"What makes a movie a movie is the editing," says Zach Staenberg in the documentary "The Cutting Edge."
Admittedly, Staenberg is an editor, most famously of the "Matrix" movies, but he's not wrong. Editing can create emotion, speed up or slow the pace, explore the psychology of a character or find meaning that even the actors and writers didn't know was there. Along with the director, an editor decides what we look at and for how long.
You'll find examples in the clip-filled and entertaining "The Cutting Edge," which examines the art of editing and which you can watch for free on YouTube. In it, we see editing legend Walter Murch solve "problems" created in the filming of "Cold Mountain," hear his compadres talk about why it's so much fun to work on chase scenes, learn why women broke into the craft much earlier than others (spoiler alert: sexism worked in their favor) and see how famous scenes might have been altered if an editor had made different choices.
The job is one of the most misunderstood in Hollywood. You'll often hear it said, "Why didn't the editor make it shorter?," which misrepresents the role of an editor, who is more likely to determine how individual shots fit within scenes than the movie's length (that's a director's or producer's call). Even Oscar voters get it wrong. They generally throw up their hands and award the editing statue to the best picture winner, unless there's a flashier option ("Whiplash," cut to the rhythms of jazz, or "All That Jazz," where almost-subliminal cuts plunge us into the mind of its out-of-control protagonist) or a movie with cars banging into each other ("The French Connection," "Grand Prix" and "Bullitt" all won for their editing).
"The Cutting Edge" is mostly about American movies, but it pays tribute to the pioneering '50s and '60s French editors whose jittery technique spread to Hollywood films such as "Bonnie and Clyde" and continues to this day in, for instance, "Moonlight."
It also acknowledges the founders of editing, many of them Russian, who figured out basics such as the Kuleshov Effect, which established that you could juxtapose a blank-faced actor with an image of, say, a birthday cake or a dead body, and the audience would interpret the blank expression as showing emotions such as delight or horror. We don't notice it, but this effect is in literally every movie. When the Walker Art Center's Mediatheque reopens, you can view dozens of examples from Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," Dziga Vertov's "Man With a Movie Camera" and D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance."
These greats say a lot about the editors who decide what makes the cut.
Martin Scorsese is making an adaptation of "Killers of the Flower Moon" right now, and that means editor Thelma Schoonmaker is making a new movie, too. She has been with Scorsese in the editing suite since 1967. She's won three Oscars for Scorsese movies (triple his total!), including this one, in which the slowed-down, sped-up, knocked-sideways boxing scenes are the most striking.
