Conquering The Mind Through Better Editing?

Just so long as the pink noise doesn't become white noise, I think we're ok.

I've always felt that film is in it's infancy compared to music, for example. Perhaps pink noise is analogous to a 4/4 beat and we are just now beginning to discover the possibilities of 2/4, 3/4, and so on. Look at the intricacies and sophistication of music and then at it's result, especially classical music. NLE frees us to experiment more with these things. Though I suspect editors have largely fallen into a secure pattern of consistency, which brings us to this article.

Couldn't film be just as magical and just as orchestrated as music? But this is uncharted territory. Most have yet to successfully navigate such concepts. Perhaps music video was a pervasive attempt. But that relied on music. Couldn't film have it's own harmony among it's many instruments, image, sound, time, motion, color and so on?

How would this work? Not necessarily by cutting. Perhaps there are multiple levels of imagery in the same shot that effectively cut the action. Billy Bob had something like this going on with Sling Blade. He liked wide shots with multiple characters, each one doing their own thing. That is musical.

When you look at great films I think you can begin to see these ideas. But filmmakers remain slaves to the security of tradition.

Disruptive rules - I'm all for it - but now that you've got me thinking on it, a couple of observations.

Warning, I'm going to sound like an "old guy" here. What I do know (and I appreciate these are hardly unique observations) is that something transformational happened when we moved from non-linear to linear editing, film to digital, mattes to CGI. I suspect that this might be more to the point in accounting for Dr. Cutter's view.

As context to my penny's worth: I'm a former film editor who evolved (or devolved?) into producer/writer with a bunch of genre features and series behind me. I will however draw on the "old editor" in me and pick on - the the Linear to non-linear transition in the edit suite to make and illustrate my point. To over-simplify, with certain specific changes in technology we unintentionally changed the way our minds -as editors, experienced the editing process - and this may significantly account for the observations cited in the Cutter article.

Back in the day, when we'd hang cuts, trims and upcoming takes in a trim bin, an editor had to think thru the edit sequence in his/her mind before we'd physically experiment with editing decisions (if your hair's gray enough to remember a bunch of quadruple-taped single splices in a row, you can stop snickering now). Where I worked, my fellow editors liked to think we carried the sequence of upcoming cuts, as well as how we lead the eye through seven mental edits forward and back at a time - this isn't boasting but rather goes to the major point of difference that memory played -had to play- in how our minds worked while making the edits happen, (that's your brain thing Dr. Cutter). This meant we'd be forced to study shots to death, and recall their dynamics before making cuts. Thus, mentally reviewing multiple variables in many sequences before making some of our cuts is different in degree and nature from the process the (often very creative) non-linear editor has worked the past two decades.

Don't misunderstand me- I'm not saying we were smarter or better off than our counterparts today, but we were forced into a greater intimacy with the shot in all its editorial aspects, in all its dramatic aspects, in each shot's comparative dynamics by the mechanisms of the day, and that means the mental process of editing is different today, not simply in technology but in psychology.

For a director leaning over the editors shoulder today - as opposed to before these changes, this difference, tho unconscious, must have its own effect on the "innate" understanding of the post side film-making (or "pinkish-ness" if you must).

Having recently had to pound the edits of one-hour TV scripted drama's through an edit-suite from rushes to picture lock in one week (from the producer's position - and thank god not the editor's) the blessing of non-linear technology to my delivery schedules and budgets are a further curse to my creativity. I also know that CGI (which I often use a lot) and the many other forms of relatively new post-technology you all know about enables us to output, ever less expensively, visions that are superbly crafted without having to be as thought thru and intimately designed as when this was an expensive and difficult process.

I know that the observations of Dr. Cutter, as cited, may seem like a refining of the film "medium" (read "message" of course) - and perhaps on an industry wide scale, perhaps Dr. Cutter is right, it's nothing more than that, the fine tuning of formula to a hard-wired innate brain pleasing "pinkishness" - market selection perfecting Soma for our consumption. Yet, from a former film editor -become producer point of view - what we're really talking about here is the effect of improved technology, performing optimally to budget and schedule - and hence audience expectation - that has adversely transformed the opportunity for nuance and complexity into simplistic patterns.

I could leave my comment at that. Of course there are many other possibilities- I've also had many meetings with once-clever and once-promising writers who've had the crap so badly beaten out of their creativity over the years, that they belong to growing club of sub-scribes reduced to the glib is the sole filter of character and story revelation. It's a filter without nuance or complexity, so much so that the content might as well all be cut by brain-pattern pleasing math and cliche anyhow - so maybe it's all much simpler - maybe the big hard world out there has just - as is the cliche "dummed" the crap of us all down.

That's it for me, I'm just working on a second wind... the question, can an older film guy become youthfully creative again. The motto behind my desk has for years been "Different is better", "Disruptive" would do as well.

Thanks Ted for your massive contribution to thought in the industry.

Humbly yours

"Let’s aim for something a bit more disruptive, yes?" I like this sentiment, but perhaps a path to this result is to edit in an audience friendly way (1/f pattern?) allowing some even more disruptive aspect of your film to reach them such as the concept or storyline. Disruptive editing could have the opposite effect of stepping on the larger idea of the film.