Chapter 14
Editing: The Process of Refinement
Editing techniques are hard to grasp from a book, but you can learn about them from films you admire. Work out for yourself how they suggest eyes, ears, and intelligence working together as they dig for subtextual meanings. At the beginning of Chapter 34, Editing: Refinements and Structural Problems, there is an important analogy linking editing to the way human consciousness works. It’s in the advanced editing section because you’ll probably prefer to make your own editing discoveries first.
Lay bare your favorite documentary’s techniques using Project 1-AP-6 Analyze Editing and Content and Project 1-AP-7 Analyze Structure and Style (both in the Appendix).
Unifying Material into a Flow
After running your first assembly two or three times, it increasingly strikes you as clunky blocks of material having a dreadful lack of flow. First you may have some illustrative stuff, then several blocks of interview, then a montage of shots, then another block of something else, and so on. Sequences go by like a series of floats in a parade, each separate from its fellows. How do you get that effortless flow seen in other people’s films?
Once you have found a reasonable order for the material, you will want to combine sound and action in a form that takes advantage of counterpoint techniques. In practice, this means bringing together the sound from one shot with the image from another. To show, say, a teacher with superb theory and poor performance, you could shoot two sets of material, one of relevantly structured interview and the other of the teacher droning away in class.
FIGURE 14-1 (A) First assembly of material using a straight cutting boxcar approach compared with (B), an overlap edit, which allows abbreviation and a simultaneous counterpoint of idea with actuality.
We edit these materials into juxtaposition. The conservative, first-assembly method would alternate segments as in Figure 14-1A: a block of interview in which the man begins explaining his ideas, then a block of teaching, then another block of explanation, then another of teaching, and so on until the point is made. This is a common, although clumsy, way to accomplish the objective in the assembly stage. After a little back-and-forth cutting, technique and message are predictable. I think of it as boxcar cutting because each chunk goes by like boxcars on a railroad.
Instead of alternating the two sets of materials, you can integrate them as shown in Figure 14-1B. Start with the teacher examining his philosophy of teaching and then cut to the classroom sequence, with the classroom sound low and the teacher’s explanation continuing over it (this is called voice-over). When the voice has finished its sentence, we bring up the sound of the classroom sequence and play the classroom at full level. Then we lower the classroom atmosphere and bring in the teacher’s interview voice again. At the end of the classroom action, as the teacher gets interesting, we cut to him in sync (now including his picture to go with his voice). At the end of what was Block 3 in Figure 14-1A, we continue his voice but cut—in picture only—back to the classroom, where we see the bored and mystified kids of Block 4. Now, instead of having description and practice dealt with in separate blocks of material, description is laid against practice, and ideas against reality, in a harder hitting counterpoint. The benefits are multiple. The total sequence is shorter and sprightlier. Talking-head material has been kept to a decent minimum, while the behavioral material—the classroom evidence against which we measure the teacher’s ideas—is now in the majority.
By counterpointing essentials the interview can be pared down, giving what is presented a muscular, spare quality, usually lacking in unedited reminiscence. And there is a much closer and more telling juxtaposition between vocalized theory and actual teaching behavior. You challenge your audience to use its own judgment about the man’s ideas and what he actually does.
Counterpoint editing cannot be worked out in a script or paper edit, but you can quite confidently decide which materials will intercut well. You have to work out the specifics from the materials themselves.
The Audience as Active Participants
A more demanding texture of word and image places the spectator in a more responsible relationship to the “evidence” presented by expecting active rather than passive participation. The contract is no longer just to absorb and be instructed. Instead, the invitation is to interpret and weigh what you see and hear. Sometimes the film uses action to illustrate, other times to contradict, what has seemed true. The teacher is an unreliable narrator whose words you cannot take at face value. Whatever makes any of us an unreliable narrator is always going to be interesting.
No audience likes stories made too easy. We prefer to interpret and weigh information as we do in everyday life. An “unreliable” character is particularly interesting because he or she challenges us to use our judgment.
