Editing is an area that sounds technical enough to make people who talk about it sound smart, but in reality its qualities are so elusive that the vast majority of people trying to speak to its merits are fooling themselves into thinking they’re experts just because they’ve used iMovie before.
Forget even for a moment that there are plenty of theorists who argue that cinema is based entirely on editing (they call it “montage” because French words are inherently more intellectual), so saying a movie was poorly edited essentially means it was a poor movie anyway so the criticism is redundant. The fact that the Oscar for Best Editing almost always gets awarded to the movie that also wins Best Picture bears this out.
But forget that it’s redundant. The real issue with trying to speak to a movie’s editing specifically is that unless you know what the editor(s) had to work with in the cutting room, it’s impossible to know how well a movie is actually edited. Every filmmaker I’ve ever heard or read on this subject attests to this, most notably Sidney Lumet in his phenomenally informative book Making Movies. I’m dropping his name so you can trust my credibility without giving it a second thought. A movie can be pieced together brilliantly from poor material and be indistinguishable from an expertly shot collection of footage thrown together willy-nilly. So when people throw this line out they’re usually trying to talk more about a film’s general rhythm, which is difficult to articulate, and how that fits in with the actual material of the movie. But that’s harder to talk about, so soundbites have to suffice sometimes.
Continue reading on the next page…
