I’m in the middle of writing a screenplay right now.
No, not that one. That one got stalled at 162 pages of not knowing what to cut. The new one is stalled at 58 pages and not knowing entirely how to proceed.
Being an independent writer/director is not like being a real writer. Not all of the rules you learn in Screenwriting 101 (or in my case, RTVF 260) apply: because you’re carrying the whole project in your head, you can get away with practically no directive paragraphs; you don’t need to have a readable, conversational style. Because you’re not selling the screenplay, you’re selling the project; and the project is yourself, it’s how you can convince people to fund you personally.
This is what I tell myself, anyway (number of successfully funded projects: 0).
There’s a flipside to this, and it’s ugly: you can’t just tell a story. I mean, you can, but that’s going to turn around and bite you on the ass. When I write something, I’m not going to hand it off to some random director and have him or her break it apart and figure out how it’s going to work as a movie. I have to do that. And I’m a damn fool if I don’t start that work from the ground up.
I’d like to think this is obvious: films aren’t modular. The success of any given work isn’t a factor of how good on an absolute scale the cinematography or the acting is; you don’t assign X points for the writing, Y points for the editing and Z points for the camerawork and say the film is “good” if X+Y+Z is greater than some arbitrary threshold. The success of the writer, of the editor, of the cinematographer lies in how well their work in concert with the other elements of production to create a whole. The success of an entire film lies in the interplay of all its components: the editing must exist in relationship to the cinematography, which exists in relationship to…you get the idea.
This is just a long way of saying that the process of writing, to me, is an opportunity to work all of that out at the beginning, or at least have some concept of where I’m going. And so I do not write just to get the words out and then see what I can do with them; for every line I put down, there is a specific camera movement, or a specific cut that I have in mind. Of course, I could clearly change my mind about any of these elements later on, but for right now I aim for a certain inevitability: this line must be filmed in this way.
And that, in turn, is just a long way of saying that because of this, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to editing and cinematography lately. In March, I could vomit forth 180 pages in two weeks because I had a clear idea in my mind about the interplay of form and content in that case. Now, two months have produced less than one-third of that length, and not all of that is particularly interesting. And so I take frequent breaks along the way, to consider my opinions of the shot and the edit, how they work and why, and this, finally, brings me to the meat of this post.
Why editing and cinematography? For one, they are the two aspects of filmmaking, after writing, that I know the most about. (You can’t graduate film school without some appreciation for how cinematography works, and editing is the only technical skill in which I received considerable training. And while I am on the subject, a word about film school: it teaches craft, not art. Clearly, you cannot be a great director of photography without knowing how a camera works, nor can you edit without knowing how the rudiments of Avid use; but technical proficiency is not the same as theoretical application, and this is why I remain steadfast in my belief that the person who wishes to make a film must above all watch films, all that he or she can get ahold of. Watching one film by Ozu Yasujiro taught me more about editing than four years of school).
The second reason I focus on these two elements is that they are uniquely cinematic. Writing is obviously far older than film; even if we limit ourselves to dramatic writing, film is still so closely linked to theater that we don’t even have a separate vocabulary to describe the two disciplines. Stage acting is somewhat easier to disentangle from film acting, but both are essentially the same craft, as attested to by the sheer number of artists who work in both media. Art design is widespread, of course; it’s to be found in the theater, in architecture, and probably in your living room. Sound is unfairly considered the bastard child of the film arts by a critical establishment that seems often to long for a parallel world in which The Jazz Singer never happened, ignoring sound-heavy films from The Haunting to The Conversation to The Incredibles; but even granting that sound has a place of pride, it seems bizaare to call it “uniquely cinematic” when the local grocery store has been sound-designed.
What makes cinematography and editing interesting is that they are so close to other artforms without being them. Cinematography is of course the younger brother of still photography, and the second cousin of painting; and in our current world, one in which cinematography is too often judged by its “prettiness,” I wonder how long it can be honestly called “cinematic.” But what those forms cannot do, what indeed no art form can do (unless we’re willing to grant theme park rides the status of “art”) is uninterrupted movement, and shifting perspective. No photograph, however beautifully composed, can move us into that composition; no painting, however perfect its balance of light and dark, can move from one room into another.
Editing, my own true love, is even more specifically cinematic, and it grants to the cinema an aspect that only one other art form in history has shared: order and duration. In an art gallery, we are allowed to look at paintings in whatever order we wish. In the theater, our eye may go to any corner of the stage. We may study a bridge or a building for whatever length of time pleases us. But in a film, we are forced to look at images in one specific order and for a specific length of time (an aside: I recently observed a debate on Girish Shambu’s blog about theater vs. home viewing; one of the pluses for home viewing was the ability to pause and view scenes out of order. And while I do not deny that can be an aesthetically valid experience, I do question the degree to which it remains “cinema”). This image must follow this image. In the 1920’s, French theorists claimed that of all the other art forms, film most resembled music, and this is true if deeply unintuitive. Music is the only other form to dictate order and duration in its very creation. And even here we find issues of interpretation: one musician’s recording of a song may be different in subtle and unsubtle ways from another’s, and we begin to lose track: is the art the composition or the performance? Both separately? Or the thing that exists as a combination of the two? Film sidesteps this difficulty by being concrete and authoritative: it is infinitely repeatable. And while there are remakes, what we might call the “covers” of cinema, e.g. the 1956 The Man Who Knew Too Much will aways be a specific object.
There is an inexhaustible amount that can be said about these topics, so at this time I will attempt to restrain myself to some – not all, I fear – of my ideas about editing and its relationship to the complete film. Most of these are thoughts that I have struggled with during my current writing process. I wish to stress that this is not meant to be a definitive statement of editing theory; there is much that I believe, which I have not been able to work into this essay, for reasons of clarity or space. And even what I do claim, I am not such a fool as to pretend that there are not other interpretations of equal merit, and I recognise that none of what I say can be true in all cases.
