Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 26-December-05
Spoiler Rating: Low

The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing (2004)

"The Cutting Edge" is a great rental for anyone who enjoys movies as either entertainment or art. Using a mixture of interviews and film clips from the past 100 years, this informative documentary examines the history and craft of editing to reveal its enormous significance to moviemaking as a whole.

Put simply, editing is the process of whittling down and rearranging the many thousands of frames of film shot by a director so that they form a meaningful story of acceptable length. Several interviewees in "The Cutting Edge" — popular directors like Tarantino, Scorsese, and Spielberg, plus the editors who work with them — define this process with an analogy. They liken it to writing poetry, where words must be connected in just the right way, or to creating pieces of jewelry or music, where beads or notes are assembled into beautiful patterns. The point most often made (which I find fascinating) is that an editor's chief goal is to provoke an emotional response from the audience. This was the aim of the first film editor, an assistant to Thomas Edison who interspliced scenes of a fire truck with scenes of a woman in a burning house and invited viewers to respond to the drama suggested by this combination. Emotional manipulation was also the object of cinematic spin doctors in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, whose influential tactics are now evident in Oscar winners and Hollywood blockbusters alike.

The documentary itself is proof of the evolution of movie editing, which has grown from an "invisible art" practiced by unrecognized grunts, or "cutters," to a noted and noticeable form of expression. Unlike their predecessors, modern editors (working closely with directors) often make their presence felt to generate a desired response. "The Cutting Edge" offers two examples of this which made a big impression on me in recent years. The first is "Gladiator," where the action sequences burst out in rapid-fire MTV style. I hated these scenes for being chaotic and ugly, but I appreciate the interview segment in which director Ridley Scott calls them a "roller coaster ride of minutiae." The second is my all-time favorite erotic scene from "Out of Sight," which achieves its sexy brilliance from the perfect juxtaposition of image and sound by director Steven Soderbergh and editor Anne V. Coates.

"The Cutting Edge" includes a number of illustrative moments like this, along with a few funny ones (e.g., Rob Cohen discussing his "cubist" approach to the action flick "XXX"). Without being too technical or pedantic, it takes a good look at a skill that impacts everyone who watches a movie.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.