Great article on Editing

[www.boston.com]

How fast cutting has permeated very genre of film...and how log takes where actors can ACT are all sliced and diced.

I miss movies with nice sprawling takes that give the actors room to act...

Interesting article. Thanks Shane.

When I cut a reality-TV pilot for a producer, the first note I got back...

"It's good, but there aren't any jump cuts in it. We have to have some jump cuts. Can you give us some?"

Somewhere along the way, it never occurred to her just *what* she wanted to cut out using those damn jump cuts.


www.derekmok.com

Good stuff.

Seems to me this debate has been on going since Fred Astaire insisted his dances be filmed in wide shot only. Monolithic essays on the editing techniques used in the "French New Wave" films were a staple of serious cinema magazines for 10 years. Then came Dede Allen and then came MTV and then came summer blockbusters. My take on all this is if it works it works. And that scene in Devil Wears Prada worked very well as is. Might of worked better with a long slow push in but the scene worked quite nicely.

It's a choice.

Michael Horton
-------------------

I think she hit the nail on the head regarding a lot of what's wrong with the films that are coming out from the major studios in recent years.

Like the music industry who try to rationalize that business is down because of piracy the film industry is climbing on the same bandwagon. Sure they are losing money at the box office. They have an amusement park mentality with regard to what they are producing fore the box office.

Thankfully every so often a good film manages to get made & makes it to the big screen. The early 1950's were an all time low not unlike the present. Because the American Studio's releases were so barren of inspiration it provided a golden opportunity for European films to capture a sizable chunk of the N. American cinema audience who wanted a more mature type of production. That audience now watches DVD's of films they have seen in the past, but will come out in sizable numbers has content rather than a smokescreen of gratuitous special effects & an overabundance of music & sound effects.

If they wanted to watch crap they could turn on their TV sets, but they don't have to because they have DVD players & thousands of well made films from which to choose. It may be a good thing in the long run, some of the majors may go bankrupt with their multi million dollar circus material & leave some breathing space for filmmakers who have some other motive for making a film other than just making a buck.

Dave

Dave Hardy Wrote:
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> They
> have an amusement park mentality with regard to
> what they are producing fore the box office.

Not to defend the mainstream studios, but they have this mentality because it's what the public wants: let's see how many explosions we can put into a scene. Our whole culture has become one theme park after another. Go to a restaurant and you'll see what I mean - Don Pablos, Lone Star Steak House, Outback SteakHouse, whatever. They're all theme parks. Because it's what the public wants and what they pay for. The film equivalent is the "franchise" approach to filmmaking; how many Batman or X-Men films can we take, after all?

>
> The early
> 1950's were an all time low not unlike the
> present.

I'm not sure what you mean here - there was an awful lot of good stuff made in the early 50s - film noir in particular - which served to define the American Style, which was copied worldwide and then gave a jumping off point for things to be a counterpoint like French New Wave.

Films these days are more trash than not, but there is nice work done - one just needs to find it. It's usually not a blockbuster, IMO.


> Because the American Studio's releases
> were so barren of inspiration it provided a golden
> opportunity for European films to capture a
> sizable chunk of the N. American cinema audience
> who wanted a more mature type of production.

When? In the 1950's? That didn't happen. American studios were pretty inspired then, for example, the 50s was the time when social subjects started to appear in film. For the most part, the studios gave the public what they wanted, but pushed it a little bit - they tried to be like a social conscience. Dory Schary comes to mind - who was both praised and villified, but was made a studio head and had a lot of very successful films. Several were made that dealt quite directly with various forms of prejudice, and they were well received. European cinema was at that time for the most part relegated to a small audience shown in art houses. Actually, a lot of the films that are considered classic editing exercises today (like Godard's Breathless, since we're talking about the French New Wave) were trashed in their own time. The jump cut was considered a mistake by the mainstream of the day. And in fact, the jump cut didn't appear in Godard's first Director's cut. His producers and the critics disliked the film, and he recut it, adding the jump cuts. Some think it was Godard's way of giving them the bird. But I digress...