Editing is how a film admits that it is untrue. Godard claimed that “Cinema is truth, 24 times per second, and every cut is a lie,” but this is not wholly accurate. Without getting into fuzzy philosophical debate about lying to find a deeper truth, cinema is the depiction of things that aren’t so. Locations and events are controlled by an individual or a team of individuals who do not appear on camera, in order to create the illusion that they are happening naturally and by chance. For any given shot in a film, there is a crowd of people lying just outside of the frame, creating what we see and hear in the shot. When it is done successfully, it is impossible to tell that the film is not a pristine documentary of the real world.
Every element of a film is designed to convince us of its reality (of course there are avant-garde films that do not subscribe to this at all, some of them quite well-known, but for the purpose of my current thinking, I ignore the avant-garde). The most exciting camera moves are usually those that display the largest amount of the set, leaving the smallest number of places for light and crew to hide. We do not judge special effects on their beauty or on their difficulty, but solely on their ability to mimic reality. The best-loved actors are those who seem most natural and unforced in their performance.
Editing runs counter to all this. Editing is the representation of something that never occurs in the real world. No matter how quickly the human eye can switch perspective, no matter how much we attempt to recreate experience of moving from one angle to another instantly, life has no analogue to the visual shift from one image to another in one twenty-fourth of a second. It is near to instantaneous. And despite ninety years of rules on how to make the transition from shot to shot as smooth and unnoticeable as possible, it is hard to regard a cut as anything other than a gash across the carefully constructed pseudoreality of film. Editing is the rude reminder that what we’re watching has never existed, it has been stitched together from discrete parts.
When it is done well, editing should be used to focus attention. We are accustomed to thinking about how camera framing and lighting and depth of field can tell us what part of a frame to look at; but cannot editing do something similar? Because it is such a distraction – because it tears us out of the reality of the film – it should be the case that every cut says the same thing: you must stop looking at that, and start looking at this. More than any other tool in the filmmaker’s arsenal, the edit forces the audience into a supordinate position, because they are being deprived to right to look at what they wish. Editing should take advantage of that fact. There must be a horrible inevitability about each cut in a film, as though the entire work can only survive because at that precise frame we have switched angles.
Therefore, I have been able to devise one and onle one rule about cutting: never do it arbitrarily. Take a celebrated example: shot/reverse-shot. This is the familiar pattern when we see two persons talking to each other: as we hear Person A speak, the camera is on her face, then as Person B begins to speak the image cuts to him; and so on, back-and-forth. Sometimes their dialogue is lapped over the cut. An instantly familiar pattern, found in countless films, and sometimes even a necessary one. But the danger of using it unthinkingly is that it is familiar: the audience upon noticing it might fail to observe a deeper meaning to the cuts, believing instead that the editor has acted out of allegiance to precedent. Or worse still, the audience may fail entirely to notice that editing occurs!
Why should it be natural to edit according to who speaks? Is it unimaginable that it may be more important to watch a person listening to the response to their question? Or that it may be best to observe a silent third party who listens in on the dialogue? Or even that we watch a person far removed from the conversation entirely? The question of who or what we look at during a line of dialogue should never be answered by the book: it must always be an act of specific choice. Even the subtlest change from the norm will register with the audience, albeit subconsciously, and a truly daring shift can call attention to itself and change the whole import not just of the dialogue but the image as well.
I wish to make it clear that I do not advocate that all films should be comprised of endless takes, cutting only because the camera has run out of film. I merely hold that every single cut should be deliberate and forceful, should hit the audience like a shot to the chest. This can be acheived in a film composed solely of marathon-length takes (Ingmar Bergman’s Scener ur ett Äktenskap for example), or in a film with rat-a-tat MTV-inflected editing (Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! leaps to mind, a film with more cuts in its first four minutes than the entirety of the six-hour Bergman series). What is important is that it is necessary for the audience’s point of view to be violently shifted, and for the audience to be shaken out of complacency. To cut merely because it seems appropriate is insufficient – our first requirement of every cut is that it is vitally important to force that reaction at that precise frame. When analyzing the editing of a film, the question must always be, why is this juxtaposition of these images necessary at this moment?
I don’t wish to use myself as a case study, but I shall use the example of my screenplay to explore what I mean by this practically, and perhaps show why I have lately come to these ideas. My story treats on the subject of people who perform themselves for others; in other words, it is about people who present a false self to other people. The first half of the film features seven people establishing their facades to each other and the audience, and the second half shows those facades being discovered and torn apart.
As I have suggested, editing reveals film to be a lie. So by extension it seems right to use editing to reveal the lies that my characters live. But how? At the most basic level, there are two options. I can use agressive, frequent cutting in the first part of the film to undercut the characters just as I undercut the film they are in, and show that both are constructions; or I can do so in the second part of the film to show the constructed reality of the film falling apart at the same time that the characters’ constructed selves are being discovered as fiction. And even this presupposes a false binary, that ignores the needs of individual moments of the film; let us say that I elect to retain my most elaborate editing for the second part, but there is a scene in the opening that demands a series of quick, alienating cuts. What choice do I make?
Beyond this, I am not interested in explaining how I intend to edit a film that currently lacks a screenplay, a cast and a crew. Merely, I want to suggest the process that has led me to my present state.
I fear this post has become much longer much faster than I’d intended when I began it. At this point, I had hoped to analyze the editing in a handful of the films that have most influenced my theories. But I fear that the reader is already tiring of my bloviating, and so I will end for now. At some point in the future, if anyone seems to be interested, I would be happy to extend my theories here expressed to some real-world examples. In the meanwhile, feel free to tell me what I got completely wrong in comments.