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P:O.V. No.6 - The Art of Film Editing

On Editing
Mark Le Fanu

Cinema has two beginnings: the rst, when the

photograph originally budged, the limbs uncoiled, the
human being walked, the single spool of lm ickered
into life - on whatever occasion we choose to date this
(whether in 1893 or 1895).

Yet the second, in a way equally momentous,

beginning of cinema could be said to follow some time
later - if we want to date it, let us say in the years
immediately prior to 1900 - when two strips of lm
were rst spliced together to form: what? Another
mode of narrative? Or maybe narrative itself - lm
narrative - for the rst time? Stories may indeed be
told without editing - a little one-minute gem like the
Lumire Brothers' L'Arroseur Arros tells its story
perfectly - but in an important way the beginning of
editing is the beginning of cinema itself.

Still, we have to ask ourselves, what is so

"momentous" about this joining or splicing that impels
us to pause on it and puzzle out its meaning? After all,
in the theatre we are used to the division of the play
into acts which operate through a principle of ellipsis.
Thus, at the end of a given scene, the lights go down,
the set is invisibly whisked away and, when the lights
go up again, we are in a different place (surely by
magic), while time has moved on, sometimes by
decades (this too is magic).

But the splice, in cinema, has more dialectical

properties. It serves not merely as a pause or csura -
something that separates or provides a brief breathing
space - but on the contrary something that joins:
"syntactic" in the root sense of the word. And if we are
talking about magic, the magic of cinema is surely
sensed to lie here: in the strange alchemy arising out of
the juxtaposition of images - images that cut through,
or rather dispense with, pages of theatrical dialogue to
achieve their effect instantaneously: a subliminal effect
in the best instances, too swift to be put into words,
though when we do take the trouble to nd words for
the experience we see that what we are dealing with is
the imagistic equivalent of a metaphor. Such and such
a thing, says the lm, is "like" something else - in
ways that we might never have thought of; only once
there (placed there, by chance or by the genius of the
editor) understood as rich, suggestive, inevitable or
(when it needs to be) satirical.

The theorisation of these properties of lmic syntax is

the legacy of the Russians: Kuleshov for example (in
the famous "Kuleshov effect")[1] and above all, of
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course, the great Eisenstein. These men and their
colleagues practised this sort of cinema ("the cinema
of attractions", "the cinema of shocks") and wrote
about it extensively. Yet to mention such names at all,
since they lived so long ago (in the epoch, precisely, of
the silent cinema) is to wonder if their conclusions are
still valid. Perhaps it was just because, for the rst 30
years of its life, cinema had no spoken word that the
juxtaposition of images in the way we are describing
was sensed to be so fundamental. Our enquiry touches
here upon something that I will revert to below: the
fear, that is, that the very special form of editing
patented by the Russians as "montage" is, or was,
merely a passing episode in the evolution of cinema,
giving way in due course to the coming of sound.

I am not sure how to answer this fully. An annual

Oscar is offered by Hollywood for Best Editing, and
when one tries to pin down the qualities of a really
well-edited mainstream lm - one of Scorsese' s
movies, for example, cut by Thelma Schoonmaker
(GoodFellas, maybe, or Casino) - one sees that the
skill referred to is not so much montage, in the Russian
sense of the orchestration or controlled dissonance of
images, but rather the ability to handle pace creatively;
more simply put, to imbue the lm in question with a
ne and vigorous rhythm.

Such skill where it exists doesn't rule out a more

radical style of ellipsis - something closer to the
Russian model in density and complexity of image
placement. But it could be argued that the home for
editing in this richer sense - the sense referred to of
"montage of attractions" - is no longer (if it ever was)
in mainstream ction. We may be more likely to nd it
in certain dense personal meditations - half
documentary, half lm diary - of a few privileged
auteurs: Orson Welles for example (F for Fake surely
one of the most "edited" lms of all time), or Godard,
or Wim Wenders (a diary lm like Tokyo-ga rather
than his regular feature lms). And we could add a few
more names at this point: Johan van der Keuken from
Holland, Chris Marker, Adam Curtis (from the BBC),
Frederick Wiseman, Dusan Makavejev (incomparable
montage of WR:Mysteries of the Organism), Agns
Varda, Alain Cavalier, Alain Resnais...

