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31 S U M M E R Q 2 I S S U E E D I T I N G I N T H E T W E N T Y - F I R S T C E N T U R Y ample enough to include his many subplots, supporting characters, and seemingly inci- dental digressions. Tellingly, his "Kill Bill" is slated to be released in a single, inclusive version later this year, "Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair." Y e t l o n g e r r u n n i n g t i m e s d o n ' t necessarily translate to meditative, de- liberate movies. To the contrary, several recent movies that pushed the boundaries of length, such as "The Brutalist" or "Meg- alopolis" (both 2024), are packed with incident, happenings, and even shocks, as though the audience, though prepared to settle in for the duration, still demands constant stimulation. The late director Peter Bogdanovich ("The L ast P icture Show" [1971]) anticipated this trend over a decade ago while cutting his final feature film, "She's Funny That Way" (2015). "I've been seeing a lot of new movies," he wrote me in 2014, explaining why some of the grace notes in his own movie had been sac- rificed, "and they all start off immediately, no leisurely beginnings, often now just the title, the way we did 'Picture Show' lo, those many years ago." But of course, "Picture Show" was leisurely: though it clocks in at just under two hours, it used its time not to overload the audience with incident but to spend time with the characters. By contrast, Spike Lee's "Highest 2 Lowest" essentially begins in media res. The film is one of the year's best, but we scarcely have time to become acquainted with the characters — who is who, and how they relate to each other — before the central kidnapping plot starts to unfold. The assumption is that the audience wants action, not grace notes, and is sophisticated enough to figure out what is going on without handholding. Traditional coverage seems remedial in this light, even though it remains aesthetically pleasing. But fewer and fewer movies savor a shot for its own sake or a pleasing cutting rhythm for its own sake — partly because the gen- eration of directors who made movies with such shots has either passed away (Bog- danovich) or has been eased into something like retirement (Woody Allen). HIDDEN CUTS By Jonathan Rosenbaum H aving been invited to comment on developments of picture editing in American movies over the past quarter century, I should begin by noting that I worked as a regular film review- er (at the Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly) for only the first eight years of the 21st century. Though still writing now at 82, I recall wel- coming my retirement at age 65 from an industry that catered mostly to children, at least inside theaters. Today I usually prefer to watch old- er and less-targeted fare from the '30s, '40s, and '50s — movies that at least pretended to speak to everyone. My favorite academic film critic, James Naremore, who's slightly older than I, does a better job of keeping up with both theatrical movies and home TV, developments in technology that seem to have encouraged both longer takes in the former (as in the virtuoso 28-minute "home invasion" sequence of "Anora" [2024]) and much greater fragmentation in the latter: "Because multiple cameras are in use for TV films, editing becomes busier than ever (and easier because of digital technology)," he notes in a recent book-lengthinterview from "Cinema Then and Now." "Sometimes a driving scene, which in the old days would be shot with back projection, will show a view from the back seat of the car, then from the driver's door window, then from the passenger's door window, then from the hood, and then from the car's exterior mirrors." The reductio ad absurdum of this latter approach might be the Transformers movies of Michael Bay between 2007 and 2017, where the logic of continuity as pure sensation and/or delirium, as on a theme-park ride, seems to triumph over the logic of any other thought process. This scattershot approach suggests a metaphysical difference be- tween editing today and yesterday. But one shouldn't extrapolate too much from the different needs of different projects. The brief opening sequence of "Letters from Iwo Jima" (2006) — directed by an old-fash- ioned classicist, Clint Eastwood — explores the shoreline of Iwo Jima in 2005 as discontinuously and as variously as Naremore's hypothetical driving sequence before establishing narrative continuity when outfitted technicians with shovels turn up at the location, occasioning a match cut to soldiers digging their own foxholes at the same location in 1944. Eastwood's movement from discontinuity to continuity resembles a question-and-answer structure with narrative providing the answer to an implied non-narrative question ("What IS this spot?"), whereas Nare- more's example, lacking any clear narrative context, can be read as either SEE PAGE 52 SEE PAGE 52