The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing Analysis Essay Example

After having watched the film, “The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing”, I can say that I agree with the statement that an editor “writes the last draft of the script” because, at the beginning of cinema, many people had little faith that it had no future since people would eventually get tired of paying to watch actualities, which was something they could simply watch in real life and free of charge. But one of Thomas Edison’s employees, Edwin S. Porter discovered that  “cutting separate shots together could create a story”(3:40). His films such as “The Life of an American Fireman” (1903) , portrayed a story through its use of parallel shots which would showcase two scenes in different locations that were happening simultaneously in order to incite an emotional impact on the audience. This discovery opened the door to a whole different side of cinema, in which compelling and fascinating stories could be sold to the masses. 

One of the men considered to be the father of cinema is DW. Griffith. He was a pioneer of modern editing techniques and understood the importance of editing when telling a story in order to captivate the hearts of the audience, and immerse them in the protagonist’s world in order to sympathize with them. He created a film called “The Birth of a Nation” which although regarded by many historians to be extremely racist, it included ten years of editing knowledge along with DW. Griffith’s revolutionary ideas. It was one of the first movies to include close-ups, flashbacks, etc. A lot of his editing methods are still used to this day. He understood that a simple change or cut could either change or enhance the message being conveyed in the film, and he would use that to his advantage to edit his movies in a way that the audience could empathize with.

 Editing allowed the audience to only focus on the interesting parts of the story while cutting out the slow and uninteresting parts. Some people might counter by saying that the final script should be selected by the director because their job is to shape the movie to match their vision, but the director and editor work closely together on the film post-production, to shorten the movie and make it more appealing to the general audience but still keep the original feel and message that the director wants. Quentin Tarantino states, “It (the scene) was like a date in real time. It was sort of like, Sally’s (His editor) job to kinda convince little by little to bring it down”(16:40), the film would still have the meaning he wanted to convey, but it would not be as painfully boring to watch long and uneventful scenes that weren’t necessary to convey the director’s vision for the movie. This means that although directors and editors work together for long periods of time in order to come up with the final film, editors are the ones who ultimately decide which scenes they should take out to make the movie an enjoyable length that still keeps a coherent story and the message of the writer.

The best example to prove that the editor has the final script would be communist propaganda films like “The Battleship Potemkin ''. After the Revolution of 1917 in Russia, film tape was extremely scarce, and during this time Lev Kuleshov experimented with different editing techniques and eventually discovered the Kuleshov effect. “They began to understand they could get a certain emotional physiological effect by a certain type of cutting from one image to the next ''(20:57), this effect entailed the cutting between shot A and shot B to add a picture that would change the meaning of the scene. Russians would import foreign films and edit them using the Kuleshov effect to fit communist ideology and use them to manipulate illiterate masses to join the cause. This shows that despite the movies having already been produced, communist editors would completely change the message of the film in order to fit their own needs.