> If they wanted to watch crap they could turn on
> their TV sets,

Estes Kefauver said something to this effect about TV in the early 50s, as he coined the term, "Vast Wasteland." Some things never change, but he might as well have said it about popular culture. TV - like art forms in general - reflect the culture of the moment. But there is good TV, it just occasionally has to crawl through the cracks like an unwanted cockroach. Then it eats the poison and goes away for awhile, but it always comes back.

From a producer's perspective, it's just really hard to make money by pushing any art form on a public that is more interested in NFL on a BigScreen and the size of the Bud Light girl's hooters than in their own child's report card. And whether we talk about films or the NFL or beer or hooters, it's all about money.

> but they don't have to because they
> have DVD players & thousands of well made films
> from which to choose.

Like Gigli? Crap is crap, irrespective of the medium. There is definitely well-made TV, just as there is poorly-made film. And vice-versa. But I have to add what Ernie Kovacs said (again, in the 50s): TV is a medium, because it is neither rare nor well-done.

> It may be a good thing in
> the long run, some of the majors may go bankrupt
> with their multi million dollar circus material &
> leave some breathing space for filmmakers who have
> some other motive for making a film other than
> just making a buck.

I think you're too hard on the majors for giving the public what it wants. I agree with your basic sentiment, and I certainly wish that films were, overall, better. But things aren't changed in big steps, but rather, very small ones. Unfortunately, the problem as I see it is that the public is just tasteless and uneducated (ie, they don't know any better), and the majors don't have the guts to push anything in the direction of a good story. The screenwriter's guild probably has something to do with this, but I don't know. I do, however, have complete faith that the public will gladly eat up a good story (they do it all the time), but the majors always seem to want to make a huge score with a blockbuster, rather than making a decent, entertaining film but grossing less. I'm not even talking about a film that's a landmark; just good entertainment that A) makes money and 2) gives the audience whatever it was expecting to get, in an artful and skillful way.

But then, that wouldn't pump the producer's ego, would it?

Further, when we talk about making films "better," what is 'better?" And who decides? Personally, I can't stand "Breathless." It comes off like a bad, uninteresting and lazily-made student film to me. But it's considered a landmark.

I've often held the pompous notion that it was tough to have taste, but who decides?

Interesting article -- a journalist's idea of editing. I think that her observations were correct, although she went back and forth between contradictory considerations of what good editing is all about. Yes, things have changed and ... they're always changing. Everything about shooting and editing movies has been changing all the time. There have been some filmmakers ahead of their times and there have been some filmmakers that captured the classical style of filmmaking before their time. There are no rules to cinema...

Personally I don't like watching any film or video that's moving faster than I can see what's going on. I don't want to be a guinea pig for subliminal cutting. I'm paying ten bucks, I want to see the actor's face speaking and the actor's face reacting and the essential action. If a cut works then whether it's noticeable or not is not the isssue. Sometimes a cut is meant to be noticeable, for shock effect; other times it's best that it isn't so I don't have to lose the flow of what's being said or conveyed.

Fellini and Bergman let their actors tell the story. They both used the camera unobtrusively. Eisenstein punched out the narrative with his shots. Very noticeable style of cutting, but that was his way of forcing the audience to see the action his way. I think D. W. Griffith was the first one to try most of the styles of visual storytelling.

Today, it's really a free for all. With Final Cut Pro and other NLE systems it's possible to re-invent editing and filmmaking on the whole.

What's damaging to great filmmaking are the styles that come from commercials and commercialism. I think a line has to be drawn, so everyone learning how to make movies can clearly see where the profit motive ends and where art begins. Easier said than done, I know :-)

Editing is definitely more difficult today. The equipment allows for a lot of possibilities, but editors are only human, and they have preferences and their own perspective and sensibilities. It's an unhappy time for editors, but things will change -- I have a feeling that editors will come into their own and maybe carry the day with the final credit on the movies :-) like David Lean did in the Forrester adaptation, A Passage to India, as Dave Hardy pointed out in the other thread about filmmaking and FCP.

