23rd Nov 2008 ; Cutting Edge:The Magic Of Movie Editing

The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing
A documentary by Wendy Apple
Country : USA
Run time ;:98 min
English with English subtitles
23rd November 2008 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

Take a peek at the documentary :courtesy - You Tube

"The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing," a lively, occasionally illuminating tour of the "invisible art" of film editing, ultimately feels more like a textbook primer than an exhaustive study. Spearheaded by American Cinema Editors and featuring interviews with about 30 top-flight cutters, plus director collaborators, docu is lovingly rendered. Film buffs and general viewers alike will find much to enjoy .

A longtime dream project of the late editor and documaker Arnold Glassman (to whom pic is dedicated), "The Cutting Edge" has clearly been conceived in the mold of "Visions of Light," the 1992 study of cinematography co-directed by Glassman, Todd McCarthy and Stuart Samuels. But whereas that film benefited from a relative ease of construction -- the work of cinematographers being visible -- "The Cutting Edge" is beset by a far trickier proposition: How to show the work of craftspeople whose best efforts are supposed to go unnoticed by even the attentive filmgoer's eye.

To some extent, Apple has solved this dilemma by incorporating it into the finished film. Early on, she presents excerpts from films by the Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison, in which the only "cuts" were those created by the stopping and re-starting of the camera.

Then, segueing to the likes of "The Matrix" and "Cold Mountain," she slows down and replays scenes featuring cuts made on matching action, allowing the viewer to become conscious of the film editor's work.

With some 50 movies featured, it's a little too easy to nitpick about the choices director Wendy Apple makes in picking films to profile. This documentary is precisely what it's title purports to be, an in-depth and instructive look at movie editing that literally spans 100 years of film history, from The Great Train Robbery to Cold Mountain.

Through interviews with a copious number of directors and editors, The Cutting Edge covers everything from basic editing techniques like the matching of cuts to modern editing theory as inspired by MTV and The Matrix. The film goes into extreme detail in parts, like when we get to see James Cameron's trick of removing one frame per second out ofTerminator 2 to give it more momentum and realism. It's all a little bit insidery and self-congratulatory, but the movie works far more often than not. Any film buff will find it hard not to like.