This is fascinating stuff. There's room enough in editing for both the technician and the poet.The documentary is narrated by Kathy Bates and, as the list of participants reveals, has a couple of dozen commentators. Not all of them are household names, of course, because who knows the names of any editors? Interesting that the craft started with women seated at their desks and cutting and gluing the old-fashioned way. It was thought proper to put a film through an assembly line of women because, well, that's a woman's job, isn't it? Cutting, snipping, crocheting, macramé, sewing -- weaving away forever like Penelope.And it STILL seems to be at least one of the occupations where the men haven't moved in and taken over entirely. (Another is superstar modeling, where the beautiful woman is paid about ten times what the beautiful man is paid.) One might think of the editor as some pale ectomorph buried in his cellar, gawking into a moviola, but they're actually pretty human and proud of what they do. The closest any of the editors come to that covert stereotype is probably Walter Murch. Here he is, a thin figure in a black Beatnik pullover, neatly trimmed beard, and proper eyeglasses, with never a wry comment or an expansive movement. He knows it too. He compares editors to precision jewelers. Yet he knows exactly what he's doing and shows us, point by point, how it's done. PS: It no longer involves being bent over a table and examining frames of movie film.A nice informative job by director Wendy Apple -- and editors Daniel Loeventhal and Tim Tobin.

This documentary is seriously odd (More on that below). It's a study of the power of film-editing. None of the information these subjects share is offensive, in fact it's all pretty interesting. Some terrific examples include the dumping of two entire reels from the climax of Lenny with one edit. Snipping five short vignettes from a longer Martin Sheen improvisation in Apocalypse Now. And a love scene assembled very cleverly in Out of Sight (Never heard of it myself) via moving the audio track around, short frame delays and non-linear time sequencing. A personal problem I have with this, is that director Wendy Apple shows you the inventor of a basic editing technique; and then (nine times out of ten) cuts to some loud, superficial action/effects movie that uses it. More than a few times, a technique that would be much better highlighted in a well-chosen clip where the edit can be studied almost in isolation, is instead buried under explosions, green screen razzle-dazzle, car-chases and gratuitous knife.gun.martial arts battles, where a fraction of the impact can be credited to the edit.The larger problem is that this approach continually results in Eisentein, Reifenstahl, Griffith clips sitting in close proximity to, and introducing things like Terminator 2, Scream, Gladiator, Titanic, Top Gun, The Matrix, Star Wars. !??! Equating originators who believed in what they were doing to the depths of their soul (and devised these techniques themselves), with modern filmmakers who frequently just want to increase viewer stimulation to increase their payday with a tried and true technique, is obtuse if not completely grotesque. Jumping from the ingenuity of a filmmaker devising an editing trick to rally people to a political viewpoint, to popcorn movies about surface stimulation and box office receipts is so reductivist as to be offensive. Which is I suppose a back-handed tribute to the meaning that editing can cause. This may be appropriate in one case; as when WW2 propaganda films are used to introduce Starship Troopers, because it's director (Verhoeven) is knowingly riffing on propaganda. But I was not watching this thinking "Thank God Eisenstein invented X so that it could be used in Basic Instinct." Instead, I frequently had a pained expression on my face. One can imagine this dilemma arose out of the need to cut to living, breathing editors who pick up the story, but it imposes some real arrogance on those involved. It almost never chooses to cut to calm, modern art films by thoughtful directors where the spare use of gimmickry allows you to appreciate what the editing tool actually does. In doing so it jumps almost completely over the middle years (60s-70s) where an astonishing burst of rebellion and experimentation occurred, from a second wave of originators. Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Kubrick, Resnais, Truffaut, Polanski..? All missing, to make room for people like Joe Dante and James Cameron.

This is a remarkable documentary, informative, interesting and successful in clarifying what is, for many, something of a mysterious process. The contributions to film making of directors, actors, designers, cinematographers and sound recordists is self evident, but the film editor's role has seldom been understood nor its importance fully recognised. This documentary is the first to give directors and editors an opportunity to explain exactly what goes on in the editing room and they have done it superbly. What a pity then, that references to the history of film editing woven into this story are cursory, inadequate and in some instances completely wrong. Martin Scorsese refers to Edwin Porters' 1902 film, Life of an American Fireman, as the very first film to be edited using crosscutting as a structuring device, and the commentary supports this view, despite convincing evidence to the contrary that was discovered in 1978. In fact the earliest discovered examples of this practise date from 1906. Equally mistaken is the assertion, made several times in this prize-winning documentary, that D.W.Griffith originated the important editing practise of action matching. In fact there is clear evidence of action matching in a British film made as early as 1903 and Griffith's first film was not made until 1908. There is considerable evidence that Griffith considered action matching to be of very little importance, and when used in his films it is often ill judged and clumsy. All this is curious in a documentary that seeks to explain the history and practise of film editing. One might have expected research on the topic to be as well informed as the comments made by most of the contributors, particularly given that the scriptwriter is Professor Mark Jonathan Harris of the School of Cinema and Television, University of Southern California.

Do you know of the importance of the Film Editor to making a great film or to leave the best on the cutting room floor? Did you know that Spielberg & Scorcese will not let any Actor into the Cutting Room (but that Sean Penn will do so)....that earlier there were "Basic Rules" to editing but that the rules went asunder under the French "New Wave"! PLEASE: Ignore the low score and note that almost all viewers gave this documentary either a TEN or a one....and we all know that there is a small percentage of IMDb'ers that truly HATE films and will do anything in their zeal to burn their path of ignorance behind them in an effort to bring everyone to their level of ignorance. How sad to disdain our basic need to learn about life and specifically to learn about what make a Great Film what it will become.