Posts
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. …
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. …
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. …
The editors of Fantastic Machine (#27) say they cut for composition, not dramatic arc, and describe two structures running together: a historical one starting in 1828 and a looser, associative one. Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (#6) is the older case of a film whose shape is made in the edit.
A video to make: cut three minutes of found footage twice, once in date order and once by association, and show both to a few people. Ask where each one lost them.
Cut the opening last
Ann Collins (#12) says the opening is the last piece to settle, and the ending is the easier one: ask the subjects how the story changed them, and the answer is usually the ending. Chad Herschberger (#13) describes 78/52 as the opposite of an A-to-B arc, with four buckets of material and a rewind device that keeps returning to the shower scene. …
The interview as spine
Ehrlich (#8) says the whole structure of My Octopus Teacher comes from its interview. Lanzmann's Shoah (#5) is that idea at nine hours.
A video to make: take one long interview and lay out its structure on cards before touching footage. Then ask Ehrlich's question of the ending: did it cut easily because the interview had already decided it? Compare with how hard the opening was to find.
Only the edit
Make a short with no narration and no interviews, cut the way Vertov cut a city (#6). Then make a second with nothing but one interview, the way Shoah builds on witnesses (#5). Show both, and ask which told you more.
Staged, then and now
A video on re-enactment, from Flaherty's arranged scenes in Nanook (#1) to Morris's stylized ones in The Thin Blue Line (#3). One hid them; the other made them the argument. End on the question your viewers can answer: when is staging honest?