Cinema- Concept & Practice

by Edward Dmytryk

  Excluding the many pure action movies, most films made today are essentially theatrical; that is, dialogue carries the day. The best are a mixture of cinema and theater; some sequences are all dialogue, others are largely action, or image, and this imposes a duality of techniques on the editor. Where dialogue dominates, it should be respected and given its full due; but when action or image prevails, words, like music, become underscoring. In short, a sequence should get the treatment that will exploit its special qualities, but it should be understood that the two techniques are quite different.

  Until now the words “cutting” and “editing” have been used interchangeably, as they still are in Hollywood, but such ambiguity diminishes our ability to discuss the craft intelligently. In my lexicon the two words are by no means synonymous, except in a very casual sense, and the fact that they have been so used probably helps to explain the decline in regard and respect for the art and the artist. All editors can “cut,” but only a comparitively few “cutters” can edit. Advanced editing is an intuitive skill and, as is true in all arts and crafts, it is exceedingly rare.

  It is a cliché in the field of education that “talent can’t be taught,” and since editing is a gift rather than a mechanical routine, it is difficult to illustrate its advantages, but two simple examples will at least hint at the concept. The first is that of the football game in Chapter 3, where it is used in a different context. But if the change in routine, as suggested, takes place during the cutting process rather than in the shooting, it is called creative editing. The second example is slightly different. Let us imagine that a sequence showing the start of an important airplane flight has been written and shot in the following manner: First, a long shot of a busy airport with planes taking off and landing, then a closer shot of a particular plane at its terminal. A montage of cuts shows passengers getting out of taxis or limousines, crowding the ticket lines, depositing luggage, negotiating the electronic frisking gates, boarding the plane, and finally settling in their seats. About this time a nervous baggage handler approaches the plane, looks about carefully, then quickly opens a luggage door and shoves in a small valise.

  Now, of course, the viewer feels some suspense, but how late in the proceedings! Here, the preliminaries, even if nicely edited, have been routine and dull, more documentary than narrative in style. Characters have been introduced in some of the montage cuts, but even if they are “names” they are of little immediate importance.

  However, a smart editor can realign the material to show the stowage of the suspicious bag before the boarding montage develops. Now the passengers’ very lack of apprehension has an aura of suspense; the introduced characters as well as the background people are all potential victims and therefore worth the special attention of the viewer, who is aware that he may be looking at dead men and women.

  Such rearrangements of cuts, usually far more complicated than these beginners’ examples, seem quite simple and logical. Why aren’t they written that way? Why wasn’t Heaven’s Gate a smash success? Hindsight is always easy, but such misconstructions in the writing and the shooting are by no means infrequent, and the possibility of an improved scene are often overlooked. Still, creative editing (which can stem from any one of a half-dozen minds) has improved a thousand sequences.

  Finally we come to one of the most difficult and sensitive areas of good film editing—the film as a singularity. For the film as a whole, the extension of the properly timed cut is the perfectly smooth flow. In this context, “smoothness” is quite separate from the film’s level of tension, of action, of violence; it underlies all of these but deals only with the inexorable progress of time—the flow of life. Although, in the process of shooting, scenes have been studied, started and stopped a thousand times and more, the edited result should show not the slightest evidence of this, only a subconscious impression of continued forward movement. Temporal reality is unimportant, but chronological direction is an imperative. The river of time may have eddies, rapids, and limpid pools, but it must never stop, hiccup, or flow backwards. And the viewer must feel, if he bothers to think about it, that every character in the film, no matter how insignificant, continues to live and, unless he is killed or dies in the film, will continue to live even when he is offscreen. Life does not stop with the cut.

  Notes

  * The masculine gender is used here (as in most other sections) for simplicity in writing. In fact, editing is a field that has always been wide open to women (which cannot be said of most film crafts), and their skills have always been quite unchauvinistically regarded.

  * However, when a thirty-five million dollar production lives in the cutting room for a year or more, one may surmise the shooting was, to say the least, confused.

  * For a detailed technical exposition of this aspect of film editing, see Edward Dmytryk, On Film Editing (Stoneham, MA: Focal Press, 1984), Chapter 9.

  15

  About a Forgotten Art

  “I want to share this with you.” During the last two decades this expression of the “Me” generation’s idea of unselfishness has captured the young and the old alike. Such a concept destroys not only marriages but artists as well.

  In Southern California, an elderly TV weatherman often “shares” his meteorological information. Why doesn’t he give it away? If he is reluctant to bestow that which is not really his to begin with, he might at least “pass it on” with apologies to the United States Weather Bureau. But no, he shares it, even though giving would cost him not a pennyworth in money or self-esteem, and would relieve him of a very unreliable responsibility. The ancient desert patriarchs knew the score. “It is more blessed to give,” they said—to give, not share. “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

  This book’s orientation has been toward the receiver, the viewer, because although giving is never wholly altruistic, the chief goal of any artist should be to give his work to the people. To create for one’s own glory is risky business, since no artist knows for sure the aesthetic worth of his work while it is in progress. But if people accept his efforts, they will crown him with more garlands than his brow can decently wear. On the other hand, the man who asks his crew to perform the most difficult feats purely for his own credit may dazzle thousands but he is, at least at the moment, an arty pretender rather than an honest artist. Filmmaking is not just an opportunity to make an obvious display of one’s creative brilliance; it is an effort to communicate effectively, to reach and touch another. I would gladly trade the most ingenious ten minute “sequence shot” for a 27-second close-up of Ingrid Bergman looking longingly at the man she loves. The less gifted filmmakers offer their viewers technique or catharsis and escape; the artists help them to learn how to live.