A handful of examples, then, some of them very well-

known, others a little more obscure.[2] What binds
such artists together is that editing in their lms seems
to be used as an instrument of thought, not merely as
guarantee of rhythm. Maybe the distinction sounds
slippery - for all good art is thoughtful; and there is no
monopoly (how could there be?) on the artistic means
used to achieve depth and effectiveness. Yet it is one
aspect of thought, at least, to be alert; to cut through;
to surprise; to forge connections; just as it is the
peculiar property of the work of the directors just cited
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that we seem to see these connections being minted, as

it were, in front of our eyes.

An example would seem to be called for. But before I

give one, maybe it's apposite to recall that "producing
examples" is not always as easy as it looks. In lm
criticism, then, as opposed to the literary variety, there
is no such thing as a quote. The most the critic can do
is to prcis: that is, to reproduce, or attempt to
reproduce in words the effect of the extract he is
talking about. He (I mean "she" of course in the
appropriate context) may use stills or photograms to
aid the evocation, but until (which may not, after all be
too long in the future) written elucidation can be
combined with push-button or CD-Rom access to the
relevant extract, commentary about lm is condemned
to remain vague and approximate. A limitation
especially onerous here, it may be thought, where the
whole force of the discussion focuses on the elegance
of swift solutions, and of split-second timing.

To return to our argument, and the example left

hanging in the air. "Split-second timing" is one of the
masteries of the elusive French director Chris Marker.
After the success of Sans Soleil (1982), Le Tombeau
d'Alexandre (English title The Last Bolshevik), which
came out in 1992, reafrmed the French documentarist
as one of our nest contemporary lm essayists. The
movie in question is a meditation on the life of a little-
known but important Soviet director named Alexander
Medvedkin, who, while faithful in broad terms to
communist ideology, made lms in the twenties and
thirties which, seen in a certain light, are distinctively
subversive of the system. (Happiness (1934) seems to
be the best known of these.)

Marker' s own lm, I believe, is one of the profoundest

documentary meditations we have on the history of
communism. Surrounding his investigation of a single
Soviet career, however (and what makes the lm so
interesting to us), is a rather broader philosophical
meditation on the status of images in general: their
power, their ambiguity, their propensity for
falsication and so on. (A quotation at the beginning
of the movie by George Steiner sets the parameters of
the discussion. "It is not the literal past that rules us",
he says, "but images of the past.") Soviet history, of
course, with its notorious revisions and occlusions, is
fertile ground for the ironical, or tragic-ironical,
pursuit of such an enquiry; and one of the lm' s most
chilling sequences as a matter of fact chronicles the
fate of a woman lm editor who failed to remove
completely the face of a recently-condemned Enemy
of the People from a 1930s newsreel (the tip of his
nose was left showing at the edge of the doctored
black-out strip). For this oversight, she was herself
subsequently "edited": that is, dismissed from her post,
and in due course, we are led to infer, executed.
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The episode, which I mention in passing (in all its sub-

humorous grotesquerie), is only one of many asides
and tangents in a movie that progresses on the one
hand by means of the director' s voice-over
commentary (it's structured as a series of loose letters
addressed to the recently-deceased Medvedkin); on the
other hand by a voiceless kaleidoscope of images
working ceaselessly in the subliminal, underground
way I have been describing to set up, across the movie,
a series of rhymes, correspondances, assonances and
mysterious ambivalences.

Let me cite only one such case, a juxtaposition which

occurs in a sequence where Marker, thinking about the
meaning of socialist realism, highlights a scene from
one of Medvedkin's kitscher musical comedies. The
extract in question shows a vigorous Russian folk
dance. In a wooded glade, and surrounded by smiling
clapping comrades, a pretty girl performs a vigorous
Russian folk dance. As she nishes her solo a male
dancer leaps into the arena. There is a swift cut to
another set of footage: a battleeld, with ghting in
progress. And a body - surely the body belonging to
the man we have just seen? (only it can't be) - explodes
on the ground in a broken mangled heap. The effect on
the viewer is electrifying . The frisson it delivers is
like the hammer blow to the solar plexus that
Eisenstein is perpetually theorising. What needs to be
singled out for our purposes, however, is the
"serendipitous", contingent nature of the splice. The
cut has the air of being planned in advance; but in truth
it can only have been found. This is the magic of
editing, then: the thought comes into existence the
moment the editor (or in this case the editor-director)
discovers it. It is as if he and we are discovering it
together simultaneously.

