The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing

Cinema was an invention without a future, according to one of the founding Lumiere brothers, until the advent of “cutting” or film editing (early films were made from single cameras capturing one long uninterrupted shot). Today, many feature films finish production with 200 hours of raw footage (from multiple cameras filming at numerous angles), which is then edited—on average—into an 90-120 minute movie. It is the editor's job to take this huge clump of cinematic clay and shape it into a work of “art,” or at least “entertainment,” and success or failure may lie in a matter of a few seconds kept in the film or left on the cutting room floor (or, as Jaws director Steven Spielberg puts it, “something that would look really scary, or something that would look like a Great White turd”). As Wendy Apple's fine The Cutting Edge points out, the relationship between the director and the editor is much like a marriage with its share of love/hate moments, and—indeed—it is notable that while male directors still outnumber female directors by a wide margin, many of the top film editors are women—including the late Verna Fields (Jaws), Sally Menke (Pulp Fiction), Carol Littleton (Body Heat), Thelma Schoonmaker (The Aviator), and Dede Allen (Bonnie and Clyde). Originally, editing was—in fact—considered women's work, a sort of stitching, but as the language of cinema became more complex, editing (which George Lucas here calls “visual poetry”) took on greater significance, ultimately being recognized as the final rewrite of a film. The Cutting Edge traces the history of editing, from The Great Train Robbery and the Russian montage pioneers (including the famous Odessa steps sequence in The Battleship Potemkin and the brilliant Man With a Camera) to Truffaut's rule-breaking French New Wave classic Breathless to contemporary films such as JFK that fragment time and space. Interspersed throughout are interviews with directors, editors, and film historians (including Neal Gabler), with the go-to man here being the very knowledgeable and eloquent editor Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now) who deservedly receives much screen time and even shares some real-time editing decisions with the audience as he works on scenes from 2003's Cold Mountain. Packed full of insightful comments and wonderful film clips, The Cutting Edge is both a solid introduction to the subject of editing and a heartfelt homage. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)