>>Estes Kefauver said something to this effect about TV in the early 50s, as he coined the term, "Vast Wasteland."<<


Newton Minnow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, at NAB, 1961.

[www.americanrhetoric.com]

It's easy to say there should be more breathing room, but put that film in front of a standard audience and they'll be out the door in five minutes, bored out of their skulls.

Modern audiences are too media savvy. They can and do watch several things at once, while listening to music, reading emails and responding to chat. 30 seconds of silence is like death on a stick.

If you're about making a profit, that is. If you have an actual message and an interested (read : advanced film festival) audience you can sometimes step outside the box.

Thanks for the article - good timing for me.

> 30 seconds of silence is like death on a stick.

I agree with you generally, Jude, but at the same time, I think producers, clients and agencies often underrate viewers. Thirty seconds of silence is *not* necessarily death to a narrative film. I cut over 50 short films, where the structures and pacing are much more unforgiving than on features -- you have about 90 seconds to grab the viewer, not the standard four to eight minutes (loose estimate) as on a feature. And if the moment warrants it, you can achieve a lot by putting in a longer, tension-filled moment with spartan sound design. One of the major rules I've learned while refining films is that often, filmmakers are tempted to cut too quickly when told their films are too long. But very often, the solution I end up implementing to "tighten" a film isn't to speed things up. Very often, I slow things down so people can get enough time to look at shots, enjoy moments, in other words pacing. A "tight" 24-minute film, with well-controlled exposition and varied rhythm, is better than a frantic, insecure 20-minute film.

What you can't have in modern narrative film is 30 seconds without action. By action, I don't mean guns blazing and people running. I mean narrative action -- actor chemistry, story progression, things for the viewer's brain to interpret. Even in non-narrative films, at least good ones, you have narrative moments -- shots, cuts, effects that tell you something, or amuse you.

That's why Eisenstein's films, even Potemkin, are too slow for modern audiences -- I remember the shots of the maggots on the meat in Potemkin. Great for two cutaways, six to eight seconds apiece, but not for the unendurably long lingering shots he'd cut into Potemkin. We got the message two days ago, and he keeps holding on them. Not to say he's not a good editor, but more like the fact that older film rhythms are slower (even a classic film I like, like M) and their viewers weren't as quick to interpret visual language.

> Modern audiences are too media savvy. They can and do watch several things at once, while
> listening to music, reading emails and responding to chat.

I think modern people pretend to be able to do that many things at once. Their attention spans are shorter. However, it's a fact that the brain can't *focus* on more than one thing at a time. Classic case: You can't draw a square on one hand and a circle on another. And cell phones while driving cause lots of crashes. And when you use split-screens, you tend to focus more on one side than on the other. Look at Brian De Palma's Carrie: When the sympathetic teacher is killed by Carrie's blind rage, De Palma had to leave the split-screen technique to show her moment of death, to make sure you're not looking at the other side of the screen. Because the split-screen divides our attention and would have detracted from the importance of her death.

In film, audiences are led by the filmmakers, mostly subliminally, to look and focus on different things at different times. That's why narrative films aren't shot in static medium wides -- without the film telling you what to focus on, you gradually lose interest. Viewers *want* the film to manipulate them, into emotional states, into specific character sympathies, into points of view, into regulated rhythms that engage them.

> What's damaging to great filmmaking are the styles that come from commercials and
> commercialism

Not necessarily. I'm not a big fan of MTV style in general, but Run Lola Run uses it very well, for example. We get close enough to the character, understand her plight, are manipulated into rooting for the couple, and are engaged by the events unfolding. Domino, on the other hand, doesn't -- because it doesn't do the essential storytelling job of making us like the character. Domino is so hung up on its own stylistic rampages that it forgets even to tell us who the hell she is, by letting us watch her in conflict -- classic dramaturgy going all the way back to Aristotle, destroyed by Tony Scott's b.s. special effects.


www.derekmok.com

Actually, you can blame it all on television.

NTSC video, with it's limited bandwidth, only provides us with a very small amount of information in each picture, compared to film. As a result, the mind becomes bored with each picture it sees very quickly, unless there is something happening - either lots of "action", or many pictures in sequence, (many cuts). That's one of the reasons why a movie that works on the big screen can flop in video and vice-versa.

