Sloppy Editing

Last week, I sat through several minutes of bad movie making. Most of us can’t escape those moments. When I also had to edit a long ill-written essay, it got me thinking. I confess my ignorance about film editing, but I believe that the underlying intentions of editing are the same in books and movies. There is no reason to think otherwise.

It is understandable that any creator of art, having fallen in love with it, at times fails to be rational. Thankfully, the editor brings objectivity. Whether it is fatuousness or faultiness, the cold-hearted editor takes action keeping the tautness of the big picture in mind.

Delete key is a valuable tool for all editors. They gleefully pounce upon every iota of inanity. Adjectives, sentences, scenes, chapters, and even characters are sometimes wiped out. What keeps them going is the pride that the overall work has improved because of such cruelty.

Unfortunately, our film editors are shying away from deletion. Yes, we have all heard that today’s filmmakers make lakhs of feet of reel and “edit” it to about fifteen thousand feet finally. Besides the fact that it sounds preposterous, it is obviously insufficient. Many more hundreds of feet can be cut.

Though I would love to nitpick dialogues and scenes, my complaint is primarily about characters. That extra family member, extra friend, extra neighbor, and extra comedian. They are not edited enough. I’m not asking you to kill them all; it will become such a lonely world. When they do not have a role, please do not give them one. When they do not need to be in a scene, let them not. We see strangers everywhere every day. But they don’t get a face, they are not in every scene lurking somewhere behind us. A large cast is not a mistake; a large crowd in every scene is.

Songs, in the name of entertainment for the masses, are another excuse for poor editing. There isn’t a strong enough need for them except that there hasn’t been one in over thirty minutes. I love songs. But when a song springs out of a strong situation, it has an innate potential for greatness. The composer, the writer and the singers can be motivated to give their best. (I wish to delve deeper about songs in a separate post in the future.) The opposite is true for songs that are there just to be there.

On the other end is the abuse of technology that is being done in nearly every movie. I do not know what it is technically called, pardon me, but there is a technique where many short clips (sometimes connected, sometimes not very) are clipped together. These have very specific purposes. They can show what is happening, and they can also accentuate an effect. A spark, a shock, a commotion, e.g., are best conveyed using this technique. They capture the moment as well as the viewer’s mind perfectly. However, they are increasingly being used during introductions, fights, songs, anywhere they can be thought of. Phew!

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