Here's the talk I gave and I'll share the questions we asked tomorrow. Between Round 1 and Round 2 I first showed this video:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gEsASjxJJT0JaYyCGD2R-OKHCEq6nFSx/view
And then between Round 2 and Round 3 I gave this talk:
The famous French filmmaker Robert Bresson once said that a film is born three times: first in the script, then in the shoot, and finally in the edit.
As you can tell from the clips we watched before the break, today we’re focusing on film’s final birth – the edit.
Crosscutting is a unique film term that means jumping back and forth between two locations to achieve a certain effect - excitement, tension, or in the famous scene we saw from The Silence of the Lambs, deliberate misdirection. You also heard the editor of The Silence of the Lambs, Craig McKay, talk about parallel editing which is simply a form of crosscutting.
What’s interesting is that these now-famous sequences – the baptism scene in The Godfather or the FBI raid in The Silence of the Lambs – do not exist in this form in their original novels. They were not simply adapted from the page. They were created by cinema. And to me that fact points us to a much larger idea.
At nearly every Reel Adventures I’ve talked about film as an artform – about the belief that cinema, when practiced at the highest level, deserves to stand alongside painting, music, and literature. That a great film can be as meaningful as a Van Gogh painting, a Beethoven symphony, or a Tolstoy novel.
Early defenders of film as art argued that cinema had to prove two things in order to earn that status.
First, it had to establish who the artist was. Unlike a painting or a novel, film is intensely collaborative. So critics and filmmakers began to argue that the director functions as the film’s primary creative voice – the guiding intelligence shaping all the elements into a coherent whole.
Second – and this is the more difficult hurdle – film had to demonstrate that it could do something no other art form could do.
One of those uniquely cinematic qualities is montage: the idea that meaning is not confined to a single image, but is created through the relationship between images. Editing allows film to generate ideas, emotions, and even moral judgments that do not exist in any individual shot. For those of you who attended Reel Adventures Rear Window, this is exactly what Alfred Hitchcock explains so clearly in his famous demonstration.
(VIDEO of Hitchcock I showed):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eYm8gMK5dzIb9cBqrk7IuCQbUgwHmL4p/view
Another early concept was kino-eye – the belief that the camera is not just a recording device, but a new way of seeing. Through lenses, angles, slow motion, and time manipulation, film can reveal aspects of reality the human eye alone cannot perceive.
And then there is crosscutting. Crosscutting allows film to place two separate actions in conversation with one another. As you heard Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather, point out this technique – this ability to tell two stories at once and create meaning from their collision – is something the novel simply can’t replicate in the same way.
So where does that leave us?
Film is undeniably a hybrid art. It borrows composition and light from painting, performance and blocking from theater, and narrative structure and dialogue from literature. But it is not merely a combination of those forms. It is something new.
Cinema possesses expressive tools that belong to it alone – montage, kino-eye, and crosscutting – the ability to create meaning through juxtaposition and rhythm. And it is in the edit, that final birth of a film, where these tools fully come to life.
If an art form must demonstrate unique capabilities in order to claim its place, then film more than meets that challenge. And the scenes we’ve looked at today don’t just entertain us – they quietly prove the case.
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