"Magic", of course, is only critic's shorthand: a

metaphor. Have I been too free with the word? Orson
Welles was a practising amateur magician as well as a
lm-maker, and in a lm like F for Fake (1975) we
come to see how the word "magical" really does
describe, I think, the effect of its overall editing
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strategies.The whole movie (whose subject, as its

name implies, is fakery and illusion) possesses a
dazzling, rabbit-out-of-the-hat quality that comes from
its myriad joins, splices, feints - all stitched together
(in the twinkle of an eye) by the hand of a virtuoso
conjuror.[3] Yet F for Fake's virtuosity serves to
remind the viewer (once he has "recovered from" the
spectacle) that editing is actually supposed to be
invisible. There are in fact - it is time to be explicit
about it - two main traditions of editing: the rst called
montage, where the cuts are designed to be noticed
(how else, in Eisenstein's terms, could one register the
feeling as "shock"?); and an opposite tradition, much
more mainstream, where the object on the contrary is
to render such cuts unobtrusive. So much so that,
winding the lm back in your head after the show is
over, its progress is like the outcome of a seamless
single take - an evenly-maintained present tense from
which however (in Hitchcock's famous denition) all
the "boring bits" have been miraculously evacuated.

This species of editing (in fact, for many professionals,

the only form of editing worth bothering about) is
commonly associated with Hollywood. In fact it is the
vernacular of practically all "lmed entertainment" - of
television drama as much as of feature lms (formally,
they are indistinguishable). Two of its most striking
aspects are these: that an individual scene is broken up
into countless different shots; and that those shots,
when stitched together , will preserve continuity of
movement or "ow" - as well as respect for the scene's
geographical integrity. It is one of the pleasures of
studying lm in the classroom to discover that these
procedures, which seem to us to be so natural (and
which, for the ordinary lm-goer, are so natural as not
to be noticed) do in fact possess history and
provenance. Thus, there was a rst time ever, and we
can still marvel at it (the lm in question - or a
plausible candidate - exists in the archive)[4] when a
director, or maybe just a cameraman, said: "Let's stop
the camera and move in to see this thing closer." So
they stopped the shot, picked up the apparatus, moved
a few feet forward (or maybe just put in a new lens)
and started shooting again. And so, for variety and
emphasis - since there were, in silent cinema, neither
words nor speeches to carry the audience along - there
arose the convention that the action should be seen
from many different angles, and from many different
distances from the actors. And the audience crossed
the proscenium invisibly, as if in a dream; forcing us to
say, as we make sense of the experience, isn't that
magic too? Isn't that in fact the main magic of cinema?

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It never had to be discovered. It's not too difcult, I

think, to imagine an alternative development of cinema
history whereby the single-take set up or "plan
sequence" turned out to be (as in the theatre) the
natural syntax of story-telling. Editing "within the
scene" might have turned out to be, in this alternative
landscape, the exception rather than the rule: at best an
eccentricity, in the last resort unnecessary and
distracting. The speculation of course is not merely
hypothetical, since what has just been described lies at
the heart of some of the most rigorous, powerful and
beautiful cinema in existence. In the work of directors
as diverse (and as eminent) as Mizoguchi, Dreyer,
Angelopoulos, Tarkovsky, Ophuls, Greenaway, Jancs,
Skolimowski, Antonioni (to cite only a handful of
well-known names), the single shot scene, allied, in
the majority of cases, to a relentlessly mobile
camerawork, takes over from editing as the
fundamental source of cinematic expression,
reminding us, if we need to be reminded, that there are
indeed alternative ways of doing these things. And
since this method of lm-making is the result of
intellectual choice and not mere random happenstance,
it crucially reminds us, too, that there is another side to
the "magic" of editing. Editing, by this new argument,
is another word for manipulation; whereas the absence
of editing allows, or encourages, truth, integrity,
enlightenment. You could say that the camera, in
single-take cinema, awaits on Truth to emerge like an
epiphany (or not to emerge: the directors just cited are
patient about the possibility of failure); whereas edited
cinema "manufactures" truth, or rather, to put the
matter polemically, it lies. Thus the underside of magic
- we needn't belabour the point - brushes the realm of
ashiness, cheap effects, virtuosity for its own sake,
mendacity. Any serious essay on editing, it seems to
me, is required to raise the question of manipulation as
a moral and political issue. The difculty is to do it
without recourse either to clich or to stale parti pris.
Does one really think of editing as lying? is a question
that needs to be answered rather personally - needs, at
least, to be open to the possibility that such judgements
are not always easy; unless one thinks (as some people
do) that all lms are emotionally manipulative and, for
that reason, morally suspect.

