The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing

"The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing," is a fascinating documentary about the film editing process and how it has evolved throughout time. When one goes to see a film today, one barely notices the editing. While most of today's editors seem to aim for this seamless effect,  editing has gone through many changes since it was first used. In fact, the first films did not use editing at all. In these works, the cameraman shot the film from one location until he either ran out of film or became bored. The introduction of editing changed not only the way films are presented to viewers, but also the way these films were created.

For the average film project today, approximately 200 hours of film are shot. Standard film is shot at about 1/24th of a second per frame. 200 hours of standard frames would be long enough to stretch between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. While it may seem that most of this footage is extraneous, one frame can be crucial to a sequence. In movies such as "Jaws," which involved the use of a mechanical shark, one frame could be the difference between a shark that appeared to be real and terrifying and a shark that looked like the fake it was. Director James Cameron did an interesting experiment with frames during the editing of "Terminator 2." In an attempt to make the movie shorter, Cameron requested that the editors take out one frame from every second of the film. This attempt failed, and the result of Cameron's idea was a choppy, rough, scene with cuts in all the wrong places.

Eventually, people discovered that manipulating the way frames were cut could be used to create political propaganda. Vladimir Lenin was the first to discover the power of editing in communicating a message. Lenin used film to reach the illiterate population of his country, and it did not take him long to discover that a certain type of cutting could change what the viewer was thinking and feeling. Lenin was able to use cutting to create specific emotional and psychological responses in his viewers.

As editing techniques improved, editors began to experiment with intercutting, or inserting an unrelated shot into the sequence. In fact, editor Lev Kuleshov conducted a fascinating experiment regarding montages. Kuleshov's sequence shows a shot of a man, a shot of a bowl of soup, a shot of the same man, a shot of a woman lying on a coffin, a shot of the same man, and a shot of a child. Viewers of Kuleshov's sequence were impressed by the actor's performance. They commented that he looked at the soup hungrily, regarded the woman mournfully, and had a tender expression toward the child. Actually, all three shots of the man were the same. The man had the same expression on his face in every shot.

Many aspects of film editing go unappreciated, but it is the skilled work of editors that makes most movies what they are. Editors may be some of the least acknowledged workers in the film process, but it is the editors who truly are responsible for the art of the film making process.