On Film Editing

An Introduction to the Art of Film Construction

Edward Dmytryk

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429000775
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Film & Video

In On Film Editing, director Edward Dmytryk explains, in clear and engaging terms, the principles of film editing. Using examples and anecdotes from almost five decades in the film industry, Dmytryk offers a masterclass in film and video editing. Written in an informal, "how-to-do-it" style, Dmytryk shares his expertise and experience in film editing in a precise and philosophical way, contending that all parties on the film crew—from the camera assistant to the producer and director—must understand film editing to produce a truly polished work.

Originally published in 1984, this reissue of Dmytryk's classic editing book includes a new critical introduction by Andrew Lund, as well as chapter lessons, discussion questions, and exercises.

1
Titles and Definitions

There are as many levels in the practice of this craft as there are practicing craftsmen. They range from the “mechanical” to the truly creative, and when modified by the skill and ingenuity which any particular cutter may possess, as well as the input of directors and producers, they present us with the possibility of a nearly infinite number of styles and techniques and an almost equal number of results.

The use of the word cutter in the previous sentence was intentional. In the 1920s and early 1930s, a cutter who called himself a film editor would have been considered a snob. Then came the Wagner Labor Relations Act and unionization. In an attempt to raise the status of the craft, which was considered by the less knowledgeable executives of Hollywood to be five or six rungs from the top of the filmmaker’s ladder, it was decided that film editor had a more imposing sound than film cutter, and henceforth that became the official terminology.^* However, most film editors, at least in each other’s company, still use the down-to-earth term cutter to define themselves and their profession.

It is probably safe to say that no two cutters will cut a film, or even a moderately lengthy sequence, in exactly the same way. So let us consider some of the varieties of workers in the field. First, let us look at one of that number who populate the fat part of the bell-shaped curve, the mechanic. Working as an apprentice, he (or she)^* learns a few simple rules, follows the script and/or the director’s instructions, and delivers a film to which the cutting has added not one whit of anything ingenious or original. On the contrary, his lackluster efforts may diminish the film’s potential impact considerably. It is the mechanic’s good fortune that so few directors, producers, and studio executives have the expertise with which to judge his contribution, although I have rarely encountered a member of any of these categories who did not consider himself to be one of the world’s great film editors.

At the top of the scale is the creative editor, the person with an understanding of dramatic structure, a keen sense of timing, a compulsion to seek out the scene’s hidden values—values which even the writer and the director may not have clearly grasped (believe me, it does happen!)—and a mastery of the technical skills needed to bring all these talents to bear on the film he edits. Unfortunately, there are very few creative cutters in the field, at least among those who edit other people’s work. The reasons are clear, and a little sad.

On the average film, a cutter’s status is usually beneath that of the director, the writer, the top actors, the producer, the photographer, the composer, and sometimes the set designer. And his salary is proportionate to his status. This state of affairs often induces a potentially brilliant cutter to seek a career offering greater rewards, even though his talents may not lie along other lines. Add to this the extremely long apprenticeship which assistant cutters are forced to serve, no matter how great their talents, and it is clear why so many quick, bright, and ambitious young men and women often opt for alternative careers. I have known several promising young men who have abandoned the cutting rooms because they were unwilling to spend 7 or 8 years at menial labor before getting permission to put scissors to film.

At the top of the scale lies another trap. Really fine, creative cutters quickly earn a “miracle man” reputation. Promotion, difficult to resist because of the increases in salary and status, inevitably follows, usually to the rank of director or, less frequently, producer. But these crafts demand their own special talents, and success is by no means assured. Indeed, the result is often tragic. A backward step is difficult to take, for obvious reasons, and many cutters, in classic adherence to the “Peter principle,” persist in hanging on as second- or third-rate directors or producers rather than return to a highly respected cutter’s bench. Only a handful of exceptional men and women have been content to spend their working lives exercising their rare talents in the relative obscurity of the cutter’s cubicle.

To appreciate the role of editing in the filmmaking process, one must have some understanding of how a film is made. Working backward from the completed work, we find that the film is divided into a number of sequences, each sequence corresponding, let us say, to a chapter in a book or a scene in a play. Broadly speaking, a sequence has its own beginning, middle, and end, although these are not as clearly marked as they are in the film as a whole.

