Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545125
53 S U M M E R Q 2 I S S U E guing at times over the affective differences that adding or subtracting a single frame can make on a sequence. Their avant-garde principles separate their practice from that of most American narrative features, which depend more on storytelling and less on behavioral nuances, but one of Straub's comments — that the greatest editor in the history of cinema was Charlie Chaplin — dramatizes the extent to which the art of editing interacts with other arts (direction, music, dialogue, or, in this case, performance). For Straub, Chaplin's greatness as an editor came from knowing precisely when a gesture begins and when it ends. And for me, Straub's comment about Chaplin offers a memorable critical insight into the latter's lasting art: a capacity to control, in tandem, time and physical/ gestural space in terms of two edits — the ones before and after each gesture. This often happens to the strains of Chaplin's own tunes, implicitly making him their mu- sical conductor as well as their performer, and a genuine economist in the practice of both arts. The greater subdivisions of labor on m o s t co m m e rc i a l p i c t u re s s o m e t i m e s lamentably yield movies at cross-purposes, where the director, writer, or composer's left hand doesn't necessarily coordinate with what the editor's right hand is doing, and where the separate calculations of both hands might be subsequently overturned or at least complicated by the afterthoughts or misgivings of a producer. T h e p o i n t a t w h i c h c o l l a b o r a t i o n becomes warfare also characterizes the confused and wasteful way some features are composed and/or decomposed, where the disparity between left and right hands sometimes matches the discrepancy be- tween plan and execution. Some would argue that the same condi- tions ruled Hollywood during the first half of the 20th century. But I would counter that even if MGM's Louis B. Mayer and Columbia's Harry Cohn were tyrannical vul- garians, their rags-to-riches backgrounds ensured that they considered themselves part of the audience and believed that most of their movies were addressed to everyone — attitudes that are no longer feasible with targeting and producers less likely to be film buffs. My paternal grandfather, a movie exhibitor in Alabama, belonged to the same generation of Jewish immigrants as Mayer, Cohn, and Samuel Goldwyn, so I can proudly boast that I was raised on their populist tastes and a respect for the public that these tastes imply. I had the pleasure of working with Wal- ter Murch on the 1998 re-edit of "Touch of Evil," based on a lengthy post-production memo by Orson Welles that I unearthed from diverse sources, including Charlton Heston, while editing Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles' interview book, "This is Orson Welles." I recall Murch saying that one of the advantages of analog editing over digital was browsing through reels in search of shots that sometimes led to accidental discoveries and unexpected inspirations, whereas the possibility of finding shots immediately with digital editing eliminated browsing and all its potential benefits. Without such benefits and boiler-plate models provided by the studios during Hollywood's Golden Era, digitally encum- bered editors today have to invent their own orthodoxies. Chopped-salad montages and show-offy long takes, as in the famous 3:20 single-take traveling crane shot that opened "Touch of Evil," are obvious and extreme directions that might be followed. But sometimes intermediate solutions produce the best results, as in my two final examples. As we move from one shot to the next in "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" (2001) — my favorite film so far in the 21st century (and arguably one of the most misunderstood) — movement itself is observable in every shot, coming from actors, camera, and/ or occasional props, carrying us and the narrative along with them. This becomes a way of sensitizing us to minute differences so that when actors' movements are min- imal, we become more observant of what distinguishes, say, the facial expressions of a human mother from those of her adopted robot son. A similar principle of sameness and difference characterizes what was developed over many years by Stanley Kubrick, namely story and storyboards, and what was brought by Steven Spiel- berg, which includes the aforementioned movements of actors, props, and a restless camera. Thus the editing becomes, in effect, the manipulation of faucets controlling the movie's overall performative rhythm and flow, whereas the potentially antithet- ical intellectual and emotional inputs of Kubrick and Spielberg provide a dialectical stimulus to our expectations and interpre- tations, making them far more complex and ambiguous than they would be otherwise. For a writer-director like Alan Rudolph, who virtually choreographs his films to music, designing some of his features in relation to specific record albums, cuts are often a form of punctuation for his musical- ly-measured shots. The music he favors is often romantic and nostalgic evocations of Hollywood clichés, even when his unstable characters and their dark stories provide ironic and skeptical counterpoint to their imagined selves. In "Ray Meets Helen" (2017) — his most recent movie, made after many years of inactivity — his title leads, Keith Carradine and Sondra Locke, play lonely depressives who eventually meet and virtually coalesce to the strains of "Beauti- ful Dreamer." Rudolph's editing provides the renditions of their similarly plaintive laments that merge into Stephen Foster's 19th century favorite, and true to his long- ings for a more inclusive populist cinema, Rudolph sings to and for everybody in the audience, at least if there are any audiences left that are willing to listen. ■