Other ways to juxtapose and counterpoint stimulate the imagination by changing the conventional coupling of sound and picture. For instance, you might show a street shot in which a young couple goes into a café. We presume they are lovers. They sit at a table in the window. We, who remain outside, are near an elderly couple discussing the price of fish, but the camera moves in close to the window. We see through the glass the couple talking affectionately to each other but hear an old couple arguing over the price of cod. The effect makes an ironic comment on the two states of intimacy; we see courtship but hear the concerns of later life. With great economy of means, and not a little humor, a cynical idea about marriage is set afloat—one that the film might go on to dispel with more hopeful alternatives.
To hook those who normally turn away from documentary, we must find ways to be as funny, earthy, and poignant as life itself. How else to get audiences contemplating the darker aspects of life?
By juxtaposing material that demands interpretation by the audience, film can counterpoint antithetical ideas and moods with great economy. At the same time, it can kindle the audience’s involvement with the dialectical nature of life.
The Overlap Cut
Dialogue Sequences
Another contrapuntal editing device useful to hide the telltale seams between shots is the overlap cut (also known as lap cut or L cut). The overlap cut brings sound in earlier than picture or picture in earlier than sound and thus avoids the jarring level cut, the underlying cause of all clunky boxcar editing.
Figure 14-2 shows a straight-cut version of a conversation between A and B. Whoever speaks is shown on the screen. This quickly becomes predictable and boring. You can alleviate this problem by slugging in some reaction shots (not shown).
Now look at the same conversation using overlap cutting. A starts speaking, but when we hear B’s voice, we wait a sentence before cutting to him. B is interrupted by A, and this time we hold on B’s frustrated expression before cutting to A, driving his point home. Before A has finished and because we are now interested in B’s rising anger, we cut back to him shaking his head. When A has finished, B caps the discussion, and we make a level cut to the next sequence. The three sections of integrated reaction are marked in Figure 14-2 as x, y, and z.
When should you make overlap cuts? Usually it’s done later in editing, but we need a guiding theory. Let’s return for a moment to human consciousness, our ever-reliable model for editing. Imagine you are witnessing a conversation between two people; you have to turn from one to the other. Seldom will you turn your head at the right moment to catch the next speaker beginning—only an omniscient being could be so accurate. Inexperienced or bad editors often make neat, level (and omniscient) cuts between speakers, and the results have a packaged, sterile look that destroys the illusion of watching a spontaneous event.
FIGURE 14-2 Intercutting two speakers to make use of overlap cutting. Overlaps x, y, and z function as listening, reacting shots. This technique reduces the sound gaps between speakers without speeding up apparent pacing.
In real life you can seldom predict who will speak next. The intrusion on our consciousness of a new voice in fact tells us where to look. To convince us a conversation is spontaneous, the editor should mostly follow shifts or anticipatethem. This replicates the disjunctive shifts we unconsciously make as our eyes follow our hearing or our hearing focuses in late on something just seen.
Effective cutting always mimics the needs and reactions of an involved observer, as if we were there ourselves. Listening to a speaker as she begins making her point, we often switch to consider the effect of the point on her listener. Even as we ponder, that listener begins to reply. A moment of forcefulness causes us to switch attention to the listener, so we glance back at her. The line of her mouth hardens, and we know she is disturbed.
We are getting complementary impressions—the speaker through our hearing and the listener through our vision. We listen to the person who acts but look at the person on whom she acts. When that situation reverses and our listener has begun his reply, we glance back to see how the original speaker is reacting. Always we are looking for visual or aural clues—in facial expressions, body language, or vocal tone—to the protagonists’ inner lives.
Editing often must hint at the subtext—that is, the hidden agenda that’s going on under the surface. Subtexts make drama more rich and layered.
Good editing does this. It engages the spectator, not just in hearing and seeing each speaker as he utters (which would be tedious) but also in interpreting what is going on inside each protagonist through catching key moments of action, reaction, or subjective vision. In dramatic terms, this is the search for subtext, for what is going on beneath the surface.
