Chapter 11
In the long running television series Star Trek, the highly evolved alien race known as Vulcans can do a very cool maneuver called a “Vulcan Mind Meld.” They place their fingers against someone’s head and sonorously chant “your thoughts to mine,” thus downloading the relevant memories, experiences, and thoughts to solve the problem at hand, direct from the other person’s brain to their own.
This chapter is going to propose that an editor/director collaboration at its best, is like a Vulcan Mind Meld, without the laying on of hands, or the sonorous cliché chanting. And that the editor is the Vulcan.
This chapter is near the end of this book because it relies on the ideas that have come before it about what an editor does in shaping the film edit. Its “meld” theory relies on agreement, in the first instance, that the work of an editor is not just the mechanics of editing, as in chopping bits of sound and image into a timeline. The work of an editor is creative. Editors create structure and rhythm. They do this by manipulating movement. They manipulate the movement of the film from one shot to another, from one idea to another, one performance to another, and so on. The editor shapes the movement of story, the movement of emotion, and the movement of image and sound.
Recognition of this underlying action of an editor, the shaping of movement, is key to understanding how editors make decisions, and also how they collaborate. In the intuitive process of shaping a film’s movement, editors persuasively and skillfully extract the thoughts of directors, producers, and audiences and filter them through their own perspectives and intuitions, to shape the structure and rhythm of the cinematic story.
The Mind Meld
One might be forgiven for thinking that this next section is going to be about the finer sensibilities and listening skills of the editor. Their incredible patience and good humor, exalted capacities for working steadily, quietly, sensitively for long hours with little reward and less credit, and so on. But it isn’t. It is about cognition and the neurology discussed in Chapter 1.
Specifically it is about extended mind theory and mirror neurons.
First a brief re-cap on mirror neurons: these neurons are parts of the brain that mirror movement that you see, allowing you to interpret what you see based on your own feeling for movement or kinaesthetic empathy. These special neurons allow you to understand meaning in movement. Scientists have hypothesized1 that they are the key to how we understand each other: through mirror neurons we recognize the intentions in moving bodies and images and know how they feel.
So, when an editor is shaping the movement of the rushes, she is literally feeling it, empathizing with the movement onscreen as she cuts, and if it doesn’t feel right, if it doesn’t mirror in her body in the right rhythm or dynamic for the meaning she is trying to construct, she moves the cuts and watches again, to see if it feels right the next time.
What does this have to do with collaboration?
Extended Mind
The editor isn’t just feeling the movement of the rushes through her own sensibility, she is also channeling the director’s sense of rhythm, flow, story, and emotion. She shapes the release of information, the emphasis, the emotional qualities by tuning to the movement feeling that the director has brought to the material and that he or she is bringing into the suite. This is where the mind meld comes in. It is unspoken. It is literally felt, through the mirror neurons and the bodies of the collaborators, not discussed or processed consciously. One could say that this is an instance of what cognitive philosophers call “extended mind.”
Chalmers and Clark’s influential 1998 essay “The extended mind” proposes that the mind is not bounded by brain and body. Thinking, they assert, is an activity located in brain, body, and world. By way of illustration they propose, for example, that the re-arrangement of tiles on the scrabble board is “not part of action, it is part of thought.”2 Film editing, is like a scrabble board in this way—you need the pieces in order to have thoughts or make decisions about them.
The “extended mind” of a director, an editor, and the film they are working on relies on what collective cognition advocates call “complementarity.” “Complementarity,” cognitive scientist John Sutton writes, is what happens when “biological and non-biological resources … work together, coalescing into integrated larger cognitive systems.”3 This then is a more scientific explanation (with all due respect to the science officer of the Starship Enterprise, the Vulcan Mr. Spock), of the director–editor “mind meld.” The mind of the director, with its feeling for story, emotion, image, and sound, works with the mind of the editor in a complementary way so that the two minds coalesce, with the filmed material, into an integrated cognitive system.