Early on, (back in the previous millenium) I was made very aware that you cannot show a still picture on video more than a couple of seconds -- there's nothing to look at.

If HD catches on, all will change.

But TV in the 50s, 60s and 70s had a much slower pace, without the audiences getting bored. I find the pace of modern TV (and movies for that matter) so fast, that you can barely follow allong. I think pace disguises lack of plot, for the most part.

Graeme Nattress Wrote:
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> ...I think pace disguises lack of plot, for the most
> part.


+1 for Graeme's statement. having worked on many videos and spots i have to agree that these two mediums can certainly be forced into the frenetic cutting style, i don't know if this is a good thing or bad.

films on the other hand are obviously allowed to tell their story in more time and should (in my opinion) make use of that time and allow writers to write quality dialog that actors can deliver in suit and directors can direct and shoot beautiful scenes that warrant the movie goes interest and $ for reasons more than blowing things up!

I'd have sworn it was Kefauver. Maybe I should check my memory. Thanks for the correction.

HarryD

A friend of mine and I had a discussion along this line, and his opinion was that if 2001: A Space Oddessy were released today it would bomb out big time. It's too slow and plodding for today's audience. I have to agree with him. Barry

filmman Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> What's damaging to great filmmaking are the styles
> that come from commercials and commercialism. I
> think a line has to be drawn, so everyone learning
> how to make movies can clearly see where the
> profit motive ends and where art begins.


I really dislike this train of thought. One often hears that commercialism is bad, "art," (whatever that is), is good. Well, I've been to art school, and I've been to music school. Both sets of artists complained about "commercialism" and the "corporate" effect on "art." And every last one of them was doing their best to become part of the very system they derided. As i said before, it's about money; we all have to eat. But greed and gluttony are bad.

A problem with this argument is the assumption that art and commerce cannot coexist. They can and do, very easily, but producers and distributors are not quick to take chances that don't guarantee a big payoff. Whenever one of these films comes out of nowhere and is lauded by the public, they are surprised. They shouldn't be. A great telling of a great story is what it's about. American audiences know it, but usually not until they actually see it (they're not stupid, just ignorant). Producers somehow don't seem get that. So I guess there's the rub between commercialism and art - not taking the chance to merge the two.


>
> Editing is definitely more difficult today. The
> equipment allows for a lot of possibilities, but
> editors are only human, and they have preferences
> and their own perspective and sensibilities. It's
> an unhappy time for editors, but things will
> change -- I have a feeling that editors will come
> into their own and maybe carry the day with the
> final credit on the movies

I don't agree with this, either. We have tools that our forebears never dreamed of, and here we are with them in our living rooms. Moreover, we have their work to guide us in moving the story forward, thus we stand on the shoulders of giants in how to use those tools. But if you're saying it's harder because of the youthful style of fast cutting to zero story being required by trendy directors, then you're right. It's hard to cut about nothing.

Geez, where have all the writers gone?

HarryD

The technology of today gives empowerment to more people. Remember FF Coppola's quote about "Next thing you know, some fat girl in Ohio, with her daddies camcorder, becomes the next Mozart" Film editing now is like desktop publishing was back in the day, when anybody could make a flyer with 12 different fonts on it. Give these NLE's (New Linear Editors) some time and keep your eyes on Ohio.

>>I think pace disguises lack of plot, for the most part.<<

I agree. I'm completely and utterly bored with most film and TV. It's terribly predictable, lacks great characters and just runs up and down the same money-making rut time and time again. And I also agree that classic films and tv seem incredibly slow and sweetly naive.

But it's all about money. Find what works, make a template and keep churning out those sausages.

I do my fair share of sausage manufacture. It's what pays my mortgage. But at the same time I'm working on a surrealist short feature that has four actors playing fourteen characters with an Exquisite Corpse storyline. You can bet your second child that most people will think it's crap, because they don't speak the language required to read it.

I guess modern (blockbuster) film is about the lowest common denominator. But we knew that.