Looking at and Looking Through

To reflect how we watch two people interact in a conversation, a film version must relay three different points of view: one for each of the participants and a third for the observer. The observer’s point of view (POV), being outside their enclosed consciousness, tends to look at them from a more detached, judging vantage but is susceptible to empathically entering each protagonist’s viewpoint when the observer feels called to do so.

Depending on what the editor shows, the audience will identify either with one of the characters or with the more detached perspective of the Observer—who in film becomes the Storyteller once the camera observations have become a tale. While character A talks, for instance, the Observer (through whose eyes and mind we see) might look at either A or B in search of ideas, expectations, suspicions, etc., that A has of B or vice versa. Or the Storyteller might show them both in a long shot. The Observer on the spot sees, reacts, and remembers, while the Storyteller uses this material stored in memory to instruct and entertain an audience—functions with an important difference.

These possibilities of viewpoint allow the Storyteller not only to construe privileged viewpoints but also to demonstrate what anyone observing sees (and therefore feels) at any particular moment. This probing, analytic way of seeing develops from the way that we, unconsciously and in the moment, delve into any situation that interests us.

The film process thus mimics the interpretive quest that both accompanies and directs human observation. It’s complicated to grasp, and you’ll understand it best from discovering how you first (passively) observe and then (actively) decide what action to take. There are many nonverbal signs that help—in body language, eyeline shifts, voice inflections, and particular actions—and to which we all ascribe similar meanings.

Editing Rhythms: An Analogy in Music

Music makes a useful analogy if we imagine, for a moment, an edited conversation between child and grandparent. We have two different but interlocked rhythms going: First, there is the rhythmic pattern of their voices in a series of sentences that ebb and flow, speed up, slow down, halt, restart, fade, and so on. Set against this, and taking its rhythmic cue from speech rhythms, is the visual tempo set up by the interplay of cutting, image compositions, and camera movement. The two streams, visual and aural, proceed independently yet in rhythmic relationship, like the music and the physical movements in a dance performance.

Using your Instincts While Editing

As you watched your inner process of inquiry and empathy unfold while a couple conversed, so you can expect similarly authentic reactions to a piece of editing. Where is the dream state of high consciousness broken? What breaks it? What is missing, or too long, or too short? What is needed? Your instincts will tell you, if you ask them and wait while your thoughts coalesce. You are looking for an authentic stream of consciousness, and just as you’d recognized a wrong note or wrong chord in a musical composition, so you recognize where things go awry in a piece of editing.

Trial Audiences

You’ll need to use trial audiences so you get feedback from newcomers—your eventual audience being only newcomers. By this stage everyone associated with the film, particularly the director and editor, are hugely fatigued and encumbered from the experience of working on it. You know what the audience should see and feel, and it’s easy to assume this is happening. Sitting through each viewing and relating the audience’s body language to each part, you’ll see from movement or stillness which sections are gripping and which aren’t. You ask the same kind of questions but focus on the parts where the audience shows signs of restlessness.

Subtexts: Making the Visible Significant

A baffling problem that often emerges during editing is that, for some reason, nobody gets the underlying reason for something. They don’t understand that a bank official feels bad when he can’t give the small business owner a loan. Your audience sees him as heartless. The problem is one of subtext; for some reason, they don’t notice what you notice. Why?

In Chapter 5 of his Literature and Film, Robert Richardson goes to the heart of the filmmaker’s problem:

It’s simply difficult to drive the film audience’s awareness beyond what is literally and materially in front of the camera. For instance, we may accept a scene in which a mother makes lunch for her children as simply that. So what, you ask, mothers make lunch for kids all the time. But there are nuances: One child has persistent difficulty choosing what she wants. The mother is trying to sup press her irritation. Looking closely, you see that the child is manipulating the situation. Food and eating have become their battleground, their frontier in a struggle over who controls whom. The mother’s moral authority comes from telling her daughter she must eat right to stay healthy, while the child asserts her authority over her own body by a maddening noncompliance.

If the audience had first seen child and mother in some other, more overt conflict over control, they would read the scene correctly, and of course there may be several other ways to channel the audience’s attention. But without the proper structural or contextual support, the significance and universality of such a scene could easily pass unnoticed. What you start to see happening on the fourth viewing won’t necessarily strike even the more perceptive of first-time viewers. They lack your commitment, your deepening insight that comes from behind-the-scenes knowledge and your repeated exposure.