Heightened Sensitivity
Even in an integrated cognitive system, the editor’s mirror neurons have a particular impact on collaboration because the editor’s are more sensitive or more trained, or both. When this is true, then the editor has a special talent for shaping movement. Great editors have highly refined capacities to see and feel movement. They use it to shape the release of information and ideas into a compelling pattern; to breathe the movement of emotions into a dynamic the viewer can synchronize with immediately, viscerally. They use it to sculpt the movement of images and sound into an aesthetic composition that energizes the sight, carries the emotional dynamic, and conveys the story information with elegance and grace as need be, or with violent collisions should the need be. Editors are trained. They have years of experience. Their intuitions for this particular part of the process, shaping the flow of movement, are sharper, more specialist, more honed than anyone else’s, even the director’s.
What is interesting to me is that this last point may be contentious. But why would it potentially be a put-down of a director to say that someone on the team has a greater talent for some part of the filmmaking process than they do? Why do editors hide this special skill, much the way Vulcans—when in the company of humans on Star Trek—would often hide their pointy Vulcan ears? Are they trying to make the directors/humans feel more comfortable? It is not hard to imagine that the Vulcan Mind Meld may be a bit unnerving for a director to acknowledge. The Vulcan Mind Meld is definitely a ceding of some control, and that, I’m sure, is scary. Especially if the Vulcans are invading your planet. But the trick to collaboration is to realize that the Vulcans are not invading your planet, they are collaborating.
So what does “collaborating” mean? Some people say “working together” is not “collaboration”—if the director is making all of the decisions. But what about decisions made intuitively? Decisions that arise from complementary cognitive processes working as an integrated system? Unspoken decisions that are the result of sensitized neurological and embodied processes rather than discussion? There are also questions about “creativity” that come into the debates on collaboration. I contend that in order to understand the creative collaboration between the director and editor it is necessary to understand that there are different kinds of creativity, some are responsive and some are generative, but all of them are significant. These questions of responsive and generative creativity lead on to questions of power and hierarchies and to consideration of the value to the film, to the process, and to the collaboration, of the editor’s intuitive work.
Decision Making
Like the director, the editor’s job is making decisions. Editors don’t necessarily see or make decisions about anything before it is shot. But they do about absolutely everything after. In fact they may be the only crew members who see and make decisions about everything once it is shot. Editors look at the rushes and start making decisions about three things: which shot, where, and for how long. They look at scenes, sequences, and acts with the same questions. They look at flow of events and ideas, are they clear? Have the decisions made metaphors or just statements of fact as is appropriate to the moment? Do the juxtapositions, moment to moment, create collision or linkage of ideas, emotions, and images? Is time, to paraphrase the title of Yvette Biro’s book on the subject, turbulent or flowing?4 The editor’s work is, in some sense, the most “theoretical” work of any crew member, especially if we take the word “theory” from its ancient Greek origins, theoria meaning “contemplation, speculation, a looking at, things looked at.”5 Editors see it all, they see what it might be if put together in a certain way and they try it out. The first cut is a hypothesis, it asks “does it all fit together like this?” The editor looks at it, it isn’t quite right, she refines the hypothesis, makes another theory of how it all fits together.
Where is the director through all of this? Doesn’t the director make these decisions about what works and what doesn’t? Well yes, absolutely, and no, certainly not. But this is where the questions of “working with” or “working for” comes in, and we’ll get to that in a moment. First, while the director is still on set, or even while she is getting a coffee, or talking on the phone or sitting right next to the editor, the editor makes thousands and thousands of decisions, at the speed of light. Think about it. There are, depending on the country in which you are cutting, 25 or 29+ frames per second. Sixty seconds per minute. There may be three angles on every important minute, and three takes of each angle, nine shots, each lasting roughly a minute, and the editor decides which shot, where, and for how long. Or more precisely, which frame of the possible 1500 of each shot will connect to which frame of the possible 1500 of any other shot from a combined pool of some 15,000 possible frames each of which could be put together, theoretically, with any of the others in any possible combination. Thousands of decisions, made before showing the director anything and asking: “how about this?” so that the director can make one yes or no decision, or perhaps even just “wait and see.”