  “Poetry comes with anger, hunger, and dismay,” said Christopher Morley, and Donald Culross Peattie affirmed what the world of artists had long accepted as a cliché. “A poet should always be hungry,” he wrote. For obvious reasons narrative film is rarely poetic; normally it is a mass medium which aims its product at a mass audience. It is freely charged and reluctantly admitted that the resulting product is overwhelmingly mediocre, and a mediocre product suggests mediocre crafting and craftspeople. So it is little short of miraculous that in a medium dedicated to the ordinary, a few film-makers have been able to extrude gold out of blocks of utterly common clay, to create “poetry” through narrative film.

  Today the miracle is less often in evidence; most filmmakers, like their product, now spring from the middle class, and their only spur is the possibility of money and fame. As indicated by Morley and Peattie, those are not the incentives that have traditionally propelled anyone toward art. Perhaps a few women and minority members, predominantly blacks and Latinos who are beginning to edge their way into the filmmaking community against fairly heavy odds, have been gouged by the rowels of hunger and anger, but film recruits are largely fat and sassy college graduates. Few, if any, have felt the wolf gnawing at their bellies, and most reserve their ire for th
ose who deny them their luxuries or try to prod them to higher standards of excellence.

  The “democratic” contention, spread by parents and educators, that all persons are bom with a “gift” that can be uncorked by training and practice is, of course, the sheerest of nonsense. Only an exceedingly frivolous definition of “talent” could possibly support that point of view. But train them we do, with the result that competent “visual” engineers are turned out by the hundreds.

  “We have a lot of good engineers,” writes Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, “but very few good artists.” Which is fair enough, and by no means unusual. But while developing its engineers, society has lost sight of its obligation to discover and nourish (or starve) the artists. To be sure, engineering, of any kind, is an honorable and useful profession, but engineers and artists walk separate ways. No bridge can be built without recourse to a multitude of formulas and equations, but no prescriptions exist which guarantee the construction of a good film, and the director who thinks he has found them by slavishly copying the work of his betters is not a filmmaker but a hack.

  So here we are, at an impasse, high on the horns of a dilemma, stuck with few rules and even fewer rule breakers, which is either a catastrophe or the dawn of a new era. While the situation is an aesthetic disaster for the visual engineer, it can be a breakthrough for the artist; the fewer the rules the freer the creative mind, if one can find it. In the early 1950s only a few people were aware that the adoption of technical innovations such as Cinemascope and Cinerama, and the development of advanced methods of recording and delivering sound were, at least in part, the industry’s desperate attempts to fill the growing gap left by the deterioration of film quality. Well, the more things change…. Today the air is still filled with news of technical wonders; tiny chips which can record an entire film are just around the comer, and the miracle of digital sound is already with us. There is much talk of better looking films, of better sounding films, but none about better films.

  However, despite the arresting of film’s aesthetic growth a few stunted but still green twigs continue to survive, an indication, perhaps, of a long delayed regeneration. If that is so, there is no question that motivated creators must soon be found. But how? What are the substitutes for the traditional motivations of hunger and anger so often cited by the poets? Wishing won’t bring them back and, in any case, the wisher would be attacked as a regressive and sadistic animal.

  And where? The discouraging truth is that we are forced to look for creative minds in a society that breeds far more criminals than creators, that stultifies rather than inspires, a society that cheerily substitutes a Pee Wee Herman for a Groucho Marx or a Rodney Dangerfield for a Charlie Chaplin, and accepts the Roman numerals II, III, IV, and even V, as completely satisfactory stand-ins for originality and innovation. Even more depressing is the fact that we have hatched a youthful community far more interested in specialization, in the development of techniques and formulas, a generation that does not recognize that the understanding of substance, “soul,” and the human condition, without which no film can really breathe, can be acquired only through a continuing study of intellectual disciplines that are in no way related to filmmaking techniques.

  Although substance, “soul,” and a concern for the human condition are the main ingredients of any good film, they can be blended only by those who have a special talent, a “gift,” for filmmaking, and that talent can no more be taught in a book than in a classroom. All that can be explored here is the nature of any possible incentive that will prod the gifted few to come to the aid of a nearly extinct art form, and a major irritant comes immediately to mind: We are Earth’s most bellicose creatures and even the well-fed can rarely resist a challenge, if it is recognized and admitted.