It is not a position I share. (I don't think, if one really

believed it, that one could write about cinema
intelligently.) Still, there is an element of my response
to cinema that is in tune with this rather Bazinian
reserve, or austerity, about the very basis of editing
itself. Sometimes I think: one shouldn't make a fuss
about editing. It is a skill, and a very important one.
I've been speaking about it as if it were the director's
prerogative but, in another sense, the people who
actually carry the task out - albeit in collusion with the
director - are "merely" anonymous craftsmen. It would
be ludicrous to lose sight of the fact that what matters
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overall, about cinema, is the vision of the artist, and

the integrity of the chosen actors' performances.[5]

So we may agree, then: editing is "magic"; editing is

the cinema's virtuosity. And yet...Suppose one were,
for a moment,to take Andr Bazin's position seriously,
which is, in effect, that the introduction of editing was
a fall from some earlier primeval virtue?[6] The major
breakthroughs in editing technique are conventionally
attributed to Grifth and Eisenstein, and in each case I
nd some sympathy (though it is extremely nuanced)
with Bazin's hypothetical hostile dissenter. Thus with
Grifth, whose achievement, of course, is stupendous,
the hesitation crystalizes round the idea that the viewer
has to be thrilled by the speed and the frenzy of his
chases. The climax of so many Grifthian lms being
the ride to the rescue, the adult viewer can't avoid
feeling, I suppose, a certain boredom and impatience at
the mechanical way Grifth cross-cuts between the
doughty rescuing party forging forward on the one
hand, and on the other hand, the imprisoned heroine (it
is usually a heroine) awaiting her last minute
deliverance. Editing, in Grifth's hands, conrmed the
genius of cinema for excitement, thrills, suspense,
along with the pleasures of audience identication. But
in doing so it cut out, or rather forced underground,
another strand of lm-making (beautifully exemplied
in early Russian and Scandinavian cinema) whose
characteristics are thoughtfulness and languor.

The case of Eisenstein is different. Without being

excessively pious, let us agree to agree: the stature of
the great Russian - like the stature of Grifth - is
unassailable. He is a giant (even, and especially
towards the end of his life, a moral giant), however
one chooses to consider the matter. But montage, after
all, in the hands of the Russians, was, we shouldn't
forget, a specically-honed tool, during the 1920s, for
the furtherance of state ideology. The lms of
Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, Vertov etc pressed you to take
a view, manipulated you, "battered" you, cozened you.
We feel this strongly when we see their lms now,
because the ideology they championed is so freshly,
comprehensively discredited. (There are no Marxists
any more, even in universities.) But in truth there was
never any doubt that cutting, in the hands of these
practitioners, was designed to be partisan and
polemical.[7] The British historian Orlando Figes,
reviewing a recent biography of Eisenstein glosses
montage as "the dynamic juxtaposition of images to
force people towards ideas and emotions", but the verb
"force" in the sentence is so smoothly given as to
function, almost, as an equivocation. Yet is it, we ask
ourselves, or is it not, sinister to be forced towards
accepting an idea (or an emotion)? Not (we note)
forced to choose but rather, it would seem, to submit:
to submit to ideas and emotions that have previously
been chosen for us. "Eisenstein", says Figes, later in
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the same review, "invented modern advertising

techniques." Yes, that's it, one nds oneself
murmuring. The lost world of Bolshevism and the
modern world of consumer capitalism are united in
this recourse to montage. So it seems to me tting,
then, - even inevitable - that that the discussion of
editing should come to rest here, thinking about the
astonishing manipulations and morphologies (backed
up, in each case, by hundreds of thousands of dollars)
which constitute, for our delight and entertainment, the
modern movie and television commercial.

Yet in this case, is it truly editing we are talking about?