Responsive Creativity
I turn now to first-hand experience to try to explain the somewhat inexplicable workings of the Vulcan Mind Meld. I recently had two experiences with a director on the same day; they weren’t particular to that director, they were the same two experiences any editor has had countless times.
First, the director comes in and says: “Move this shot before that one”. A few minutes later when I have smoothed the edges of the shot-to-shot relation, so that the cut itself works, the overall flow still isn’t right, it doesn’t feel right. The director suggests that I try putting in ten more frames. I suggest, “Could we try another approach? Rather than telling me what to do, try telling me what you are looking for and I’ll figure out how to do it.” My theory is that allowing an editor this space for responsive creativity is a way of galvanizing the editor’s skill, knowledge, and kinaesthetic intelligence to create what the director is looking for.
The other common experience is when the director gives seven general notes and walks away. Four of them are about shots he wants put back in the cut somewhere and two are about structure; one is telling me what to do and I diplomatically ignore it. (Diplomacy in the director/editor collaboration is not being nice, it is being tough, nicely.) Hours later the director comes back, all of the shots he wanted are back in, and the structure is working. But not the way he expected. I have made, over the few hours he was away, literally hundreds and hundreds of decisions about which shot, where and for how long, which frames to cut on, where to dissolve, how sound and music would create a dynamic with image. When he comes back, he is pleased. He feels his choices have been good ones. “Good notes,” I say. “Good cutting,” says he, acknowledging that cutting and directing are not the same thing.
The editor/director collaboration is interpretive, and it requires editors’ intelligence to be activated, their decision-making capacities to be engaged, and their particular talents to be given space to stretch their legs. As Cate Blanchett said, in an interview in The Sydney Morning Herald, “It is not the director’s job to connect the dots for you. The director makes a proposition and you complete the sentence—that’s the actor’s job.”6 Later down the track it’s the editor’s job, too, and just like actors, editors do a better job if they are given recognition of their unique capacities to do it, without anyone being afraid that their decision-making authority is being stripped away.
Power and Hierarchy
So are the director and the editor equal? That is the wrong question. They are not “equals” in the hierarchy—if they irrevocably disagree, the director gets the final say.
Are they both decision-makers? Both creative? Clearly. They are equally creative and occupy different spheres of creativity. Interpretive creativity is not “less” than generative creativity and does not involve less decision making, it comes at a different phase in the process and takes its directions from a different source.
Generative creativity collaborates with interpretive creativity or perishes. Interpretive creativity makes decisions, applies skills, knowledge, wisdoms, experiences, artistry that the generator does not have and so cannot apply.
I have elsewhere argued that editors are like dancers; now I’ll make the analogy with singers. Composers can’t necessarily sing, and if they can’t, they are stuffed without singers. Which is “higher”: composing or singing? Which is more “valuable”? Which is more creative? Which brings more to the project? Why ask such stupid questions? They need each other, and we need both.
The question of equality has a bit of a mind–body-split whiff around it. Why do we say there is unevenness of “thought” if one person is making the decisions and another is setting up the material to be decided upon, that one is a labor more exalted or important, that one is art and the other craft?
What if we were to ask the movie—were you made by one mind or many? Are you the sum of your parts or greater? If each “collaborator” thinks that their creative contribution to the film is 50 percent, and there are ten key creatives or heads of department, then how do we account for the whole being 500 percent collaborators contributions? Why doesn’t it add up? Are these people deluded about how important their role is? No. It just isn’t a quantifiable equation.