For the ambitious editor the message is clear: Be true to life by conveying the developing sensations of a critical observer. Do this, and sound and picture changeover points are seldom level cuts. Overlap cuts achieve this important disjunction, allowing the film to cut from shot to shot independently of the “his turn, her turn, his turn” speech alternations in the sound track.
Sequence Transitions
A transition from one sequence to the next may also be a staggered cut. Imagine a scene where a boy and girl discuss going out together. The boy says he is worried that the girl’s mother will try to stop them. The girl says, “Oh don’t worry, I can convince her.” The next scene is of the mother closing the refrigerator with a bang and saying firmly, “Absolutely not!” to the aggrieved daughter.
A level cut is like a fast theatrical scene change. More interesting would be to cut from the boy/girl scene to the mother at the refrigerator while the girl is still saying “… I can convince her.” While she is finishing her sentence, the picture cuts forward in time to show the mother slamming the fridge door—which carries metaphorical force. Then she caps it with her line, “Absolutely not!”
Another way to avoid the staccato level cut and merge one scene into the next would be to hold on the boy and girl, have the mother’s angry voice say “Absolutely not!” over the tail end of their scene, and use the surprise of her incoming voice to motivate cutting to the mother’s picture as the scene continues.
Either of these devices serves to make the “joints” between one sequence and the next less noticeable. Sometimes, of course, you want to bring a scene to a slow closure, perhaps with a fade-out, and then gently and slowly begin another, this time perhaps with a fade-in. More often, you want to keep up the momentum and get to the next scene. A level cut often seems to jerk the viewer rudely into a new place and time, while a dissolve integrates the two scenes, but dissolves insert a rest period between scenes and dissipate the carryover of momentum.
The overlap cut is the answer. It keeps the track alive and draws the viewer after it, so the transition seems more natural than forced. You have surely seen this done with sound effects: The factory worker rolls reluctantly out of bed, then as he shaves and dresses, we hear the increasingly loud sound of machinery until we cut in picture to him at work on the production line. Here anticipatory sound drags our attention forward to the next sequence. Because our curiosity demands an answer to the riddle of machine sounds in a bedroom, we do not find the location switch arbitrary.
In L-cuts or lap-cuts, anticipatory sound arrives ahead of its accompanying picture, while holdover sound runs on after its picture has ended and a next one has arrived. These techniques are useful to soften or blur the transition between scenes.
Another overlap cutting technique makes sound work the other way; we cut from the man working on the assembly line to him getting some food out of his home refrigerator. Holdover sound of factory uproar subsides slowly as he exhaustedly eats some leftovers.
In the first example, the aggressive factory sound draws him forward out of his bedroom; in the second, it lingers even after he has gotten home. Each lap cut use implies a psychological narrative because each suggests that the sound exists in his head. It suggests how unpleasant his workplace is to him. At home he thinks of it and is sucked up by it; after work the din continues to haunt him.
Overlap cuts soften transitions between locations or suggest subtext and point of view by implying the inner consciousness of a central character. You could play it the other way, and let the silence of the home trail out into the workplace, so that he is seen at work, and the bedroom radio continues to play softly before being swamped by the rising uproar of the factory. At the end of the day, the sounds of laughter on the television set could displace the factory noise and make us cut to him sitting at home, relaxing with a sitcom.
Use sound and picture transitions creatively, and you transport the viewer forward without the ponderousness of optical effects like dissolves, fades, and (God help us) wipes. You can also scatter important clues about your characters’ inner lives and imaginations.
Mono- and Bidirectional Attention
In life we either probe our surroundings monodirectionally (eyes and ears on the same information source) or bidirectionally (eyes and ears directed at different sources). Our attention also moves in time—forward (anticipation and imagination) or backward (memory). Look for these facets in the films that inspire you and work out for yourself how they suggest eyes, ears, and intelligence working together while they dig for subtextual meanings.
