To get some extra inspirations for the edit and a better Idea of what it means to be a director I watched an American documentary called ‘The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Making’ (2004) by Wendy Apple.
“The Cutting Edge” is about the art of film editing. It shows clips from groundbreaking films (old, new, fiction, documentary etc, both famous and unknown) with creative and innovative editing styles. The documentary spans 100 years of filmmaking showing examples from early films where the only “cuts” were those created by stopping the camera and re-starting it, to showing films like “Cold Mountain” where they used more creative editing and doing cuts made on match on action.
The cast for the documentary is no “small talk” and consists of directors and editors such as Quentin Tarantino (director - The hateful 8), Steven Spielberg (director - Jaws), Walter Murch (editor - Apocalypse Now), Martin Scorsese (director - Goodfellas), Sally Menke (editor - Pulp Fiction) and more. The documentary has a lot of similarities with ‘Visions of Light’ (1992) a documentary where camera operators discuss the art of Cinematography and the “DoP”, illustrating their points by using clips from more than 100 different films.
“Musicians have notes, editors have frames.” Quentin Tarantino.
It’s interesting to see how editing can change a film, as James Cameron shows by showing a scene from ‘Terminator 2’ where 1 frame from 24 is missing, and that way illustrates the importance of every frame of the movie. Or as Walter Murch shows how he covers mistakes, controls emotions and work with light when editing scenes from ‘Cold Mountain’. The importance of close up’s at the right time, flashbacks, parallel action, slow motion etc.
It’s also interesting to hear about the process of editing both from the editors point of view and well-known directors. Zach Staenberg (editor - The Matrix Trilogy) says early in the documentary: “What makes a film is the edit”. This is being backed up by the rest of the directors and editors through the film, such as Sean Penn (director - The Pledge) who says “I think great editing skills will protect a director from suicide.”
//All images from Google.com\\
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