In the early 1920s Russian filmmakers Lev Kuleshov and V I Pudovkin conducted an experiment in the (then) burgeoning art form of film editing. They aimed to prove that by juxtaposing two unrelated images, it was possible to create a third, equally powerful mental image in the mind of the viewer. They filmed famed Russian actor Mozhukhin gazing blankly into camera and spliced in shots of an empty bowl, a woman in a coffin and a girl with a teddy bear. They then rearranged the shots preceding and following Mozhukhin's close up and exhibited the different versions to an audience. Each time the audience perceived the actor's blank expression to be conveying a different emotion. Sadness, grief, hunger. Some audience members even praised the actor's range.
This is perhaps one of greatest examples of the impact of film editing on an audience. It's an enigmatic craft that has earned its own category at annual industry events such as the Academy Awards or BAFTAs, yet most cinemagoers would be hard pressed to actually describe what the craft entails .
Stanley Kubrick cited editing as being the only craft exclusive to film and filmmaking and that every other technique used in the creation of cinema are all borrowed from other mediums (cinematography from photography, costume design from fashion design, production design from theatre, sound recording from radio/music etc).
In Alexander Walker's fine book Stanley Kubrick Directs the famed auteur remarked: " I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of filmmaking. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit".
As creatively involved in the production of a film as the director or writer, a good editor, a sensitive editor (ideally) has an instinctual sense of rhythm and timing and most importantly should be fluent in the visual language of film. Like any language, film has its own particular grammar and once fluent in it, an editor can ultimately shape the overall tone and feel of a piece purely through the timing of the cuts. Editing can make (or break) an actor's performance, make comedy funnier, action more exciting and drama more intense in a way that most cinemagoers and indeed actors are entirely unaware of.
So what is the specific thought process that an editor goes through to determine what works and what doesn't?
Film editing guru Walter Murch (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient) accurately describes his personal editing process with what he has called the 'Rule of Six'. He states that an ideal edit is the one that incorporates all the following:
- it is true to the emotion of the scene
- it propels the plot forward
- it happens at a moment that is rhythmically right
- it acknowledges the audience's focus of interest, such as location and movement within the frame
- it respects planarity (the visual grammar of three dimensions condensed by a photographic lens into two - with respect to stage-line, eye-lines etc.)
- it respects the 3D continuity of the actual space e.g. where people are in relation to one another.
The first rule - emotion - is the one thing you should try to preserve at all costs. If you find you have to sacrifice any of these six things to make a cut, sacrifice your way up, rule by rule, from the bottom.
Many recent films have attempted to break these conventional editing rules, experimenting with the construction of the 'three-act' film and employing a non-linear structure in order to tell a story differently.
A handful of films have radically pushed modern audiences with their use of editing, most notably Christopher Nolan's Memento . As a film it is wholly subjective, placing the audience totally in the headspace of the protagonist, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce). Shelby is hunting the killer of his adored wife and suffers from an amnesia-like condition that has rendered him unable to form new memories. Living each day of his life devoid of any context, Leonard obsessively follows a pile of notes and Polaroid photos that he collates, knowing he'll soon forget the details. He leaves clues to follow, all in the desperate hope that he'll catch the man responsible and kill him. As the film plays out, it begins at its conclusion, showing Leonard executing the man he believes responsible for his wife's murder. Working its way chronologically backwards, we soon feel the disorienting effect of Leonard's condition, unable to place the scenes in context, we stumble confusedly into each, as does Leonard. This is one of the cleverest uses of film editing in cinema. It adds to the emotion in a way not seen before, as Leonard laments his dead wife he ponders on the possibility that she's been dead for years, yet he feels no time passing. He wonders how he will ever heal and how he will ever rid himself of the pain. The ultimate conclusion answers this, revealing Leonard as an unreliable narrator and is all the more powerful, not only as a result of the performances, but of how the film has been structured. As Leonard says: "We all lie to ourselves to be happy" - the realisation dawns that we the audience have been lied to, duped by Leonard. Our awareness of how the film has been edited is heightened, and it's an awareness of being manipulated at the hands of someone talented at it. Incidentally, the UK DVD release features an alternate version of the film that runs chronologically forwards, as a conventional film would play. Unbelievably the film works just as well forwards, character motivations and intentions are more obvious and Leonard's motives are evident from the start, yet for a film to fit together so intelligently like a mathematical puzzle in two completely different ways is a major achievement in editing and as a debut effort from Nolan, it's nothing less than staggering.
When I wrote and directed my first short film Down To the Wire , I whittled down the rough cut to an unwieldy length of 12 minutes. Seeing that there was significant 'fat' to be trimmed (and acknowledging my inexperience) I enlisted the help of an experienced colleague to see what could be easily excised and still tell the story, to essentially bring to it what I couldn't: objectivity. This process led to a rough cut that ran for just over five minutes yet still effectively told the story I wanted to tell. So what exactly had I been missing? Like a student with a tenuous grasp on a foreign language, my grammar was flawed. I needed to be more succinct. I was labouring points and allowing scenes to play out long after they've served their purpose in moving the plot forward. Our minds assimilate information faster than ever, therefore if a character in a film runs to a vehicle and in the next scene is shown speeding along a highway in it, we assume the character got into the car even though we did not see it happen. These are leaps of logic that we as audience members make every time the cinema lights go down. The audience fills in the gaps, the leaps can be as subtle as entering a vehicle or as extreme as leaps in time and space, like the 2001 - A Space Odyssey 40,000 year jump-cut from hurtling prehistoric leg bone to rotating space craft. Despite the artifice, the audience renders it believable, adding the vital key component that makes the entire process work: an emotional connection. So my first editing lesson was the same fundamental lesson learnt by Pudovkin and Kuleshov all those years ago: that the power of film editing is not on the cinema screen but in the hearts and minds of the viewers.
Jarrod Walker
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