Australian film industry analysts Simon Molloy and David Court have written about the value of “psychic income” to the film industry. (“Psychic income” being an economist’s term for what we used to call meaning or camaraderie or the satisfaction of doing your best, or being creative). Molloy and Court suggest that “consumers of Australian screen content … are the beneficiaries of a 150–295 million dollar annual subsidy based on the passion and commitment of workers in the sector.”7 I would like to suggest that it is not just the audience but the film itself that benefits from the psychic contributions, made by mind meld or otherwise, of creative personnel, and this is why the equation can’t be quantified. Everyone gives 100 percent and still the film is greater than the sum of its parts.
Synchronizing with the Director
Sometimes tensions arise between directors and editors who “feel” things differently, and the editor has some tricky judgment calls to make in these situations. If a director feels the rise and fall of tension and release or the flow of movement in a different way from the editor, it could be because he is not seeing what is really there, but what he hoped would be there, or what he intended to have captured but didn’t. In these cases, it is up to the editor to bring the director around to a new way of seeing the material. This may mean working without the director present for a while and shaping something that has its own integrity. Then, when the director sees it, there is an opportunity for him to say, “That’s not how I intended it, but it really works.”
On the other hand, sometimes directors and editors feel things differently because the director is deeply tuned to the material and the performances, and the editor doesn’t yet see its potential to go in a particular direction. In these cases, it is really important to try to synchronize through the director. Use his sense of how things flow rather than your own—see with his eyes, feel with his heart rate, tune your kinaesthetic empathy to his feeling for the rise and fall of tension in a scene or across the whole film.
Figure 11.1 Working collaboratively in the edit suite under pressure, as seen in Phillip Noyce’s classic Australian drama Newsfront (1978). [Photo credit: Palm Beach Pictures; The Kobal Collection]
In either case, it’s essential not to make too big a deal of things too early. Much will change over the course of an edit and if there is a showdown over who is right about a given moment, then that moment will always be a sore point, no matter who wins. Furthermore, both the editor and the director actually lose in these showdowns because their experience of the contentious moment shifts from being a direct experience of the material to an indirect one: instead of seeing the moment, they remember the argument and impasse it caused and see it as a problem. Diplomacy skills are emphasized in the teaching of editing, and this is one example of where those skills can be used to good effect. If no standoff is created by the editor, then, later, when things have cooled down, it will always be possible to come back and have another go at the moment in question.
A cautionary note for both editors and directors: Editors hate it when directors snap their fingers or hit the table to indicate where they want a cut because these gestures, as well as expressing a kind of dictatorship or distrust of the editor’s intuition, can actually jump between the editor and her own feeling for the material. On the other hand, these directorial gestures are very immediate physical responses and could save lots of time and discussion about how the material should be shaped. If the editor can just step back and not take them personally, the director’s gestures can be a great guide to how he feels the material. My advice to directors is: Try not to snap your fingers, as that seems imperious, but do make the gestures that will clue the editor in to how you feel the material; that way, at least she’ll know what she’s working with.
In the end, understanding the Vulcan Mind Meld of editing as intuitive, unspoken collaboration requires understanding minds as physical and cultural entities. Minds are not just functions of brain and body; they are integrated systems of brain, body, and world. They are not just neurons flashing in patterns, responding to and creating movement, memory and emotion; they are also an endless cultural inheritance.
The mix of the physical and the cultural, the blend that makes decisions and shapes artworks is what we call “intuition”. As the Vulcan in this metaphor, the editor is not taking power from the director, they are using their intuition to interpret the material. They are “making it their own” by investing their “psychic money”. They are not taking anything away by being creative, they are collaborating.
Endnotes
1. Gallese, V., and Goldman, A., “Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind-reading.”
2. Clark, A., and Chalmers, D., “The extended mind.”
3. Sutton, J. (2010). “Exograms and interdisciplinarity: History, the extended mind, and the civilizing process.”
4. Biro, Y., Turbulence and Flow in Film, The Rhythmic Design.
5. Definition, from www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=theory (accessed 2 November, 2012).
6. Blake, E., “A theatrical masterclass.”
7. Molly, S., and Court, D., “For love and money: Estimating the value of psychic income in Australia.”