Justin Chang - FilmCraft: Editing

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It is a well-known axiom that editing is the only cinematic discipline that did not precede the cinema itself. For centuries, writers, directors, actors, dancers, composers and production designers had a natural outlet for their talents in the theater, while still photography existed long before the key innovation of movement that gave rise to cinema. Even then, the act of filming required merely a camera and an object of the cameras attention. But the act of filmmaking suddenly required an editor, a creative technician who could step in after the performance had been captured and complete the illusion by arranging it into a form worthy of projection.

Editing is not only unique to cinema but a uniquely difficult discipline to comprehend, let alone discussa state of affairs to which this book is intended as some small corrective. Yet even some of the film editors interviewed here have difficulty articulating the precise nature of their work and the strategies they apply in the cutting room. I cant explain how I do what I do, Michael Kahn admits, while Anne V. Coates offers, I just cut the way I feel. One has only to witness the famous match cut from Lawrence of Arabia (1962) or the D-Day sequence that opens Saving Private Ryan (1998), to single out but two examples from these remarkable careers, to know that on the level that matters most, they know exactly what theyre doing.

For more concrete language on the subject, both Kahn and Coates directed me to their colleague Walter Murch, who has done more than anyone else inside or outside his profession to illuminate the public understanding of his discipline. Murch has described film editing as synonymous with film constructionthe careful assembly of a motion picture, scene by scene, shot by shot, frame by frame. Yet in his book In the Blink of an Eye, he also addresses a seemingly contradictory idea, which is the old adage that film editing is just where you cut out the bad bits. And he concedes that this shopworn notion, annoyingly reductive though it may be, nonetheless holds a kernel of truth.

Editing, after all, is an art achieved largely by subtraction, by a negation of those elements that do not serve the final product. Assembly, one of the most frequently used terms in the editors lexicon, can only take place after a significant amount of disassembly. Whatever tools the editor may be using, it is his or her job to comb through the footage, isolate the desired elements, and arrange them into a coherent and entertaining shape. More often than not, that shape is determined as much by what is taken out as by what is left in.

In any given film, then, the actors may impress us with the intensity and focus of their performances, and the cinematography may dazzle us with its sweep and beauty, but it is the film editor who maximizes the impact of these elements, sometimes by limiting rather than extending their duration. It is the film editor who, by dropping a few frames, can make the crucial difference between a joke that kills and one that overstays its welcome. Everything you see in a film is there because the editor decided to show it to you, and you can be assured that there is plenty more that the editor opted to withhold.

Thus, even the finest editing job, however elegant or economical, may be impossible to fully appreciate unless the viewer has seen the raw materials and thus has some sense of what has been discarded in the first place. As you read this book, from time to time you may catch a glimpse of those unseen, unheard moments: the snippets of song that Virginia Katz had to leave on the cutting-room floor of Dreamgirls (2006), the hilarious Robin Williams scene that Lee Smith saw scrapped from Dead Poets Society (1989), the extended Mexican wedding sequence that Stephen Mirrione ended up trimming for Babel (2006), or the lengthy dialogue passages that Valds skarsdttir had to excise, to her anguish, from Julien Donkey-Boy (1999).

This book is not a technical treatise but a series of conversations (from which my own voice has been excised) with 17 of the worlds leading practitioners of film editing, sharing their personal and professional insights into the movies theyve cut, the directors theyve collaborated with and the ever-changing nature of their specific medium. While the bulk of the interviews were conducted with editors based in the US, they also include contributions from Asia and Europe, hopefully providing a counter-perspective on the dominant mode of editing practiced within the Hollywood studio system. And just as a film editor may construct a picture with an eye toward establishing echoes, parallels and contrapuntal rhythms between individual scenes, so these chapters were assembled with the hope of placing these contributors in conversation with one another, creating an implicit dialogue between their respective views and methodologies.