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Editing Today – another Philippic
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OK, let’s try again.
– General discussion of cutting style, specifically choosing not to cut as often vs. today’s over-cut style.
– Bill suggests editing is about compressing and directing focus and pacing.
– Several say “hey, we’re talking films here, not industrials.”
– I chime in with points on both “sides” of the issue, expressing a preference for a slower pace, but pointing out that badly shot or staged material must sometimes be “fixed” in the editing.Perhaps in response to that, or a responding the the discussion in general, you said, “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.” Your choice of “not xxx, but yyy” implies an either/or viewpoint. Not “fix,” but “enhance.”
So let’s take “luck” out of the discussion. Your post implies you don’t have to “fix” material you work on. I point out that I often do have to “fix.” I wondered how you’re able to avoid the kind of jobs where fixing is needed. Since your response only dealt with dismissing luck as a “thing,” I asked for clarification.
Now we get to the “I have no idea what you’re taking about” part. I attempted to rephrase and clarify my question.
Your response: “Luck is nonsense. It is an illusion. Luck is not a thing in the real world. You are either working for the success of your current project or you are not. I am really not sure what you are doing.”
So I’m still trying to understand your initial post, setting up a choice between “fix it” or “enhance it.” I’m asking how you have apparently been able to work only on projects that require only enhancing and no fixing. I am further asking if, perhaps, fixing is actually part of enhancing. In which case, the either/or of your initial post may not accurately describe the work you or I do.
Let’s just agree to ignore the insult implicit in “I am really not sure what you are doing.”
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[Jeremy Garchow] “You’re comparing GOATs with average and citing a lack of ambition?”
It’s an old man’s privilege to decry the modern, especially when he’s right. If you want an example of a not so great you should look at “Unbreakable” by M. Night Shyamalan, definitely not a GOAT. The first half of the movie is composed almost entirely of beautifully staged one shot scenes. But that was so 2000.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
Perhaps, herb. But I prefer to see it as preserving the threads relevance for the 90% of the editors reading this who will never do more than “discuss” editing a major feature film. I’m one of those guys. So whenever the view collapses down to “here’s how the ‘real pro editors’ have to view this” I enjoy yanking the tether a bit. Keeps the discussion more grounded, perhaps?
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[Herb Sevush] “It’s an old man’s privilege to decry the modern, especially when he’s right. If you want an example of a not so great you should look at “Unbreakable” by M. Night Shyamalan, definitely not a GOAT. The first half of the movie is composed almost entirely of beautifully staged one shot scenes. But that was so 2000.”
M. Night had potential for a while though, didn’t he?
I understand the, how shall I say, ‘the privilege of the old man’s decree’, and I too think that there’s bad movies out today, and that technology can force certain indecisions in the name of more decisions, but surely there has to be at least a few movies from the last few years that are ambitious (good?) even though they aren’t Kurosawa?
Inversely, there had to have been some really sh*tty movies in the 40s, 50s, and 60s?
Less cuts doesn’t mean better?
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[Jeremy Garchow] ” but surely there has to be at least a few movies from the last few years that are ambitious (good?) even though they aren’t Kurosawa?”
Yes, but they are almost always low budget indie films. Beasts of the Southern Wild was a fantastic film. The World’s End is my other favorite film of the last few years. Neither would ever be made at a big studio nowadays.
[Jeremy Garchow] ” there had to have been some really sh*tty movies in the 40s, 50s, and 60s?”
Sturgeon’s Law stipulates that 90% of everything is shit and since movie production was at it’s height in those years it’s safe to say that more bad movies were made then than at any other time. More good movies as well. And the good movies were often popular and big budgeted items, something that is not true today. Vertigo, which today would have been released by Sony Classics and at a budget pretty close to what it cost to produce in the 50’s, was a big hit with a major movie star – go figure.
[Jeremy Garchow] “Less cuts doesn’t mean better?”
Absolutely not. The cut is what distinguishes movies as an art form – it creates time, it creates space, it creates meaning. It is to movies what silence is to music – and it needs to be employed with the care and consideration of it’s status.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Bill Davis] ” I prefer to see it as preserving the threads relevance for the 90% of the editors reading this who will never do more than “discuss” editing a major feature film. I’m one of those guys”
So am I, but I don’t feel slighted by the discussion, nor do I feel the need to make everything about me.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Simon Ubsdell] “But this has nothing really to do with changing tastes – it has to do with market forces, lack of ambition, enslavement to technology and a host of other tiresome factors.”
I agree here Simon.
Getting back to that True Detective scene we liked so much. I remember after watching it I felt blown away, like I had been physically pulled into the scene. It took me a minute to figure out why.
I think it was so real because if you had been actually there that is how your eye would have scene what was happening. We don’t see in cuts in real life, we see continuously. So when I saw that scene it felt like I was in it. Because if I were, I would see it just like that.
