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Film Editing and Painting
Every art form involves editing in the sense that editing involves the selection, collation and adjustment of parts and pieces of the work of art.
Film editing is ultimately the ideal combination of shots contained within the material that has been put unto the roll of film. It differs from other types of editing in that it brings together time as imprinted in the segments of film. Editing entails assembling smaller and larger pieces, each of which carves a different time. Their assembly creates a new awareness of the existence of that time which emerges as a result of the intervals of what is cut and carved off in the process.
The process of creating a painting is similar to that of film editing. As a painter, I do not know what the idea will come to look like at the end and, as a result, I have come to believe that images are destined to exist despite of my lack of awareness about them. For example, I may begin a canvas as a still-life. If the still-life becomes alive with the bright corners I aim to find after some brush work, then as in editing, the unified living structure inherent in the canvas is organized. The time that pulsates through the blood vessels of the film (canvas) and makes it alive is of varying degrees.
It is simply a question of recognizing and following a pattern while joining and cutting. Perhaps one corner of the still-life looks like a face staring at the moon despite the fact that all I wanted to paint was plain still-life. I wait a day or two and if the face staring at the moon keeps showing in the still-life, then I must obey the force evoking a face on my design rather than obey my own original desire to paint a still-life. I become a servant much like an editor working for a director.
The conditions that make for a smooth cutting do not arise spontaneously in the cutting room nor does the smooth creation of a face staring at the moon in my studio. If I trust my intuition by following this path, then I am open to images invisibly inherent in my ideas as they originate during painting. This is true of film making as in the words of the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky:
" For a long time I still could not believe my eyes. The film held together. It was a serious test of how good our shooting had been. It was clear that the parts came together because of a propensity inherent in the material, which must have originated during filming".
No single component of a glimmer can have any meaning in isolation. It is the film that is a work of art. In the same manner, the face staring at the moon in one corner of the still life must not be isolated even if it means the destruction of the original idea. Perhaps the face alone looks isolated even if it means the destruction of the original idea. Perhaps the face alone looks beautiful but the painting will fail if I don’t harmonize the surrounding to bring out wholeness. The whole should be greater than the sum of the parts.
The next new image should be a moon, the one the face is staring at. The other half of the still life shall be transformed into images also inherent in the material , in a sense they edit themselves; they join up according to their one intrinsic pattern. It is simply a question of recognizing and following this pattern while creating, changing and erasing to create again in sinchronisity with the harmony inherent in the picture.
In a curious, retroactive process, a self-organizing structure takes shape during editing because of the distinctive properties given the material during shooting, the same retroactive process that takes place as I look over the new shapes that emerged on the canvas while I painted. Works of art are formed by an organic process.
"They are living organisms with their own life system, which should not be disturbed. The same applies to editing, it is not a question of mastering the technique like a virtuoso, but of a vital need for your own distinct individual expression. Above all, you have to know what brought you into cinema rather than into another form of art and what you want to say by means of its poetry "(2)
The same is true for a painter who believes in the invisible images inherent within the forms destined to exist, and waiting for the artist's faithfulness to them. Through my life, I have identified myself with expressionist film-making for obvious reasons, like its emphasis on feelings expressed through form and because it is largely a director's cinema. Yet, at times, I feel tempted to recreated reality, in other words to submit myself to organizing the canvas according to the rules of a disciplined painter.
In that case, I must not look for any dream or fantasy and instead look straight to reality.
According to the French film theorist André Bazin, montage is merely one of the many technique a director could use in making movies. Furthermore, he believes that often, editing could actually destroy the effectiveness of a scene. A novelist or a painter must represent reality, by representing it in another medium through language and color pigment.
The film-maker's image on the other hand is essentially an objective recording of what actually destroys the effectiveness of a scene. A novelist or a painter must represent reality, by representing it in another medium through language and color pigment. The film-maker's image on the other hand is essentially an objective recording of what actually exists. No other art, Bazin feels, can be as comprehensive in the presentation of the physical world. No other art can be as realistic in the most elementary sense of that word. There are many ways portraying the real. The essence of reality Bazin believed, lies in its ambiguity. Reality can be interpreted in opposing and equally valid ways depending on the sensitivity of the artists. To capture this ambiguity, the film maker must be modest and self-effacing, a patient observer willing to follow where reality leads
As a painter, I learned the same lesson: a close approach to reality will carry at the end the weight of my personality without having to recur to expressionist ideas to be myself. Certain aspects of reality must be sacrificed for the sake of artistic coherence but the materials should be allowed to speak for themselves. Bazinian realism is no mere newsreel objectivity even if there were such thing. He believes that reality must be heightened somewhat in the cinema, that the director must reveal the poetic implications of ordinary people, events and places. We find this concept in the painting avant-garde movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Beginning with Pisarro as an innovator of impressionism in France. The impressionists were against the neo-classical tendency to recreate the conventional beauty of Greek art and instead, they left the studios to go outdoors and register the poetic implication of ordinary people, events and places merely using new techniques and ways to reproduce reality without distortion:
In our century; we have two good examples of the avant garde reproduction of reality: Marcel Duchamp with his ready-mades, consisting of objects of everyday life; and Andy Warhol with his Campbell soup cans and Coca cola paintings. Andy Warhol also made films such as The Kiss and The Sleep. The latter shows just that, a man sleeping; later we see him waking up and by the wizardry of cinema, that moment has an unexpected and stunning aesthetic impact. The passing of time seems to be speeded, driven by our own curiosity.