Each sequence, in turn, is divided into scenes, the number of such scenes varying from one to many. Example, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the chase through the marketplace in the Arab town is one sequence, from the start of the chase to its conclusion with the hero’s final escape. The scenes are those parts of the sequence which take place in any one location, whether they are as simple as one setup shot taking the actors through a narrow alley or as complex as the hero’s confrontation with the assassin in black, a scene of considerable length that required a large number of setups.

The scenes consist of a number of cuts, or separate, individual pieces of film. Just as the sequence may consist of one or more scenes, so a scene may consist of one cut from a single setup or, more often, several cuts derived from two or more setups. There is no one-to-one correspondence between setups and cuts, since each setup may furnish a number of cuts, as usually occurs in the intercutting of matching close-ups in dialogue scenes.

The truth, then, is that in spite of the time, talent, and effort spent in writing, preparing, and shooting a film, it has no shape or substance until the hundreds, even thousands, of bits and pieces which go to make it are assembled. And it is here that the editor puts his stamp on the film. Every artist, if he is an artist, puts his own imprint on anything he does. Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Washington is not the same as Charles Peale’s. Cortes, Picasso, and Kandinsky would each have painted the same Paris street in his own individual, widely different style. Three directors would make quite different films from the same script. All this is quite commonly accepted. But what is not so commonly known is that, given a free hand, three different cutters will create three different versions out of the same material, and the results of their labors will depend not only on the quality of the filmed scenes, but to a considerable degree, on the talents and skills of the editors themselves.

Needless to say, these skills come in different sizes, as do their effects on film. The glib phrase “saved in the cutting room” is heard not too infrequently in film circles. It sounds clever, but it hardly conforms to the facts. At the least, it is an exaggeration. The editor may improve a film by eliminating excessive and/or redundant dialogue, by selective editing of inadequate acting, by creative manipulation of the film’s pace and the timing of reactions, by mitigating the weaknesses of badly directed scenes, and on rare occasions, by more unusual editorial maneuvers. Any or all of this activity presupposes a clever editor working on a more or less incompetently directed film. However, as often as not, a more or less incompetent editor is working on a cleverly directed film and not doing it justice. In any case, the-editor works only with the material handed him by the director. Even if the editor creates a “miracle,” the fact remains that that material carries all the ingredients of that miracle except, of course, for the creative ability brought to the cutting process by the editor. Finally, it must be borne in mind that although the editing “magic” is created in the cutting room, its creator is quite often not the cutter.

Notes

* For the same reason, a cameraman became a director of photography; script clerks became script supervisors, even though absolutely no script supervision was involved in their work; a set designer became an art director and so on, to a ridiculous degree. Eventually, the Screen Directors Guild was forced to demand, in contract bargaining, that no further craftsmen be gratuitously awarded the title of director of anything.

* In the silent days, a large proportion of cutters were women. At Famous Players Lasky, where I worked, all the cutters were women. The advent of sound, with its complexities, led a number of executives to conclude that women could not handle sound-related technical problems, and many of them were discharged, never to return. However, the best of them survived, and within a few years, younger women joined them at the benches. For most of the life of motion pictures, a singularly male-oriented business, cutting has been the only craft that has fully utilized the talents of a fair percentage of women.

2
Who Cuts the Film?

Who, exactly, does edit the film. Usually, no single person, exactly. Although there have been a few notable exceptions, a good director always has the leading influence on the editing of his film, the value of that influence being proportional to his instinct for and knowledge of editing. An experienced producer can also have marked editorial input at this stage of the production. And a cutter of established reputation and proven ability can have the greatest influence of all, if only because he sets the editorial “tone” by making the first complete assembly.

In 1953, Karel Reisz, in his excellent book, The Technique of Film Editing, wrote, “In Hollywood … writers normally prepare their scripts in much greater detail and leave the director with the comparatively minor role of following the written instructions.” If Hollywood writers, then or now, prepare their scripts in much greater detail, it is to aid the production staff in scheduling the film, not for shooting or editorial purposes. Quite to the contrary, no Hollywood director worth his salt would tailor his setups or his editing concepts to the script’s measure. In more than 50 years as a cutter and director I have not known a single nonhyphenated writer with more than an amateur’s knowledge of cutting, and few Hollywood writers make any claim to editorial expertise. Most write master scenes and make no effort to indicate other than routine scene subdivisions. So the script writer, unless he also happens to be the director or producer of the film, can be eliminated as a contributor to its editing. And most writer-directors depend more on their cutters for editorial advice than they do on the “instructions” in their scripts, even if the scripts happen to be their own.

