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Editing Today – another Philippic
The Focus discussion has thrown up a number of really interesting topics but because the focus has been Focus, it’s been hard to disentangle some really good ones.
Here’s an old-fashioned view of where editing is now and where it has come from.
In the pre-NLE days, directors and their editors just didn’t cut very often.
At some level, this was because every cut was painful to execute, but at another level it was because every cut was considered.
Today, there is no question that most mainstream movies are infinitely more “cutty” but there is a definite question mark as to whether that greater number of cuts makes for better story-telling.
It is a point worth dwelling on that many of the world’s greatest film-makers still cut very infrequently. Michael Haneke cuts very rarely, so do the Coen brothers, Iñárritu’s Birdman pretends that it has no cuts. I’m sure you can think of many more examples.
One of Tarkovky’s late films (Nostalghia?) is supposed to have had as few as 100 cuts. For Eisentstein, the cut had to have dialectical value – it wasn’t just there to push the story along. Often, when a film-maker cuts rarely, the moment of the cut has enormous potency.
In Hollywood today and increasingly around the world, most movie are shot multicam. The aim is to maximise coverage, so as to be able to bring the maximum number of options into the cutting room – where the editing process has become all about glueing together everyone’s favourite bits. The notion that the edit is the final stage in honing an original vision is increasingly being lost. There is a blind terror of not having enough coverage and not enough editorial options.
The consequence of the rise of multicam is that directors less and less stage their action in interesting ways – they simply grab the coverage and hope for the best. Classic techniques like composition in depth are now rarely seen. The notion of staging a scene so it can play within a single shot has now been reduced to individual trick travelling shots – which jump out of the fabric of the movie wearing their garish party hats.
Multicam and blanket coverage have been facilitated by the inexorable rise of the NLE and digital acquisition and a cutting “style” has evolved that leans heavily on these developments.
Film editing has now regressed to the level of vision mixing and in consequence many movies now look much more like TV. Intriguingly the best TV is going in the opposite direction – great shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad put a great deal more thought into staging the action and cutting far less often, and in consequence feel far less like TV and more like what we used to think movies were.
Cutting is also often the enemy of performance – actors are not just mannequins speaking lines, they are capable of delivering an ineffable magic, and when they do, the best thing the film-maker can do is get out of the damn way and simply let that magic unfold … and not cut away from it, because there hasn’t been a cut for the last three seconds.
The other performance related issue is that many film-makers now simply pick their each of favourite line readings and glue them together in the hope that that’s going to be the best rendering of the scene. In days gone by, directors and editors recognised that the actor had given you the “spine” of the scene (because they just darn well understand this stuff instinctively), and this hodge-podge jigsaw puzzle method was largely eschewed.
I think what I’m saying, citizens of Rome, is that “more cuts” doesn’t equal “better cuts” doesn’t equal “a better film”.
A lot of us have the need for editing solutions that allow us to turn things around in a matter of hours -and thank goodness we have them. Whether feature film-makers really need them is a different story.
There is a final point to be made here and that’s about “wearing out the material” – there is simply no question that the more iterations of an edit you watch, the more precipitous the decline in your ability to evaluate better from worse. Anyone who has ever cut comedy will know that a gag is only ever funny about the first three times – if you’re really lucky. When you’re on version 36 of the gag, there isn’t a chance in hell of you being able to make a useful decision about it – all you can hope to do is remember that you or someone else might have laughed when they first saw it. From that point of view is is quite obvious that endless cutting and recutting is a slippery slope.
Hal Ashby was legendary for the length of time it took him to finish editing (not least because he was notorious for throwing everything out of sync!) but it was mostly time spent thinking (and smoking) and finding fresh (and often psychedelic) ways to look at the material – rather than grinding through endless mechanical iterations. I’m not sure a super fast NLE would have helped him make better movies.
Maybe you made a lot fewer cuts on that old, despised flatbed – but maybe they were just plainly and simply better cuts.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
108 Replies
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So perhaps it’s useful to get extremely granular and examine why we cut at all?