The 19th century impressionists and 20th century pop artists become perfect examples of the manipualtion of reality by poetizing the common place. Likewise, the cinema is neither a totally objective recording of the physical world nor a symbolic abstraction of such.
Rather, cinema, like painting, occupies a unique middle position between the sprawl of our life and the artificially recreated worlds of the traditional arts.
Whether formalist or realist, abstract or symbolist, the importance in the approach of film editing or painting is rhythm. The dominant, all powerful factor of the film image is rhythm, expressing the course of time within the frame. The are no fixed rules concerning rhythm in films. Some editors cut according to musical rhythms. The march of soldiers, for example, could be edited to the beat of a military tune as in King Vidor's "The Big Parade". This technique is also common with American avant garde filmmakers who feature rock music soundtracks or cut according to a mathematical or structural formula.
Hitchcock teases the audience by not providing enough time to assimilate all the meanings of a shot.
It is also rhythm that provides harmony in the abstraction of Kandinsky, as well as to the mathematical constructions of Piet Mondriaan or the enigmatic paintings of Paul Klee. The rhythm of a classical composition depends on respecting the golden rules. These were a classical way of accommodating the objects as to create perfect harmony and thus pleasure for the eyes of the beholder not different from the classical way of Hollywood's mis-en scene.
For the formalist painter that I am, I feel somewhat close to Soviet montage and the formalist tradition. Although I differ in the theoretical basis, I do agree by personal experience in constant change in my images. The Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein believed that the essence of existence is constant change. What appears to be stationary of unified in Nature is only temporary, for all phenomena are in various states of becoming. Only energy permanent and energy is constantly in a state of transition to other forms.
Every opposite contains the seeds of its own destruction in time. Eisenstein believed that this conflict of opposites is the mother of motion and change. Editing for Eisenstein was almost a mystical process. The rhythm of editing in a movie should be like the explosion of an internal combustion engine. A master of dynamic rhythm, his films are dreamlike in this respect. Shots of contrasting value, duration, shapes, designs, and lightning intensities colliding towards a destination.
I like to create my images using colors in different light intensities, shapes and designs harmonizing toward their inevitable destination: a piece I am happy with. This images are in constant movements as I said before, a still life may turn into a face staring at the moon. Behind this element of surprise what keeps me working is the constant energy and my aim for rhythm in the composition.
It is above all through rhythm that the director reveals his individuality. Rhythm infuses a work with stylistic marks. It is not based on theoretical basis, but rather comes into being spontaneously in a film as a response to the director's innate awareness of life, his search for time.
Feeling the rhythmically of a shot is rather like feeling a truthful word in literature or an image in painting that comes about after a long struggle and it looks like it belongs there. The person watching either falls into your rhythm, your work and becomes your ally or else he or she does not.
I see it as my professional task then, to create my own distinctive flow of time. To one person it will seem one way and to another person another way. Joining segments of unequal time value necessarily breaks the rhythm. For example, if I leave my still life half painted with a face staring at the moon, regardless of how beautiful the grapes and bananas next to the face are, the rhythm is broken. However, if this break is promoted by forces at work with the assembled frame, by new predestined images, then it may be an essential factor in the carving out of the right rhythmic design.
In so far as a sense of time is relevant to the director's innate perception of life and editing is dictated by the rhythmic pressures in the segment of the film, his hand writing is to be seen in his editing, it expresses his attitudes to the conception of the time as expressed in the rhythm of his philosophy of life.
You will always recognize the editing of Bergman, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, because each one's perception of time as expressed in the rhythm of their films is always the same. Once my paintings are finished, there is a story behind them, not always a conscious one. Symbols and signs or religion as distant lands become the ultimate embodiment of what I have been through in life.
Art can never have the interplay of concept as its goal, The image is tied to the concrete material, yet reaches out along mysterious paths to regions beyond the spirit.
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