Editorial responsibility, then, narrows down to the director, the producer, and the film editor (with an occasional stray suggestion from a studio executive). Which one of these carries the main burden on any particular picture depends mostly on the director involved. It works something like this:

Most directors have had no “hands on” cutting experience. Members of this group exhibit a broad spectrum of behavior. A few may take little or no interest in the cutting. The wise ones will “glom onto” a good editor, when and if they find one; then they will adopt a supervisorial stance, making known their dramatic desires while leaving the execution of those desires in the editor’s hands. Only a few will attempt precise cutting instructions.

For the conscientious cutter, these last are often a source of great trouble. Not knowing the patois of the cutting room, ^* they are usually unable to verbalize their concepts with accuracy. Their “specific” cutting instructions almost always amount to editorial double-talk, which the cutter must then translate into workable and effective ideas. So the question becomes: Should the cutter make the cuts exactly as the director spelled them out, or should he cut the film his way to arrive at the results which he thinks the director wanted, basing his judgment on his interpretation of the director’s expressed instructions?

The wise cutter will, of course, follow the second procedure, making the cuts in question his way to arrive at the desired result. And, if he is a very good cutter, that result will be, in the director’s words, “exactly what I was looking for."

The less secure or more restricted cutter will try to follow the director’s precise instructions and usually will find himself with a mess on his hands. Let me cite an experience of my own as an example.

On one of my first editorial assignments, I presented a first cut which was perhaps 20 minutes longer than optimum length. The running time was by no means unusually excessive and called for a routine trimming to bring it down to size. Over a period of 2 or 3 days the producer and the director reviewed the film, running and rerunning a sequence at a time. Instead of eliminating whole scenes, or even sequences, as is customary (and generally desirable), they called for the elimination of a phrase here, a modifying clause there, even, occasionally, a single word, necessitating what is called a “hemstitching job.” So many cuts of this kind were demanded that a smooth, understandable cut was impossible, but the supervising editor advised me to make the cuts exactly as asked for, even though he too, considered them incompetent.

The cuts were made, the director and producer viewed the recut version in silence, then marched down to the executive offices to demand my removal from the film and dismissal from the studio. My career hung by a thread. Fortunately, the supervising editor, Roy Stone (may his courage be ever remembered), gave his version of the episode. I was permitted to recut the film properly, and all turned out well.

I was 22 years old, and I had learned one of the most important lessons of my life: In any creative effort, one must do one’s own thing, even if that thing is being done in response to another’s order. To do otherwise is to seriously risk a result which will please neither the requestor nor the executor.

On the great majority of films, then, all the actual “hands on” cutting is done by the film editor, with the director and/or the producer supplying most, if not all, of the creative ideas involving changes in continuity, in the editing or elimination of scenes or sequences, and in the manipulation of acting emphasis and audience attention. The part the cutter plays in these proceedings depends on the director’s faith in the cutter’s talent and on his willingness to allow the cutter to participate in the creative process.

But, whatever the degree of that participation, the cutter still has almost complete control over the tempo and pacing of the film, and here he can do great damage or perform small miracles. Since tempo and pace are largely the result of technical manipulation of cuts, a technique outside the average director’s sphere of expertise, lack of finesse in these areas, though frequently quite apparent, often remains uncorrected, and even an expert critic will rarely know where to place the blame.

Naturally, those few directors with a great deal of practical cutting experience are fully aware of this important aspect of editing, and unless they are fortunate enough to have editors who match or surpass them in editing intuition and technical ability, they will insist on cutting their own films. Some will allow the editor to make the “rough cut,” to their instructions, while a few will undertake even that burdensome task. But all will make the final cut with their own hands, fine-tuning the film to their own satisfaction. This operation is as important to a film as it is to a racing-car engine or a symphony orchestra, and only the person actually handling the film can properly make these desirable and necessary adjustments.

Note

* Every craft has its own language, or terminology, most of which is unintelligible to the layman. The special idioms of the sciences are generally acknowledged, but the language of even tho...