Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit [Paperback]

I'm a (prose) writer and have read about screenwriting (McKee's Story and Truby's The Anatomy of Story) to gain a different perspective on storytelling. But it wasn't until I read Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream (Chapter 4, "Cinema of the Mind"; a comparison of film vs fiction techniques), that I realized how helpful it might be to explore other aspects of filmmaking. And then, on cue, came Karen Pearlman's primer on film editing -- an element so crucial to storytelling that she says, "Editors write the last draft of the script."

To be clear, this is primarily a book for film students or editors early in their careers. Focusing on rhythm to shape a story, she first discards the off-putting adjectives that editing is "intuitive" and "magical." Instead, she opens the process to show a tangible set of tools and skills that can be learned, practiced and internalized -- until they do operate in the subconscious background of seeming intuition. It's textbook-ish -- academic in tone (yet very readable) and content (including exercises and case studies), with end notes, a bibliography, and an index. My only quibble is that some of the case-study photographs are printed so dark they're indecipherable.

Then consider this passage:

"Editors compose rhythms in the sense that someone might compose a flower arrangement: not by making the flowers, or in this case the shots, but by choosing the selections, order, and duration of shots."

It sounds exactly like second-draft prose writing, and confirms a second audience: creatives who would benefit from getting behind the scenes of a less-familiar medium to explore very familiar aspects of storytelling: pace; perspective; distance; tension and release; arcs of action and emotion; scenes of dialogue; multiple storylines; speeding/slowing/collapsing time.

And I suggest even a third audience: highly motivated film buffs -- those who devour the bonus-material commentaries on DVDs -- who will find the material in this book revelatory. Knowing more about film editing and the collaboration inherent in film has already made me a more knowledgeable and appreciative film-goer.

The least you need to know is that Cutting Rhythms is an interesting book. I say this in the same way I would say watching bacteria replicate is interesting i.e. genuinely so. This book reads like the thesis work it started out as. Author Karen Pearlman apparently got interested in the science and art of dancing and bodies in motion then, like a true academic, decided to see if she could analyze her chosen profession of film editing in light of her chosen hobby, as it were.

The result is, and I beg your apologies again, interesting. It's always so when one attempts to fuse two things that on the surface couldn't be more different; in my humble and untutored opinion, Pearlman succeeds.

I have heard it said that all capital "A" Art aspires to music and film editing is no different, I expect. Pearlman proposes to dissect something which on the surface appears to defy analysis and in this well-laid-out book, she grabs the reader's interest and doesn't let go. Beginning with the Introduction, in which she describes what she's about to tell you (including this little tidbit: "Cutting Rhythms hypothesizes that the editor's intuition is an acquired body of knowledge with two sources--the rhythms of the world that the editor experiences and the rhythms of the editor's *body* [emphasis mine] that experiences them." This caused me to snicker a bit) through all the 12 chapters in which she skillfully does, this is an excellent bit of work.

I am particularly enamored of Chapter 6, Physical Rhythm, which she describes as "the rhythm created by the editor when she prioritizes the flow of the visible and audible physical movement in the film over other types of movement (such as emotional interactions of characters or larger patterns of events in stories)." She contrasts this with emotional and event rhythm which she covers in detail in chapters 7 and 8. Manipulating Physical rhythm creates meaning directly through action and the editor uses, she posits, techniques such as "rechoreographing" which involves changing the sequence of movements in action scenes and "singing the rhythm" which draws on a "kind of synesthesia" that allows the editor to use their background knowledge of energy management (the building and release of tension) to shape the film.

Using examples from various films, she ably shows she understands not only the actual, cerebral skills of editing, but has transcended that to the philosophy of it. This is a deep-level piece of thinking about editing film that is sure to enliven any editor's work.

One of the most important aspects of professional film work is editing. Perhaps the most important.
An editor can "make or break " a well shot scene. Naturally, depending upon the content in the scene
and with a myriad of choices from the cinematographer, Close-Ups, Singles, Twos, Wides, Establishing, etc.
the editor can create pacing, tension, romance, excitement, lassitude, calm and a thousand other moods/feelings
by choosing the rhythm of the sequence as he cuts, laps,dissolves,etc., from edit to edit.
"Cutting Rhythms" breaks down the issue of rhythm in an accessible way that allows the filmmaker to apply
the explained principles to the work at hand.It's about possibilities rather than prescriptions since every script is different.
The author presents questions editors or filmmakers can ask themselves about their work, along with a clear
and useful vocabulary for working with those questions.
The way the question is answered yields the formula for the shot sequence.
A fascinating and workable approach to a complex subject.