Often, the simple answer can be reduced to “we cut to consolidate.” If you don’t need to stop something or remove something from your narrative flow, there’s no need to cut. Because the fundamental idea of cutting is to compress information flow, usually so that we can efficiently pack more concepts into a fixed period of time.
Then the question becomes how much do you need to consolidate?
My career has primarily been as a corporate and business program editor. When I started, I made a whole lot of money producing 40-90 minute training videos for corporate use. 40 to 90 MINUTES! Want to guess how long it’s been since someone commissioned a 40 minute corporate business video from me?
A decade. At least.
Why?
Because it’s simply NOT how people want information delivered anymore. The market wants focused, targeted small information chunks that people can access as they require them. NOT huge indulgent productions that require them to suspend their on-going lives in order to consume information.
Only in sit down theatrical movies and the artificial world of 30 & 60 minute TV standard ad based forms is this still the norm. But that’s not the editing universe. It’s a sub-segment of the editing universe.
Yes, there’s much more room for stately, thoughtful and evocative work in the theatrical realm – but even there, audiences typically buy a lot more tickets to heavily cut Michael Bey films than stately Merchant Ivory work – with exceptions, of course.
I’ve noted it before, but it bears repeating. My son often can be found watching TV – while simultaneously browsing an iPad and texting on his phone. You want HIS attention?
Follow the seminal editing mantra…cut to the chase.
If you want to discuss “editing today” – you HAVE to also discuss consuming editing today. And the way that’s being done has changed massively. So I believe editing had better understand and react to that reality and keep audience needs firmly in mind.
IN that context, the idea of “too much cutting, these days” – may be nothing more than acknowledging that it’s precisely what the audience requires in order fit the information rich content consumption pattern they desire – into their increasingly busy lives.
My 2 cents.
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[Bill Davis] “Because the fundamental idea of cutting is to compress information flow, usually so that we can efficiently pack more concepts into a fixed period of time.”
Hi Bill,
Thanks for chiming in.
But I’m afraid I just can’t buy the notion that “compressing the information flow” is “the fundamental idea of cutting”.
That’s one tiny aspect of what editing can achieve – and probably the least important in a narrative context. (Let’s not forget that in narrative you often want to expand “the information flow” rather than speed it up – it’s a very commonly used tactic for dramatic, comedic, emotional effect – you only have to consider the use of slow-motion for this same purpose.)
Sure it’s important when we’re simply bashing together assemblies of material, but in terms of “telling a story” (that much overworked phrase), it just isn’t that relevant in the great scheme of things.
I can see why you want to elevate it to a fundamental principle since it supports your worldview of what Apple have done with FCP X, but I really do think you’re missing the bigger picture here.
[Bill Davis] “If you want to discuss “editing today” – you HAVE to also discuss consuming editing today. And the way that’s being done has changed massively. So I believe editing had better understand and react to that reality and keep audience needs firmly in mind.”
This is just a lowest common denominator argument and I don’t think it stands up. Your favourite folks at Apple don’t give the public what they ask for – they give them what Apple think they should be consuming. Why should film-makers be any different?
More to the point, lots of cuts don’t necessarily engage your audience better than the right number of cuts, or even perhaps fewer cuts. One can point to countless examples where movies have been overcut and it alienates the viewer rather than contributing to engagement. Action sequences are especially prone to this fault, to the point where you just have to zone out because even basic stuff like the line of action becomes hopelessly blurred.
At the end of the day, engagement is the one and only thing anyone creating anything for an audience needs to consider – you can create engagement far more successfully by surprising rather than pandering.
I think …
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
A good post Simon.
[Simon Ubsdell] “Today, there is no question that most mainstream movies are infinitely more “cutty” but there is a definite question mark as to whether that greater number of cuts makes for better story-telling.
“Is this do to people’s lack of attention span these days?
I am a fan of films that some would call “slow”
I prefer to have shots stay on the screen sometimes a little longer, but I admit, I always wonder if the multi tasking world will get bored watching.
