controlled the output of films through the editing room, giving the editor an inherent power and control over the work of the director and the many craftspeople involved in each production.

FILM EDITORS

Irving Thalberg, the ill-fated young genius of MGM, was the first to call cutters film editors. He worked closely with the editorial staff to control MGM films. When he felt a director was out of control, such as Eric von Stroheim on his epic Greed (1923-1924), Thalberg used (most now would say abused) the postproduction department to take hours out of the film to get it to what he considered a reasonable running time, at around 140 minutes. Greed is widely considered to be one of the great landmarks in early American cinema. The director’s cut on the film was believed to be forty-two reels, with a running length of up to nine and one-half hours. Only a small number of executives and others saw von Stroheim’s version. Greed has been reconstructed using stills that remained. Sadly, the negative for the rest of the film was destroyed by MGM, denying film history of one of its great masterpieces.

The advent of sound expanded the role of editing, and many sound specialists began entering the ranks of the film editing departments in the major studios. Postproduction was expanded to include sound editors. Synching and cutting dialogue scenes presented new challenges and an expansion of editing grammar.

The classical Hollywood cinema made a tremendous impact on a group of French film critics during the 1950s. These men, among them Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, led the French New Wave. Inspired by American genres, the filmmakers deconstructed Hollywood movies, reinventing camera and editing language. Jump cutting, a violation of screen direction by breaking the 360-degree rule, graphic and bold use of opticals, and dislocation cuts all led to a new and vital form of cinema driven by hand-held cameras, long takes, 360-degree shots, and a literary, political, social and personal approach to moviemaking.

During the 1960s, American film began to be influenced by the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism, which radically altered U.S. cinema, transforming it into an art form as well as entertainment. By the end of the decade, the studio system was dismantled, and the under-thirty generation created a new youth market. Filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, and others influenced by the auteur theory were the leading proponents of the American New Wave of the 1970s. Hollywood editing moved away from the classical continuity school and toward a more nonlinear editing structure. Such films as The Graduate (1967), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Easy Rider (1969) forged form with content as a new storytelling style led to a new editorial grammar. These included flashbacks, flashforwards, innovative transitions, and a tendency to eliminate dissolves and fades in favor of straight cutting, also called the hard cut, and elaborate crosscutting.

MUSIC VIDEOS

In 1981, MTV launched, and the music video genre produced another change in the editorial language of motion picture making. A generation with a short attention span understood quick cutting and rapid angle changes. Rooted in the Russian montage experiments of the 1920s, the MTV style of fast cutting was applied to a new kind of content influenced by the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the sixties and seventies. The success of the MTV format led to feature films that were seen as long-form videos. Such films as Flashdance (1983) and Top Gun (1986) made a substantial impact on feature moviemaking. Today, editing continues to be influenced by the rapid display of editorial grammar seen in the music video form, along with the wider grammar based on more than one hundred years of editorial practice.

Editorial grammar is like language—there are rules to be learned and then broken. Experimentation leads to new forms. New content demands a new language. The history of editing will continue to evolve, pay homage, deconstruct, reinvent, and create new ways to tell motion picture stories through the heart of filmmaking—the editing process.

THEORY AND SCHOOLS OF EDITING

Theories and schools of editing emerged from around the cinema world as filmmaking evolved into an increasingly complex art medium. Editorial grammar was interpreted variously in film movements that developed out of older art forms and as part of different political, social, and cultural climates.

ONE-SHOT FILMS

One-shot films didn’t start out as a theory or a school of editing. The concept and art of editing didn’t exist, so moviemaking was defined by what could be put in front of the camera during the running of a single take. Eventually one-shot films became a genre embraced by experimental filmmakers. The application of editing theory and principles is necessary to create a successful one-shot film. Pace, an essential editorial element, must be maintained as well as storytelling structure, issues of time and space, and when the shot begins and ends. In order to get from one moment to another with a moving camera or through blocking in a one-shot film, it takes a highly developed editorial sense.

TABLEAU STRUCTURE

In the cinema of Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise [1984], Night on Earth [1991], Broken Flowers [2005]), especially his early films, very long takes are linked together. This is known as a tableau structure. These films have fewer cuts but are not without challenges that are presented to every editor on every film. When does a shot begin and end? How is the tempo and storytelling structure working? This minimalist style comes out of Asian cinema, especially the work of Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story [1953], Early Spring [1956], Floating Weeds [1959]). It is a mistake to call this minimalist style theatrical, because the elements of time and space and movement that are presented and the time that elapses are purely cinematic and controlled by the sequential procession of shot after shot. They are longer than the average film, but, like the slowest movement of a symphony, they have logic and present psychological insights, mood, and atmosphere. By simplifying the editing pattern, the viewer’s eye concentrates on composition, movement within the frame, and the interrelationships between characters and their environment. The strictly one-shot film still continues