CONTEMPLATING THE CUT: THE ART & CRAFT OF NONFICTION EDITING
/KSFEF 2012 Fellow Lindsay Utz writes about her experience attending Sundance’s “Contemplating the Cut” panel in Los Angeles:
On Saturday, May 12, in Los Angeles, Sundance Institute and the Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship partnered for the fourth year in a row to bring together documentary filmmakers to discuss the art and craft of nonfiction editing.
I return time and again to Jonathan Oppenheim’s brilliant keynote, delivered at the first event four years ago, which Sundance Institute’s Kristin Feeley referenced this year in her opening remarks. She highlighted Oppenheim’s distinction between two models for the role of the editor: the “artistic model” and the “industrial model.”
In the first model, the job of the editor “is to absorb the subject of the film through the footage, to live and breathe with the material, making it his or her own, and, ultimately, to emerge with a vision for the possibilities (and impossibilities) of the film.” The problem, he noted, is that the artistic model “tends to be implicit, the view that ‘dare not speak its name.’ My sense is that it is often experienced by the editor but rarely asserted.”
If the artistic model is implicit, the “industrial model” is quite explicit. It is defined by unrealistic deadlines and long hours. It entails keeping the producer(s) happy and serving as the director’s employee, not his or her collaborator. Oppenheim ends with this call to action:
“The artistic model can be dragged out of its cave into the daylight and embraced. It should be, because it reflects the real creative inner life of an editor. So it is healthy to embrace it and to stand behind the weight of one’s own artistic process. The tension between the two models is inevitable, but my feeling is that it should be an explicit and conscious tension rather than an implicit and suppressed tension. The tension should be seen and owned, for the life of everyone involved, and in order to better support the fragile process of creating art out of real life.”
This now-yearly gathering does exactly what Jonathan called upon us to do four years ago: be open about what nonfiction editors do, and acknowledge how extensive their contributions are.