However your knowledge evolved, you must now evolve your audience’s in the same way. You may have to restructure the film or add shots or scenes that alert the audience to that power struggle. You may have to show an additional scene with the bank manager to show that he is a compassionate man.

Using the Editing Diagnostic Form

Take a look at Project AP-3 Editing Diagnostic Form (in the Appendix). As a prelude to digging into your film’s hidden aspects, it invites you to log your film sequence by sequence. You identify each by a content tag title such as “Terry’s first confrontation with his supervisor” and briefly describe each sequence’s contribution to the film’s developing argument, such as “We see the resurgence of Terry’s old problem with authority figures.”

You’ll find it helpful later if you number the sequences and log their cumulative timecode. Use the elapsed time facility in your editing software to determine the length of each sequence. Then, quite subjectively, give each sequence an impact rating of between 0 and 5 stars.

You’ll find that merely filling in the form will help you decide:

• Each sequence’s identity—because you had to name it (the tag title).
• Its function (experience, facts, or impressions, etc.) and what it contributes to the audience’s stream of consciousness. Placing a sequence elsewhere won’t change its content but often alters its function.
• Whether its length and impact rating are consonant. Lengthy sequences that contribute little are prime candidates for the ax.
• What the progression of impact ratings looks like, from the film’s beginning to its end. By laying it out horizontally, you can build a characteristic curve for the entire film. Does it peak early or sag in places?

Now divide your film into acts and rule colored lines between acts:

• Is all material in its right act?
• Do the length and complexity of each act look proportionate? (Act II is normally longer and more complex than Acts I and III.)
• Does the film imply a contract in its first minute so the audience can judge what lies ahead?
• Do the introduction and development of the film proceed logically? (Often there are back doubles or repetitions, or sequences that seem long delayed.)
• Can you see redundancy? (Showing the same basic situation twice is redundant unless the second raises the stakes in some way.)
• Are there any significant holes in the film’s argument?
• Is there too much exposition before there is any action? (Explanations are sometimes better after the action.)
• Can exposition be apportioned better?
• Do the characters appear when you are ready for them?
• Looking at the argument, whose film is it?
• Does the film’s resolution fall in the right place and occupy the right amount of time?

Some aspects of your film will be limited to where their chronology allows them to go. Other aspects are moveable and may deliver better if you move them. Here’s how.

Film into Playing Cards

Photocopy your completed form and cut the copies into discrete sequences. Paste them onto large index cards so you have a set of playing cards that you can group into Acts I, II, and III.

Now move material around to see the potential in using the material differently. This is good to do in a group discussion, with each participant arguing for changes and illustrating his ideas by moving sequences around, narrating the new order, and describing the impressions it creates.

In playing-card form, everyone has a reminder of what the film holds and can take a bird’s eye view of its potential. Each sequence you eliminate carries a number and a note of its length so you can compute time saved. The numbers enable you to return the cards to the film’s existing form.

Without such an overview and discussion of movable parts it’s almost impossible to decide where material might belong in a film series. This method is good for surveying each film’s dramatic development and deciding where it gets hung up, goes in circles, or otherwise shoots itself in the foot. The longer and more convoluted the work in hand, the more essential a method like this becomes.

Multiple Endings

When your film has several endings, you have a problem whose cause is nearly always the same: You haven’t decided what your film is really about. You are hanging on to multiple intentions and hoping you can cover them all. Probably you can’t.

To escape the labyrinth, write a fresh working hypothesis for your film and a revised premise. This will help clarify priorities so you can jettison the outriders. Go on, grit your teeth and kill your darlings… sorry, but one must. It’s the last stage in the artistic process.

More Trial Audiences

Particularly with a long film, you must use a series of trial audiences to see what effect each round of changes has had. You’ll know what information you’re seeking and can structure the Q & A session accordingly. If you think some of your audience—say, other filmmakers—would be amenable to discussing the film’s working parts in detail, have a set of sequence cards ready. A lot of new ideas arise when people with open minds look at your layout.

Length

Is your film standing up at its present length? A common mistake is to set a length and then resist trimming the film because you always intended it to be, say, feature length (90 minutes) or an hour (58 minutes). It’s disappointing when your film doesn’t hold up, but if your audiences are telling you it’s dragging, then you must bite the bullet and make a good film from the long one. You won’t regret it.