Film language can signify many aspects of shifting consciousness. Such shifts become associated with the characters, the storyteller, or both.
Regaining your Objectivity
After considerable editing, a debilitating familiarity sets in and your ability to make judgments seems to go numb. This is most likely to cripple director–editors who have lived with the intentions for the footage since their inception. Soon every alternative version looks similar, and all seem too long. Two steps are necessary. One is to make a flow chart of your film like a block diagram so you can see its ideas and intentions anew. The other is to show the working cut to a trial audience of a chosen few.
Diagnosis: Making a Flow Chart
Whenever you need a better understanding, it helps to translate it into another form. Statisticians wield the full implications of their figures by making a graph, pie chart, or other proportional image. In our case, we are dealing with the mesmerizing actuality of film, which, as we view it, embraces us within its unfolding present to the detriment of any overview. Luckily, a block diagram will give you a fresh perspective (see box) and make a radical analysis of your film easy.
Find out how your film really works using Project 1-AP-5 Diagnose a Narrative.
To use a block diagram:
- Stop your film after each sequence.
- Briefly describe the sequence’s content in the box. A sequence might contribute:
- Factual information
- Information on or an introduction to a new character
- A new situation and a new thematic strand
- A location or a relationship that will be developed later in the film
- A special mood or feeling
- Describe what the sequence contributes to the film’s development as a whole.
- Add timings (optional, but helpful for making decisions about length).
- Give each sequence an impact rating of 1 to 5 stars (helpful at seeing how well strong and weak materials are distributed).
Now you have a flow chart that lets you see, dispassionately and functionally, what is subconsciously present for an audience. What does the progression of contributions add up to? As with the first assembly, there are more problems hiding in the bushes:
- Lack of early impact or a pedestrian opening that makes the film a late starter (fatal on television)
- Redundancy, especially of expository information
- Necessary information inconsistently supplied
- Holes or backtracking apparent in progression
- Type and frequency of impact poorly distributed over the film’s length (resulting in uneven dramatic progression)
- Similar thematic contributions made several ways (choose the best and dump or reposition the rest)
- Material that fails to advance the film (be brave and kill your darlings)
- The film’s conclusion emerging early, leaving the remainder an unnecessary recapitulation
- Multiple endings (three is not uncommon—choose)
As each ailment emerges from the analysis, it suggests its own cure. Put these into effect, and you can feel rather than quantify the improvement. It hard to overstress the seductions film practices on its makers. After housecleaning, expect a new round of problems to surface. Make a new flow chart even though you feel it’s unnecessary. Almost certainly you’ll find more anomalies.
Over your career, much of this formal process will become second nature and occur spontaneously. Even so, filmmakers of long standing invariably profit from subjecting their work to this formal scrutiny.
A First Showing
Knowing what every brick in your movie’s edifice must accomplish, you are ready to test run your movie on a small audience. In a media organization, this may be the people you work for—producers, senior editors, or a sponsor—so the experience will be grueling. If you can, show the film first to half a dozen whose tastes and interests you respect. The less they know about your film and your aims, the better. Warn them that, as a work in progress, it is still technically raw and has materials missing—music, graphics, sound effects, end titles, whatever. Incidentally, placing a working title at the front helps because it signals the film’s identity.
Before each public showing, the editor should check the film purely for sound levels. Even experienced filmmakers misjudge a film when sound inequities make it inaudible or overbearing. Present your film at its best, or risk getting misleadingly negative responses.
Your work with the flow chart has given you an agenda to explore with your first audience. You know the likely strong and weak points, so now you can find out.
Surviving your Critics and Making Use of what they Say
After the viewing, ask for impressions of the film as a whole. You are about to test the film’s working hypothesis and prove the “what it contributes” part of your analysis form. Don’t be afraid to focus and direct your viewers’ attention, or someone may lead off at a tan gent. Listen carefully, but retain your bearings toward the piece as a whole. Say no more than strictly necessary; never explain the film or explain what you intended, as it will only compromise your audience’s perceptions. A film must stand alone without explication from its authors, so concentrate on getting what your critics are really saying. If these people are your employers, you must be extremely silent.
