The word “frenetic” is thrown around a lot whenever movie reviews or any other form of popular, easily-digestible film commentary portions out sound bites to discuss that commonly under-acknowledged sliver of movie magic called editing. And for good reason. The process of cutting together a film, by nature of its methodology alone, is conceived with an understanding that the end product, whatever it may be, will remain as invisible as it is intangible — cloaked beneath infinitely more palpable layers of photography, acting, music, direction — to invoke the sense that viewers are experiencing a natural sequence of events unfold in front of them organically.
So when critics see extended instances of cross cutting, jump cutting, montage or whatever the shit else Vin Diesel is doing in “xXx,” the easiest targets to stab your finger at and say “There. That right there. That’s what editing is supposed to look like” become all these in-your-face, “frenetic” moments which can have incredible value in bringing an otherwise flat reality a sense of dimension — but are far from being the only examples of a craft that, at its best, forms the most basic framework of the bridge between audience and film.
Then to get a better idea of what’s truly possible at the hands of an imaginative editor, we have to look at those pictures that strive to constrain our view: force us to examine events that, yes, may still be tied to a narrative, but are isolated enough to stick with their leads’ psyches. In other terms, the editor shouldn’t have to sift through hours of footage of Vinny D jumping off a building, engaging in multiple midair gun fights with 50 Russian hitmen before back flipping into a Lamborghini — only for it to accelerate off another building.
Instead, the films that can really showcase the nuanced control of the cutting room are character studies which live, stand within their ability to leave the camera behind a character’s shoulders to let us see the frame through their eyes, or their face within the frame. So usually, the editing in such projects becomes inherently more meaningful than just piecing together different angles of someone cartwheeling motorcycles over a Walmart because more often than not, you’re playing with shots of an actor’s facial expressions — you know, that stuff you call actual acting?
Even the shards of action in these films, as jarring or visceral as they may be, are woven around little bits of character exposition, little glimmers of dialogue that prop together an entire, holistic experience. In Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” widely considered one of the most effectively edited features of all time, there’s a crucial scene in which Jake LaMotta has his final bout with Sugar Ray Robinson, this time without the help of his now estranged brother, Joey. The fight itself is fervently cut into a shuddering mess of fists colliding with face, blood spurting out of foreheads, camera flashes exploding like white bombs.
Then, around two and a half minutes in — after LaMotta is finished being pummeled into a pulpy afterthought — the editing crescendos before coming to a near standstill. As LaMotta leans forward, arms tangled in the ropes, we cut to his brother leaning backward in his couch: distant, defeated and at home. Scorsese and his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, have literally slowed down time, adding weight in those crucial moments leading up to LaMotta stumbling over toward Robinson and saying “you never got me down, Ray.”
The editing in this scene, stylized and brazen, would have fallen flat without those transitions in texture. And more importantly, the little morsels Scorsese is trying to give us about his visibly disturbed protagonist. The action sits in stark contrast with one of the film’s final clips, in which LaMotta, after being thrown into prison, punches the brick walls of his cage in futile rebellion. There’s no cutting here.
No fancy transitions tied to the thwaps of fists landing on flesh. No fiery light bulb flares or explosions of splattering gore. Just LaMotta. Isolated in ineffectiveness, nothing to do with his fists, both sides of the empty frame washed in darkness. The inaction speaks volumes about what Scorsese is trying to tell us about this character — useless masculinity, once feeding into the violence that afforded him freedom to hate, beat the people who loved him, now all taken away.
Two more recent movies in which the editing plays an integral part in formulating or informing our opinions on troubled protagonists are “Black Swan” and “Frank,” both built around honest explorations of mental illness. In “Black Swan,” Natalie Portman portrays Nina, a paranoid schizophrenic consumed by the need to embody an evil Black Swan, sensual and polarized, for an upcoming ballet recital. The role, along with the movie in its entirety, digs deep into this idea of duality. Working off the mirrors in every corner of the frame, the camera remains fixed behind Portman, anchored around that bravura, Academy Award-winning performance. And though much of the credit goes to the film’s cinematography, with its constant propensity at teasing out “pop shots” — slights of camera frequently used in the horror genre to create “cheap” scares, it’s the subtle editing that really engineers the shock.
In this case, “pop shots” were usually just director Darren Aronofsky sneaking in errant images of Portman in one of the set piece’s many mirrors, so in effect, the audience would be watching Nina put on makeup until suddenly, her reflection would take on a life of its own. There’s nothing really creative about this brand of visual trickery: simple CGI to superimpose something in a place where it’s not supposed to be. Which is why all those staggered cuts that follow, each focused on a different mirror angle, are so essential in conveying horror, that sense of “wait, did that really just happen?”
More so than simple shock value, the editing in the film puts us in Nina’s lense of subjectivity. Every actress in the cast has been made up and costumed to look like Natalie Portman — brunette, tapered down eyebrows and a wiry frame. So all the frequent cuts between Portman’s face to those of female cast members — there are many — further stress the motifs of dissimulation and transformation that Aronofsky is so keen to highlight and link with hallucination: a byproduct of schizophrenia.
In “Frank,” the editing layout is simpler, but similar in the sense that it attempts to let viewers experience mental illness subjectively. The film starts with a cutting pattern similar to one you’d see in a visual comedy — fast-paced jumps that bounce between different sight-based gags (“Hey look! Clara just threw a bottle at him! [cut] Hey look! It landed on his head!”) until director Lenny Abrahamson delves deeper into his characters’ depression. The jumps slow down and by the end, are almost entirely replaced by inactive pans and tilts of the camera.
It’s this “single character cutting,” though outwardly invisible, that makes these films click the way they do — putting viewers not just in the same frame of mind as the protagonist, but the same frame of vision and time. Which isn’t the same as cartwheeling over a Walmart in a motorcycle. But I’d rather take a glimpse through Natalie Portman’s eyes any day.