I like to romanticize editing as an art in and of itself. Unlike painting, sculpture, stage performance, or photography, film gets the benefit of an edit. A scene in a movie can shift the audience’s allegiance with a shot here and a smash cut there. In my last piece about editing, I wrote about how beautifully and expertly an editor can shift the tone of a scene or an entire film. I likened it to an assemblage of emotions. Now, I’d like to focus on how an editor can play with time.
An editor is like an omniscient being, always seeing time laid out before them. Working with their director, they can extend or cut short any sequence to build a reality for the characters within the narrative. They create the time of the film, not our reality’s runtime, but the time in which these characters will ever exist. Sometimes, that existence is over the course of a relationship— where it starts and where it ends, all mixed in with each other like in We Live in Time. Sometimes, it’s 90 minutes of nerve-wracking anxiety before a TV show premieres like Saturday Night. Sometimes, it’s a dreamy couple of weeks where a transactional relationship turns into something more like in Anora. The editor controls how we understand and experience time.
One of the greatest tricks at play in We Live in Time, edited by Justine Wright, is that we find ourselves in a story already in progress but not in the way we expect. Some scenes move Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias’ (Andrew Garfield) story forward, but in a way that is a flashback to their past. Every jump forward or backward helps build and fill in their years together. It serves to ease us into the fact that the ending, as hard as it is, is inevitable but ultimately fulfilling because of the challenges we saw them overcome over years of courtship, frustration, and love.
In contrast, Saturday Night, edited by Nathan Orloff and Shane Reid, is a train on a track barrelling ever forward, picking up speed as it heads into the station instead of slowing down. The fact that the story for the film is explicitly set during the 90 minutes prior to the first episode of Saturday Night Live hitting the air is a rigid construct with little room to move time in any way but forward. With the long tracking shots and the complicated crowd scenes, it’s a wonder, like that first episode of Saturday Night Live, that these editors could make it coherent. That’s the beauty of the craft, though, to hide the sweat and the seams to make something effortless and like they could have shot the film in one go over that specific 90 minutes.
The most incredible, madcap use of time in almost any film this year, comes from Anora, edited by Sean Baker (who also wrote and directed the film). The sequence comes as the love-drunk young couple Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) and Ani (Mikey Madison) are discovered, and henchmen Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) are dispatched by family fixer Toros (Karren Karagulian) to assess the situation. Tensions come to a head, and Toros, having been called from the scene, claims he is on his way, just ten minutes away. Within that ten minutes, all hell breaks loose. Ivan bolts, Ani is captured, and Garnick and Igor are on their back feet. The action cuts between what is happening at the mansion and Toros making his way through New York City traffic. The goofiness of these men trying to contain this situation is compounded by the fact that Toros is still on the line and can only hear the madness occurring. It’s scary, exciting, and ludicrously funny.
The way films are edited acts like a compilation of people’s memories. Memory for one person is fuzzy. Memory can be lost, but with the addition of other memories, a new era can be established. A well-edited film is a perfect piece of time in a character or group of character’s lives. Editing dictates how this cacophony of memory is understood and brings the memories into better focus. Time is constructed and wielded to create empathy for the fiction occurring on screen. It may be too long, or it may be too short, but in the end, it was all the time it needed.