At screenings for a trial audience, never explain the film or explain what you intended. Your film is supposed to do that. Instead, turn any questions around and solicit the audience’s perceptions. These will tell you how your film is actually functioning. Listen carefully and keep notes.
It takes great self-discipline to sit immobile and take notes. Hearing negative reactions and criticism of your work is emotionally battering. Expect to feel threatened, slighted, misunderstood, and unappreciated and to come away with a raging headache. Following is a typical order of inquiry. Note that it moves from large issues down to the component parts:
- What do audience members think are the film’s theme or themes?
- What are the major issues in the film?
- Did the film feel the right length or was it too long?
- Which parts were unclear or puzzling?
- Which parts felt slow?
- Which parts were moving or otherwise successful?
- What did they feel about … [name of character]?
- What did they end up knowing about … [situation or issue]?
Never under any circumstances will you be able to please everyone in any audience, so don’t even be tempted to try. Instead, listen for any general agreement that you can usefully act on. Hold onto your deepest intentions for the film, though.
Depending on your trial audience’s patience, you may get useful feedback on most of your film’s parts and intentions. Allow for the biases and subjectivity that emerge in your critics. An occasional irritation is the critic who insists on talking about the film he would have made, not the film you have just shown. When this happens, diplomatically redirect the discussion. If several people report the same difficulty, wait. Further comments may cancel each other out and no action be called for. Resolve to make no changes without careful reflection, and keep this in mind: When you ask people for criticism, they look for possible changes—if only to make a contributory mark on your work.
Most important is to hold onto your central intentions. Never revise them without strong and positive reasons to do so. Meanwhile, act only on those suggestions that support and further your central intentions. This is a dangerous time for the filmmaker and indeed for any artist. It is fatally easy to let go of your work’s underlying identity and lose your sense of direction. Keep listening, and don’t be tempted by strong emotions to carve into your film precipitously.
After one of these sessions it’s quite normal to feel that you have failed, that your film is junk, and that all is vanity. The fact is that works in progress always look fairly awful. Audiences are disproportionately affected by a wrong sound balance here, a shot or two that need clipping, or a sequence that belongs earlier.
At this stage, it’s quite normal to feel that you have failed, that your film is junk, and that all is vanity. This is the low point of the artistic process. Be patient and you will recover!
Wait two or three days for the criticism to settle. Now you can look at your film with the eyes of the three audience members who never understood the boy was the woman’s son. Yes, their relationship is twice implied, but there’s a way to insert an extra line where the boy calls her “Mom.” Problem solved. You move on to the next one, and solve that, too. This is the artistic process.
Editing Pitfalls
Here are some traps that emerge during editing that you’ll want to avoid:
- Misidentified sources—Allowing reenacted or reconstructed material to stand unidentified in a film made of otherwise original and authentic materials will get you in trouble. Identify the material’s origin by narration or subtitle. Identify speakers, too, if they need it, with subtitles.
- Spatial errors—If you don’t check essential geography, you can edit actions to suggest that the kitchen is next to the bathroom, and London is near Madrid.
- Temporal mistakes—Show events in a chronology that is demonstrably wrong, and your critics will try using it to discredit the film, as happened to Michael Moore with Roger and Me (1989, United States).
- Elision judgments—Documentary editing involves compression; long statements can be plundered to serve the film but misrepresent the speaker’s original pronouncement. Any participant who runs his own audio recording while you film (as happened to me when filming the leader of the British Union of Fascists) may be preparing to sue you.
- Bogus truth—You can make truth and meaning by juxtaposing unrelated events or statements. Even though something you’ve done is invisible and insignificant to you and even a general audience, participants may be scandalized. They are shocked that you have compressed buying a house into three shots, so be ready to defend and justify each aspect of your narrative flow.
