The Lost Art of Film Editing

Within Sunday’s Boston Globe lurked a sweet little gem about current trends in film editing. Jessica Winter, author of the upcoming ‘Rough Guide to American Independent Film’, wrote a piece called ‘The Lost Art of Film Editing’ where she criticizes the need for speed, which has diluted the process of creating meaningful editorial and briefly reminisces about the editing in some of the great films.

In order to examine how editing has changed, she sets the mood by citing the Miami Vice remake and the quarter century of MTV exposure as emblematic of today’s style.  With film directors & editors starting in the commercial industry, it is all but expected the style of cutting features will be affected by this discipline.  She quotes Walter Murch (Godfather, Cold Mountain) and Tim Streeto (Squid and the Whale), both very respectable figures, and who still adhere to a filmic style of editing which nurtures pace as opposed to cutting “back and forth between two characters like a ping-pong match."

For further reading I suggest ‘Behind the Seen’ by Charles Koppelman which describes Walter Murch’s efforts in cutting Cold Mountain on FCP and Ralph Rosenblum’s ‘When the Shooting Stops’ which was first recommended to me by an editor friend of mine Joe Haughey.