When he comes into the house and looks out the window to see the guys standing there looking back at him. They could have cut to an outside shot but it was way more effective looking over his shoulder and through the window at them.
It takes so much time to plan something like that out and execute it. Time is money.
Compare Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Kill Bill
Yeoh and Ziyi were very skilled and Lee could stay on wide shots longer to show the beauty of their talent, as opposed to Lucy Lue who was was not skilled or athletic. They had to cut around those women in KB to make it work. They wanted those Hollywood ladies so they had to make it work.
I much preferred Tiger : )
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[tony west] “We don’t see in cuts in real life, we see continuously.”
While I like long continuous takes where appropriate, I have to disagree with this statement. I’m not arguing that the scene you talked about in TD wasn’t fabulous, I just don’t think it was fabulous because it more closely resembled “real life.”
Look straight ahead at something for a few seconds, now turn your head and look to the left – you’ve just made a cut. Unless your consciously trying to notice it your mind eliminates the whip pan. The brain throws out all sorts of unimportant material in our daily lives and while we live moment to moment the information between the moments is often discarded. In a well edited scene that is aiming for a feeling of continuous time the audience is totally unaware of the cuts precisely because this kind of continuity is so similar to real life.
Long continuous moving takes build tension because your vision is restricted to a singular point of view – the audience becomes more present in the scene as they identify with the camera’s point of view and they become unnerved by what they are not seeing all around them. This is not particularly true of real life because you control where you want to look – when watching a long take you are prisoner to the camera’s point of view and the longer this lasts the more the tension can build when used for that purpose.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
Thanks for posting this amazing scene Herb.
I had never seen it.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “surely there has to be at least a few movies from the last few years that are ambitious (good?) even though they aren’t Kurosawa?”
Hi Jeremy,
Although I was doing my grumpy old man act, I wasn’t really railing at the degeneracy of contemporary movies!
You don’t have to look as far back as Kurosawa to see what I’m talking about being done well – Mathieu (above) rightly pointed out that Spielberg (who is still making movies although with grey hair now, but they’re still super-commercial rather than arthouse) is a master of a shooting style that eschews cutting.
Somehow this has become a discussion about counting cuts, which although I brought it up, wasn’t really the crux of my argument. I have to declare that I love cutting – how could I not, having spent most of my working life as trailer editor!? – and most of all I love adventurous, surprising cutting. Seeing a Godard movie for the first time was one of the most exciting things I can remember – and clearly Steven Soderbergh (and legions of others) had the same revelatory experience.
What I really don’t have much time for is “functional cutting”, which is the staple of most modern movies.
Really what I’m getting at very specifically is the distinctly modern, technology-driven (cameras and NLEs) trend to shoot multicam and assemble something passable in the cutting room. This technique seems to me to be the polar opposite of the kind of film-making that Spielberg embraces so fully and magnificently.
If your game plan is to shoot multicam, it’s never going to involve planning the kind of developing shots that have always created the most engaging type of cinema – by the way, the camera doesn’t have to move to deliver a developing shot, as you can do a lot of the same things with creative blocking, so that a close-up can become a wide or vice versa without the need for cutting.
It should be obvious that a developing shot is always going to be more immersive than the same scene covered in cuts – developing shots create a perfect identity between the camera and the viewer (as Tony mentions in another post in relation to True Detective).
One of the things that strikes me as extraordinary is how pedestrian and clunky even something as basic as a two character dialogue scene has become – virtually all we ever see is shot-reverse shot accompanied by a 2-shot that is a flat-on side angle. There are of course a multitude of interesting and far more dynamic ways of blocking this kind of scene – they’re in the textbooks, for goodness sake! But we almost never see them anymore. (Compare the amazing dynamism and economy of the lift scene from Minority Report in Tony Zhou’s Spielberg piece.)
And the reason is I think in very large part down to the tyrannous domination of multicam. Multicam makes very scene from every movie slot into a rigid and tired formula.
The irony of course is that multicam is meant to generate more coverage more quickly, but in reality a well-planned developing master is far quicker to execute on the day. Directors like Spielberg who use this latter technique tend to wrap their movies a lot faster than the other guys.
Yes, really complex, bravura “long takes” require a ridiculous amount of set-up time, although they still manage to deliver a lot of screen time for a lot less shooting time. But “long takes” have become a degraded currency and they are isolated set pieces in movies that are largely shot just like old-fashioned vision-mixed TV.
There is a lot of difference between the exhibitionist “long take” (you have to blame Touch of Evil for this enduring directorial fad!), and the functionally economical developing take which dramatically reduces both set-up and shooting time.
So the enemy for me is not faster cutting – it’s multicam and the NLE technology that makes multicam editing so much easier than it’s ever been before.
I should end by saying that there’s nothing more exciting for me in the right context than fast editing that generates a sense of visceral excitement – – but that’s really not what I’m talking about here.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com
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