- Participant fears—Sometimes you face a participant’s fear/fantasy when, after weeks of anguish, she wants to retract an innocuous statement vital to your film. You have her signature and the legal right to use it, and you know it can bring her no harm. Can you, should you, go ahead and override her wish? Your good name and career may suffer, and at the very least your conscience will prick you for violating someone’s trust. Then, again, you may have a lot of time or money invested. Maybe a trusted third party can talk her out of her fears?
- Informed consent—A liability to a participant may emerge only at the editing stage. You find, let’s say, that you must either release a significant film that causes pain or danger to someone who trusted you or remove something vital to your film’s effectiveness. At stake is “informed consent.” If you work for a media organization, they will have an explicit policy that you should know intimately. It’s designed to protect the integrity of the organization of which you are a part. Participants should understand how their material will be used and sign a release in good faith indicating that they understand the consequences. You have a right to imply a critical view of someone’s behavior or function but seldom to deceive them and cause them harm. Public figures may be fair game, but private people often merit your diligent protection.
Listening to your conscience is good, and consulting with responsible friends, colleagues, and a lawyer is usually better. Documentaries are critical, they are not made to please people. Real dilemmas do not lie in choosing between right and wrong, but between right and right. Seek advice—and don’t feel that ethical dilemmas are ever something you must solve alone. You may have to level with your participant and see what he feels.
Participants’ Viewings
When should a participant have the right to see and veto a cut? This seems like an easy and natural thing to agree to, but it’s a mine-field. Your work, like that of a journalist, also counts as free speech and you have rights that you shouldn’t give away without good cause.
You secure a personal release from participants so you have the right to edit as you see fit. When they want to see your film before it’s finished, you can use the argument that nobody interviewed by a journalist expects to see the reporter’s notebook or to vet the article before publication. Sometimes, of course, an ethical or moral right will override your authorial privileges and you must bend (gracefully, if you can).
So, if you:
- Have made a film that might land you or your participants in legal trouble, then get legal advice. Be aware that lawyers look on the dark side, because their job is to look for snags and to err on the side of caution.
- Agreed at the outset that you would solicit participants’ feedback, then this is their right.
- Did not work out a consultative agreement with your subjects, then it’s a bad idea to embark on one now without very strong cause.
- Agree to show a work-in-progress cut to participants, then do so only after clearly explaining the limitations to their rights.
- Are willing to take advice but not instruction, then be really clear or expect much bad feeling.
- Think a participant may feel upset or betrayed by something in your film, then prepare him or her in advance so he does not feel humiliated in the presence of family and friends. Fail to do so, and that person may hence-forward regard you as a traitor and all film people as frauds.
Participants see themselves with great subjectivity. To overcompensate in the hope of pleasing them is to abandon documentary work for public relations. Sticky situations at public showings usually go best if you have some general audience members and the person’s friends and family present. Their enjoyment and the approval of the majority usually override the subject’s momentary sensitivity and leave him or her feeling good about the film as a whole.
The Uses of Procrastination
Whether you are pleased or depressed about your film, it is always good to cease work for awhile and do something else. This might be taking a week away from the film, or, if you are under deadline, going to a birthday party instead of working all night. If this anxiety is new to you, take comfort: You are deep in the throes of the creative experience. This is the long, painful labor before giving birth. When you pick up the film again after a judicious lapse, your fatigue and defeatism will have gone away, and the film’s problems and their solutions will seem manageable again.
After sustained editing work, try putting your film away for a week or two. When you return, your energy and optimism will have recovered, and making changes no longer seems so monumentally difficult.
Try, Try Again
A film of substance that requires a long editing evolution will need several new trial audiences. Try the last cut on the original audience to see what progress they think you’ve made. Having a lot of editing in my background, I believe you really create a documentary in the editing process. Magic and miracles happen in an alchemy that is unknown even to crew members unless they have lived through it.