An odd piece of movie history came out this week that must be addressed. And I’m not talking about Iron Man 2.
Back before I went movie crazy, I was in graduate school for playwriting and annoyingly enough we have to take a screenwriting class in our final year. The instructor, playwright and TV writer Frank Pugliese, could see that some of us just weren’t that into screenplays, so he suggested we read The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film.
Walter Murch is an editor and sound mixer. The soundtrack of a film is put together just like your favorite Kanye West song, with multiple tracks cut and mixed together into one continuous piece of sound. That’s what a sound mixer does. An editor does the same thing, but with images. Nowadays almost all editing is done on a computer, but in olden times the editor would sit there with a pair of scissors and tape and literally cut the movie together.
As Walter Murch points out, it’s strange that editing even works. Go to Netflix right now and start a movie, any movie, and focus on the cut. Just the cut. The way one image slams up against another image. How odd it is. How jarring. The cut, strange as it is, is the distinguishing feature of movies as a medium.
Editors, more than screenwriters and more than directors, are the authors of movies – the way the story is told on a moment to moment level, the rhythm, the tempo, all of these things are the responsibility of the editor. More than anything else it was this new understanding of editing that ignited my newfound curiosity and love for movies.
All of this was foremost on my mind as I sat at New York’s Film Forum on Saturday night and watched this week’s case in point: 1927’s Metropolis.
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis premiered in Berlin as a 153-minute dystopian epic, but for its American distribution Paramount recut the movie into a 90 minute version that radically altered the storyline. Over the years various re-cuts of Metropolis have been released, but with much of the footage lost none of these versions could be faithful to the original. In 2002, Kino International cobbled together a 124 minute version that attempted a restoration – but it was still a lot of guesswork, and it was still missing a half an hour of story.
Then last year a 16mm negative of the original cut of the movie was been found at the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. A restoration project already underway in New Zealand used this additional footage to cut together an almost fully restored version of the original 1927 release.
The strange thing is this: the Buenos Aires footage has been badly damaged, so in this cut of the film the new material is obvious to anyone. It’s a strange sort of artifact. As my friend the film editor Rebecca Beluk said “Only a film nerd would want to see this.” It’s a strange film artifact that nonetheless reveals subtle and pervasive power of film editing.
Some of the bits cut out of Metropolis comprise longer sequences of debauchery deemed improper for American audiences, but even more striking are the three and four second reaction shots that were shaved off here and there to cut down on time.
Metropolis has long been hailed as the proto-science fiction film, with design concepts that would later be borrowed by movies like Star Wars and Blade Runner. Truncated cuts of the film have a kind of cold distance, drawing their force not from human relationships but from design, allegory, and scale.
The restored reaction shots bring an emotional context to the story that fills those monumental set-pieces with humanity, restoring the character-based stories that Lang originally intended.
If you want to get an idea of how powerful editing can be in movies, check out the new version of Metropolis – in theaters if you can find it, on DVD when it comes out. And if you want a deeper understanding of editing, try The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing – streaming now on Netflix.
Next week: the Italians change the game.
