In my eight years of writing on cinema for this magazine, not once have I directly tackled the subject of editing in film. Given that the cut is the flickering medium's greatest party trick, this is well nigh inexplicable. Maybe I've avoided the subject because it's too big. Or maybe editing is just too close to home for me to get any perspective on it.
Whatever the reasons, I think I know why my silence has suddenly dawned on me. I've just spent nine weeks filming my history of cinema in Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney and Beijing. Now, suddenly, I find myself embarking on 11 weeks in a cutting room, chopping and re-arranging the results with Timo, my editor. It's an instant, total change from one paradigm to another—and this, at its most extreme, is what an edit is. The only thing that has travelled across from the filming to the cutting room is, in this case, me.
Anyone who has seen recent films like The Dark Knight or Slumdog Millionaire knows that editing is, in a way, cinema's claim to fame. It took the earliest directors a few years to shake off the influence of theatre but, by about 1907, the grammar of narrative cinema cutting was in place. In the century since, as a general rule, cutting rates in mainstream cinema have got faster. And the hard data is intriguing. In the 1910s in America, the average shot length (ASL) was about ten seconds (according to the brilliant film historian Barry Salt). In the 1920s, it was nearer seven seconds. By the 1970s, it was below six seconds. In contrast, cutting rates were always slower in the Europe—15, nine and nine are the figures for the same decades. The ASL of British films in the 1960s was 7.7, the same as the speedy Americans and two seconds faster than the mainland Europeans, whose films were always that bit more contemplative.
The main bone of contention between the trend to faster cutting on the one hand and arty, slow-cutting modernism on the other has always been whether editing should work in the service of action or not. Imagine a shot of a person walking through a doorway. In conventional cutting, you cut as soon as they do so. But modernist, non-continuity editing doesn't cut in this utilitarian way; it leaves us, instead, to look at the empty doorway. Years of ordinary cutting have trained us to expect a cut as soon as the exit has happened. So when that cut doesn't come, we look again, and notice something else—the ghost of the action, or the silence after it.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, drawing on Bergson, distinguished between what he called the "movement image" and the "time image," the implication being that what we notice when we look at the door after the person is gone is not the action, but its wake—time. At the other end of the spectrum, there's something like the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's movie Psycho, where the very fast editing (ASL less than one second) doesn't allow Janet Leigh to complete even a single action, such as soaping her back or rinsing her hair. Such events are cut to ribbons into fragmented, impressionistic experience.
Average shot length is a secret and powerfully precise way of looking at the history of cinema. As I sit in this cutting room, however, I find myself even more interested in the emotional aspect of editing. If you have seen Billy Wilder's film The Apartment (and if you haven't, buy the DVD now: it will enrich your life), think of the new year scene near the end, where Shirley MacLaine sits in a Chinese restaurant with her bland lover. He says something that inadvertently tells her that Jack Lemmon, the fidgety company everyman, adores her. She's startled. "Auld Lang Syne" plays. Poppers pop and—I'm moved as I write this—Wilder and his brilliant editor Daniel Mandell suddenly cut to Shirley running down a new year's street, the wind in her hair, to meet Jack. They could have shown her leaving the restaurant, or trying to hail a cab. Instead, someone somewhere said "let's leave all that out." And so there is the cut—the paradigm shift from restaurant to run which is, for her, a leap of love.
Usually, I write about the films of Africa, Iran or Taiwan. But this month, I bow before a 49-year-old cut in an American movie: because it's timeless, modern, and wonderful to its boots.
