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Editing Today – another Philippic
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That says it all really …
When you shoot “coverage” and bolt it together in the cutting room, you get something that works just fine.
When you shoot an idea, you get something amazing.
Tony Zhou is just great – he makes you want to go back and watch every movie he talks about. So inspiring.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “Tony Zhou is just great – he makes you want to go back and watch every movie he talks about. So inspiring.”
Absolutely! Just love his work. So good.
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
https://lnkd.in/Cfz92F
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl
vimeo.com/dlawrence/albums -
The best NLE is the one a couple of inches behind the eyes and between the ears (to paraphrase the famous Photographic maxim). So I guess the debate is over. 🙂
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As usual, I think there’s a middle ground. Or maybe several different grounds.
To Bill and Simon’s points:
Well, yes, for some situations, editing is about compressing things. If we’re discussing corporate or informational or promo or other of these kinds of projects, then the demands of editing are similar. Compression of time and/or ideas is really useful and important. The audience and the needs of the project require a certain technique. Nothing wrong with that. Some industrial/corporate pieces from years ago seem painfully slow. Because they were. “Modern” editing techniques can certainly improve upon these kids of pieces, as long as the “form” doesn’t get in the way of the “function.”
“Art” pieces, for want of a better encompassing term, have different needs. I would completely agree that modern editing styles kind of suck and do more harm than good for most newer movies. And don’t even get me started on TV! But in order to realize a more considered editing approach, the material has to support that approach. What passes for direction today often can only be made watchable through aggressive editing. And that’s a real shame.
Editing does not live separately from direction, which does not live separately from writing, and so on down the line. I’d LOVE to cut something staged and blocked and shot by a Spielberg or Scorcese or DePalma or Siegel or Polanski. Bay, Abrams, Disney’s hack-of-the-week, not so much. Yet some of the masters conceive and shoot sequences designed for aggressive editing, yay for cuts!
I think it’s also relevant to consider modern audiences and modern tastes. I happen to like British films from mid-last century. But they sure are slow, even ponderous, to a modern audience. (Relatively) modern films like Barry Lyndon, Somewhere in Time, Days of Heaven…they’re not to everyone’s taste. But then I kinda like popcorn movies like Transporter. Even the dreadfully over-shot and wildly over-cut Bourne films have their own charm. I can’t imagine Bourne cut like Casablanca. Or Lawrence of Arabia cut like Pretty Woman. Why would anyone do that?
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In my capacity as an editor I have always looked at my job as not to fix what happened in production, but to enhance what happened in production.
Tim
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Simon –
While I’m sure the NLE has had some impact, it is my observation that an increase in the speed of cutting is the one constant in the history of movies. The silent films of the 20’s were faster paced than silent films before 1910, the films of the 50’s were faster than movies in the 30’s and 40’s. The cutting pace of the 70’s and 80’s were faster than what you would generally find in the 60’s. Watching an older movie with a teenager the thing that is most off-putting to them is the pace — “old fashioned movies” just seem too slow for them. I think a lot of this is because we have always over estimated how much information you need to give someone to tell a story. Every decade we prove that you can get away with a little less detail, tell the story in a more fragmented way, and the audience will adjust and accept.
As with most things human, this positive concept has led to some fairly terrible results, but I don’t think it’s particularly the fault of the NLE. Individual directors have broken these trends in both directions – your not going to find much faster cutting than in the opening and closing shoot-outs in The Wild Bunch – and conversely Peckinpah shot many of his conversational scenes multi-camera, and this was almost 50 years ago.
I absolutely agree that there is an aesthetic decline in the quality of studio movies, even as they become more technically polished, especially in the areas of sound and EFX, but I think the reasons lie outside the realm of any single technology. I can’t imagine any studio allowing a director to hold a single shot the way David Lean did when Omar Shariff appeared to come out of the sun in Lawrence of Arabia. I believe the audience would stand for it, but not the studio execs.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
Let me know when you win an Academy Award for Best Editing.
Tim
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Bill –
Simon’s opening post was clearly talking only about feature films. You are hijacking this thread, however unwittingly.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
I will quote Rilke:
Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
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Timothy –
I wish I were as lucky as you seem to have been. Many of the editing jobs I have been hired for did require me to fix much of what happened in production. I would hazard a guess that more feature editing is about fixing than most people would suspect. But I grant others have had other experiences.
BTW, if I didn’t mention it before – don’t get me started on TV! 😉
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