Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning

7 Editing

161 7 Editing What do we mean when we say a book is “cinematic”? What is it that reminds us of the movies? Sometimes it might be the vividness of the descriptions. And sometimes it might be the amount of action. But often what we have in mind is the positioning of one part of the narrative next to another, the arrangement of story information, what we would call in film and video making “editing.” Alfred Hitchcock once noted: “Cinema is simply pieces of film put together in a manner that creates ideas and emotions” (quoted in Samuels 232). This relates to nonfiction film as well. It is this “putting together of pieces of film” that we discuss in this chapter. The second section of the book already looked at the macro level of these designs, the overall structure of the documentary , the arrangement of information in order to make an argument, forge a dramatic story, or sensuously experiment with form to explore a topic or category. In those chapters, we considered concerns for rhetoric, or dramatic and poetic form, in the sequencing of information. Here we concentrate on the micro level: the placement of one shot or one sequence next to another. In one sense, editing is simply the joining together of related shots to make a sequence, and the joining together of related sequences to build the film. But editing also reshapes and manipulates material. And when the material is nonfiction , editing can redefine sociohistorical reality. A filmmaker begins by shooting something concrete, a portion of the physical world. That footage, the raw material , takes on a specific meaning when it is placed in a sequence, as it becomes part 162 chapter seven of a flow of sounds and images. Filmmaker Chantal Akerman comments on this process: “How much time should we take to show this street so that what’s happening is something other than a mere piece of information? So that we go from the concrete to the abstract and come back to the concrete” (quoted in Rosen 125). For her, there are innumerable decisions to make as she turns abstract footage into a specific story. Frederick Wiseman calls editing a “private debate.” And he talks about how meaning is created as footage is edited into a story. He contrasts documentary filmmaking with fiction production. With fiction, the writing of the script normally precedes the shooting of the film. In a documentary, however, it is only after editing that the documentarian finds his “script.” For Wiseman, the sequences in a documentary are “found” during the shooting process, but he has no idea at the time what shots will make it into the film or what the themes or point of view will be (Wiseman xi). Wiseman calls his films “reality fictions.” “The events . . . are all true,” he told John Graham, but “they have no meaning except insofar as you impose a form on them, and that form is imposed in large measure, of course, in the editing.” “A cut is a judgment . . . the only public trace of a private debate” (quoted in Miller 226). In his first film, Titicut Follies, Wiseman spent nearly a month shooting, followed by almost a year of editing. One hundred and fifty thousand feet of film were compressed into little more than three thousand feet for the eighty-four-minute film. In later films, he employed a similar ratio, generally using less than five percent of what he shoots. Yet, when those shots are edited into the final film, they appear as “if no other order were possible” (Wiseman xii). Even editors who work on other people’s films claim to have control over content. Sam Pollard, who cut Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls (1997), told MovieMaker Magazine about his early days as a documentary editor: “I was given the responsibility to really direct the material . . . [the producer and director] leave it to you to . . . help build the concept, find the direction, and find the story.” There are some exceptions, of course. Historical documentaries frequently begin with the story they want to tell. The documentarian then looks for evidence and corroboration of that story. As director Jon Else points out, these types of documentary are more popular with funding sources for exactly this reason. The funders “know what they are going to get” (Bernard 281). Prelude to War, a film that provides the history of some of the events that led the United States into World War II, began with...