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Albany – In today's Academic Minute, Professor Dustin Morrow of Temple University explains the manipulation of time, through the art of film editing.
Dustin Morrow is a filmmaker, photographer, writer and media artist. He is currently an Assistant Professor-Practice Track at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he teaches courses in media production and theory. His short films have won numerous awards and been shown in venues around the world. He has written about film, pop culture, and pedagogy for a host of publications, and his photographs have been featured in a number of art and culture magazines, as well as public exhibition spaces. During the summers, Morrow teaches and produces films in London and Dublin. Among his recent and upcoming projects are Laptop, a short documentary about electronic music; Firinne: Searching for Ireland, an anthology of short films focusing on contemporary Irish identity; Ground London, a short experimental film about London's urban landscapes; music videos for such artists as Kate Tucker and Johanna & the Dusty Floor; the feature-length musical film Everything Went Down; and the new edition of the Focal Press textbook Producing for TV and New Media.
Professor Dustin Morrow - The Romance of Film Editing
The editor is the architect of a film. He or she writes with sounds and images.
It is the conception of time as manipulable that is most central to an editor's work. The fundamental nature of time is that it is always moving forward. This is why our culture is obsessed with the idea of memory, and capturing it in photographs and home videos. But through editing, one can change the direction of time, and the audience, because it understands the language of editing from having grown up watching television and movies, accepts this manipulation without question. For example, it is through the transparency of the experiment with time that the audience is so ready to accept John Travolta's character showing up at the end of Pulp Fiction, even though he was killed halfway through the film.
An editor is constantly working with time on two levels: objectively, as in the case of the running time of the film, and the length of individual shots and scenes and sequences; and subjectively, as in the consideration of rhythm and pace. An editor can cut a film that runs a brief 75 minutes, but that feels like it's three hours long, pitting the audience's objective and subjective receptions of time against each other.
The incredible beauty of an editor's work with time is his/her privilege to cut out life's boring bits - inherently, this is one of the things that make movies so entertaining. For example, you may wish that instead of enduring your morning commute everyday, the space around you could just dissolve from your home to your workplace. That works in the movies, but not in real life. It's within the editor's complete mastery of time that lies the great romance of film editing.