Do Film Critics Know What Editors Do?
Comments by Critic Peter Rainer
Peter Rainer is a film critic at The Los Angeles Times and chairman of the National Society of Film Critics. The Newsletter asked him to respond to a comment by George Grenville, ACE that the average critic doesn't know what editors do.
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We Began By Talking About What Editing Is
I think people in general don't understand what editing is, and that's not entirely a bad thing. To some extent, editing is somewhat mysterious and even editors may not know exactly what they do. I mean editing to me is a form of music -- a really good editor is kind of like a jazz musician -- you know, who has a kind of syncopated movie and works out visual rhythms that are not easily defined.
You can watch a really well cut sequence -- and I'm not talking just about the obvious kinds of cuts that people recognize, everyone understands the movie 'Speed' is an edited movie because there are all these slam-bang cuts all the time, it's the kind of action film where even the general public recognizes there's an editor there -- the kind of seamless editing you see in a lot of movies where you're not aware of the editing is often the best and the most difficult to do. It's not recognized by virtue of the fact that it's not supposed to be recognized. It's the equivalent of really good actors who don't let you know they're acting and they often get penalized for that, as opposed to the actors who chew the scenery all the time and play drunks and feral waifs and get Oscars for it.
A lot of the best editing effects are subliminal. It's often why when you come out of a movie you may feel moved in some way by the film and you're not quite sure why. I think that has a lot to do with the editing. In the same way that, when you hear a piece of music, it often gets you in places that you're not fully aware of. I think it gets at a kind of innate rhythm that people carry around with them. And if you tap that as an editor, you can sometimes bring audiences along in ways that more explicit techniques in films can't accomplish.
Some of the best editing effects in The Fugitive are probably the ones that aren't recognized, the simplest -- not just the train wreck or jumping over the dam. This certainly also has a great deal to do with the acting, but the most memorable moment for me in The Fugitive (a movie I wasn't crazy about but it's certainly watchable) was for me when Harrison Ford was being chased by Tommy Lee Jones and they cut back and forth between them, a real cat and mouse thing -- sort of like The Third Man -- then Ford says, 'I didn't kill my wife', there's a beat and Jones says, 'I don't care'. He could have cut that sequence in many different ways so that that line wouldn't have had the kind of payoff that it had.
Peter Was Asked If He Can Recognize Individual Editors' Styles
I'm not sure. All I can say is that I would like to think that I know good editing when I see it and there are editors whose work I've watched for all my movie-going career whose stuff I am particularly aware of because I think they give their films something extra that I cannot see in most movies. And it doesn't always have to be in the good movies. There are very well edited bad movies -- Natural Born Killers is very well edited but it's a terrible movie.
I've noticed that movies are generally too long now -- even the good ones. How much does an editor have to do with that? Producers and studio heads are so concerned about their investment that they put in as many different things in the movie as possible to get the greatest possible return. A lot of our favorite movies from bygone years are ninety minutes long -- certainly under two hours. I don't think audiences felt cheated watching Citizen Kane because it wasn't two hours and forty-five minutes like The Shawshank Redemption.
I think how technology affects the art of film is certainly an interesting issue. Whether changes in editing equipment affect movies -- whether there's any artistic improvement or whether it's just simply a way to facilitate what's already been done in the past. I mean obviously if you go back to the beginnings of film, various technical improvements have affected the art of film -- Robert Altman could not have existed prior to the multi-track and that's an artistic advance that was brought about because of a technical innovation, multi-track overlapping sound, dialogue and sound effects. With editing, I suspect that it's sort of analogous to the computer versus the typewriter -- digital computer work stations versus Moviolas. I don't think that the proliferation of PC's has resulted in a generation of better writers, better books, better journalists.
I'm still very dubious about the idea that, at least at this point in the history in film, a lot of advanced technologies can result in any artistic advances. If you think that, you're thinking the way Hollywood is thinking now, which is the more technology you pile on, somehow the better it is. A good movie comes from the same place it always came from, which is inspiration, good ideas, creativity. And that sort of thing, I think, is for the most part inherent in the filmmakers - it's not inherent in the technology.
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
Vol. 16, No. 1 - Jan/Feb 1995
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