Like when someone is in the middle of a conversation and they start looking at their phone.
The conversation is not enough for them.One of the best things I saw on TV in years was that one take scene in True Detectives last year.
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[tony west] “One of the best things I saw on TV in years was that one take scene in True Detectives last year.”
Yes, I think we share the same tastes – that was a really great shot.
And all the cutting in TD was super slow – I don’t think that put the audience off and I’m pretty sure it was one of the reasons it worked so well. Great actors were just allowed to do their thing while we watched – it seldom gets better than that!
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
Interesting post, Simon, although I don’t think it has anything to do with FCPX.
I’m a big fan of long shots. Spielberg is one of my Favorite directors and watching The staging and pacing of his long camerashots always feels like The best film school anyone could ask for.
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Yes, sorry this is very off topic – but then everything is probably on topic on this forum now!
I totally agree about Spielberg – he’s superb at staging which is why his films are also so visually engrossing and immersive.
There’s so much compositional depth you really feel you’re inhabiting the world rather than just looking through a window onto it.
I don’t think he cuts very often either but I’d have to go back and look …
Again he’s a director who you feel doesn’t just rely on coverage so that he can find the movie later in the cutting room – you know that he’s entirely previsualised (in his head, not in the technical sense) how the movie is going to come together and shoots it that way.
Very old school!
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[tony west] “One of the best things I saw on TV in years was that one take scene in True Detectives last year.
““Breaking Bad” “House of Cards”, “Better Call Saul” all great shows that keep the cuts to a minimum and are no less engrossing for it
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[Steve Connor] “”Breaking Bad” “House of Cards”, “Better Call Saul” all great shows that keep the cuts to a minimum and are no less engrossing for it”
Yes, Breaking Bad is a fantastic example.
Because of the deep compositional staging of so many of the scenes, they print an indelible image on your memory – so many of the really great scenes play in wide shots, sometimes incredibly wide shots when we’re talking about the desert, so that the environment becomes a character within the story.
The interior of the White residence is clearly a character that undergoes its own transformation – and a lot of that is down to the fact that so many of those interiors play out in beautifully planned wides, where the spaces between the actors are pregnant with meaning. (And we’re not randomly “jumping in for the close-up”, or whatever.)
Haven’t yet seen Better Call Saul – can’t wait to binge on what looks like an amazing follow-up.
And yes, House of Cards is not so dusty either. Again, great composition which so many times eliminates the need for cutting,
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
Thanks for posting this. I have seen bad edits in movies and good edits. To me it is not so much the quantity of edits but rather the quality. Sometimes the quality of the edit just passes by, never noticed unless it is bad. In that situation, it stands out like a sore thumb.
I have to agree some shots should be on a bit longer. Too much fast paced cutting is an eyesore and makes my head hurt trying to figure out what just happened. The biggest problem with NLE vs film is that the computer makes it way too easy to make any number of changes. That leads also to some weird transitions being added. Film requires more discipline both in principal photography and in editing. Less eye candy to muck things up. Digital feels sterile and distant. Film grain, scratches, and dirt add a sense of “warmth” to the movie. Guess that makes me an analog lover.
* EDIT *
By quantity or quality, I don’t mind how many edits there are as long as the transition is appropriate. Just a bunch of random edits and random scenes are a bit annoying unless that is what is intended for your audience. Editing is subjective and often subjective at the same time. So there is not right or wrong response here, just an opinion. Feel free to disagree.
The magnetic timeline, it’s magnetic-o-matic!
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I don’t think the number of edits has any inherent link to the quality of the final product. Are Russian Ark and Timecode a pair of the best movies of all time because they both were done in a single, unedited take?
More edits, less edits… I think it’s up to the filmmakers and how they want to tell their story.
Editing, lighting, camera moves, score, grading, etc.,… all run the gambit from a little to a lot and I don’t think there is any one universal/right answer about how much is too much or how little is too little.
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