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Cut to Black

Buckets and two structures

Chad Herschberger (#13) describes cutting 78/52 from four buckets of material instead of an A-to-B arc, with interviews marked for the best takes and spread out so no single voice lectures. The editors of Fantastic Machine (#27) describe two structures running at once, a historical one from 1828 and an associative one, both found in the edit and tuned by screening for audiences.

Neither starts from a story and fills it in. Both start from piles and ask what the piles want to be next to each other.

A video to make: sort a few minutes of footage into three or four buckets by theme, not by date. Cut it once by walking through the buckets in turn, and once by interleaving them. Show both and ask which one felt like it had a shape.

By Raz Rotenberg, made with AI

More from Cut to Black

  • Ann Collins (#12) says the opening is cut last and the ending is the easier part, found by asking subjects how the story changed them. Two editors this week describe endings found a different way.

    Nels Bangerter (#53, Dick Johnson Is Dead) says the fake funeral was the first thing shot, and the team realized "it could end as well as beginning there." Gabriel Rhodes (#54, Time) closes on a sequence played in reverse, with the mother returning, chosen so she is not shown too rosily. …

  • Two films that put the cut on screen. Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (#6) has no intertitles, no actors and no story; a day in Soviet cities is assembled entirely in the edit. Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay on F for Fake (#11) reads Welles's film as a documentary about fakery, one that hides small tells for a second viewing: a misspelled word in the credits, outtakes reused. …

  • Lanthier (#30) lines up three ways of telling the viewer a scene is staged. Gibney's Client 9 lets an actress's voice stand in for an anonymous subject and says so only about halfway through. Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated puts the substitution in a caption. The Arbor has actors lip-sync to real recorded interviews, and lets the sync slip. …

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