  It would appear to be obvious that the “dialogue” film, trailing the long heritage of the theater behind it, has little capacity to challenge or to develop. It is going nowhere. Except for the presence of some theatrical acting and the absence of a good deal of lurid language, the good dialogue film of a half-century ago—say Capra’s, It Happened One Night (1934)—is still at least the equal of the best of our time. That should be no surprise. No playwright in almost four hundred years has been accepted as a peer of Ann Hathaway’s husband, so the road paved with spoken words can be viewed as leading to no new or higher ground. The only challenge is to do what everyone else is doing but to do it better—which should hardly be enough. But moving images are a recent invention, an even more recent art, and Griffith, Eisenstein, von Stroheim, and Mumau did not exhaust the medium’s possibilities—not by any means. Why, then, don’t young directors accept the challenge to make films with developmental potential, to feel the excitement that only the birth of something new can bring? There are three basic reasons for this state of affairs.

  The first, quite simply, is that few film students or young directors are aware that an alternative exists. The second is that it is much easier, both technically and mentally, to make and to cut a dialogue film. To be sure, it requires patience, perseverance, and an inventive mind to delete, reorganize, emend, and generally try to improve the average talking scene (a good writer makes it all much easier), but that is not nearly as difficult as staring into space or pacing the floor for hours trying to find an original way to create screen metaphor out of “To be or not to be.” Of course, it has never been done. But has anyone ever tried?

  The third reason is that the environment and the conditioning needed to reanimate the art are nearly nonexistent; neither is readily available.

  [Author’s note: Vestiges of montage technique still exist, as do a few directors who can still communicate through imagery. One has only to see a Fellini, a Lean, or a Forman film to sense how much thought and work was involved in the creation of visual storytelling. And two recent films, Greystoke, and The Man from Snowy River, stand out as excellent examples of balanced correlation of image and dialogue. Extremely long sections of each film are played in silent action (largely nonviolent and often idyllic) which is musically underscored. The Australian film is nearly ideal in its selective “sandwiching” of talk and picture. Furthermore, it is only fair to say that “talking” scenes occasionally present opportunities for creative pictorial treatment, though these opportunities are rarely realized since the modem mind-set is predominantly toward dialogue. But as far back as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1938), Jimmy Stewart’s last ditch filibuster was perfect material for the treatment of dialogue as underscoring—for the creative visual presentation of the lone, “little” man desperately struggling for his principles which, at that point, needed no further elucidation. Here, body and face language were dramatically more important than the words. In a sequence of this sort, what is seen is much more to the point than what is heard and, once in a while, imaginative treatment might turn it into a cinematic classic.]

  “The development of film technique has been primarily the development of film editing.” This statement is worth repeating, for with that observation Ernest Lindgren accurately assessed the condition of the narrative film from his day to the present. Indeed, film editing has not changed a whit in the last fifty years or more, and neither have films. That is the negative side of “Lindgren’s Law.” The positive side is that a developmental revolution in the art of editing should inevitably have beneficial repercussions on the style and quality of the narrative film as well.

  The editing of a dialogue sequence requires only basic skills. The script itself sets the direction and the emotional tone of the scene which the cutter almost always respects. Rarely can he interpolate a useful “outside” shot into the flow of the scene. It is obligatory that cuts are placed in proper sequence as written or shot, and made invisible. But a sequence of gripping suspense or, better yet, of physical and emotional movement combined as, for example, the hunt

  Suspense in a close-up. A shot of Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s M.

  for the child killer in M, or the massacre on the Od
essa steps in Potemkin, require not only technical skills but a burst of creative talent. Although such sequences are loosely based on a continuity, in the editorial realization the sky is the limit. The real creativity begins when the cutting gets under way, when the person editing the film starts “laying the bricks.” The contributing cuts have a life of their own which the editor must discover—they can be realigned, repeated, placed in contradiction or in contrast to each other, and freely manipulated to create the maximum emotional effect.

  A paraphrase of Eisenstein’s dictum puts it simply: In a montage what matters is not only how the cut looks by itself, but how it looks in juxtaposition to the cuts which accompany it. That is not the same as cutting from a verbal or pictorial stimulus to an obligatory reaction. In the latter case the cut is mandated by the material; in a montage a cut is chosen because of its distinctive effect, alone or in association, on the viewer’s emotions.*

  All this is heady stuff, the “stuff” Bazin was talking about (page 129). But trying to make it something more than just a very infrequent few hours of exhilaration brings up the question: Who’s to do it? Editing at this level requires a great deal of conceptual preplanning, not just a “wait till I get it in the cutting room” attitude, and editors could hardly manage it; they have neither the opportunity, the time, nor the creative freedom to mount such a broad new attack on what has become a narrow old technique. For much the same reasons the move cannot be initiated by the routine film director, and he suffers the additional drawback that his knowledge of cutting is on a par with that of a screenwriter. The impetus can come only from filmmakers who consider editing a significant part of their creative endeavors. Even a casual examination of the dissimilarities between the 1920s and the following decades shows one thing clearly; the great directors of the earlier period were all masters of montage who could, and undoubtedly did, spend much time in the cutting rooms, as do the very few who can still create cinematic film today.**