And if so, editing of what kind? Classical editing
involves cutting: there is an image, and then there is
another image. A choice is made as to how and when
they combine, but until they do so they are discrete
separable entities, stored on separate pieces of
celluloid. Modern editing, by contrast, is increasingly
electronic and digital, and the images in question are
not so much joined as fused together, or "morphed", in
a process that comes closest, in the vocabulary of
classical editing, to a continuous optical dissolve. It's
all done within the frame, and not, as it were, between
the frames. It's impossible now speak of editing, in
short, outside the context of the whole aural and visual
revolution in post-production - paintboxing, image
manipulation, the drive towards "special effects" - that
cinema, aided by the advertising industry, is currently
going through. The symbolism of George Lucas's
"Industrial Light and Magic" comes to mind here : the
word "magic", which we have been using (a bit
promiscuously) throughout this essay, turns up again in
the context of the work of these huge post-production
powerhouses - along with the notion governing
contemporary studio thinking that an audience is there
to be dazzled, stupeed, taken out of itself: transported
to distant poetic worlds.

Well, perhaps it is not so new, after all! Editing, since

the days of Mlis, has always been associated with
sorcery, almost another word for it. The devil is there.
A puff of smoke - and the devil has vanished. And
though its techniques may have altered in the course of
its evolution, the craft remains, as we approach the
millenium, as much the mystery of lm-making as it
ever was.

[1] Experiment arranged by the pioneer lm-maker

Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970) whereby a closeup of the
actor Mozhukhin was juxtaposed with three different
images - a bowl of soup, a dead woman in a cofn and
a girl playing with a toy bear. According to Pudovkin,
who was present at the demonstration, "spectators
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who was present at the demonstration, "spectators
imagined that the actor was registering hunger towards
the soup, sorrow towards the cofn and joy towards
the girl. But the image was exactly the same all three
times." See Robert Sklar: Film: An International
History of the Medium (London, 1993), p. 151

[2] Maybe I should mention also the contemporary

Russian lm director Oleg Kovalev, whose poetic
documentary on Eisenstein Sergei Eisenstein: An
Autobiography (St Petersburg, 1995) seems to me to
capture, with extraordinary gaiety and assurance, the
editing rhythms of Eisenstein's work in the 1920s. To
see this lm in the right circumstances is to witness
"montage", in the old sense, resurrected. Yet it is not a
mere archeological exercise.

[3] Though one of the greatest masters of the seamless

single take, Welles was no less a master (this is the
point I am making) of editing. It's worth recalling that
the reason editing gradually came to dene his style
was relentlessly practical: lming Othello in his
vagabond years in Europe, and frequently running out
of money, Welles found himself in the position of
having to "match" a shot taken in Venice with another
one (from the same scene) taken in Spain, and a third,
perhaps, in Morocco. Hiding the joins was a task fully
worthy of his magicianship. (For a full account of the
shoot, with many insights into Welles's personality, see
Michel MacLiammir's memoir Put Money in They
Purse (London, 1952).) Editing is always in some way
the issue with Welles, as the recent controversy about
the "director's cut" of Touch of Evil (withdrawn from
the 1998 Cannes Film Festival at his daughter
Beatrice's request) continues to testify.

[4] Barry Salt, in Film Style and Technology: History

and Analysis (London, 1983), suggests the British
comedy Mary Jane's Mishap (G. A. Smith, 1903). This
(rather delightful) movie is included in the two volume
video selection Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers
issued by the British Film Institute a few years ago.

[5] The self-effacing modesty of a practising lm

editor is brilliantly brought to life in the classic study
by Dai Vaughan: Portrait of an Invisible Man: The
Working Life of Stewart McAllister (BFI Books,
London, 1983). See also, in this context, representative
interviews in the collection First Cut: Conversations
with Film Editors , by Gabriella Oldham (Univ. of
California Press, 1992). As far as "secrets"of the trade
are concerned, two of the best handbooks are Film
Editing by Roger Crittenden (London, 1981, new
edition 1994) and The Techniques of Film Editing by
Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar (The Focal Press,
London, 1989). All students editing will want to read
Walter Murch's richly suggestive reections on the
subject: In the Blink of an Eye (Silman-James Press,
1995).
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[6] For a fuller discussion of Bazin's views on editing,

see my essay "Metaphysics of the `Long Take': some
post-Bazinian Reections" in p.o.v. Number 4,
December 1997.

[7] Tarkovsky's reservations about Eisenstein revolve

around this issue. Why should we need to be told, he
used to say (concerning the famous montage in
October where Kerensky "turns into" a peacock), that
the leader of the Provisional Government is shallow
and vain? The symbolism is importunate, its sarcasm
too obvious and motivated. (See Andrei Tarkovsky,
Sculpting in Time (London, 1986).)

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