Art vs. Craft

So last month I edited a 9-minute documentary about the history of a local theatre company. A pretty easy gig, all things considered: almost all of the images were still photos, done Ken Burns style, slow zooms in or out, slow pans this way or that, with music under and a voiceover that the director wrote. In Illustration No. 473 of the precipitous learning curve for Final Cut, I worked my little a$$ off and the result, sadly, was only half-a$$ed. I mean it looks fine, but there aren't nearly enough moments of zing and zazz, editorially speaking.

There are a few moments I liked--an actor descending through a trap door in the stage floor, walking into darkness just before a segment about the Northridge earthquake. But when a director friend of mine watched the piece, he immediately pointed out how much more effective the moment would have been if I had simply slowed the footage down, extending the actor's descent. A great idea, and something I hadn't even thought of, largely because I don't yet have those tools really burned into my head. I now know they're there, and I more or less know how to use them, but the skill doesn't matter if your imagination doesn't lead you to employ those tools in the first place.

A frequent point of debate in filmmaking circles is whether an editor is an artist or a craftsman. Theoretically, I categorically believe they are artists, and should be recognized as such--a movie can have everything else going for it, but if the editing is clumsy the movie won't work; contrariwise, a poor movie can often seem better than it is with good editing. I just watched Coppola's Gardens of Stone, an interesting movie that doesn't really work, and I think editing is one of the reasons why: too often the dots don't seem to be connected, not in a cool Tarantino sort of way but in a "What's going on here?" sort of way. Good actors start weeping almost out of nowhere because the moment doesn't build properly, while other moments seem to build and build but go nowhere, to no purpose. Somewhere, way deep down, there is an interesting story being told, but the presentation of it left me confused and indifferent.

My editing job on this documentary could only be craftsmanlike (and not very impressively craftsmanlike either) because I'm not yet ready to be an artist. It's the old Carnegie Hall joke: guy goes up to a cop in Manhattan and asks "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" "Practice, practice, practice!" You can't think about your pizzicato technique when you're playing in Carnegie Hall, it has to be a part of you, practiced until it's second nature. A writer has to know the rules of grammar inside and out before he can be allowed to break them. An actor in Beckett's "Play" who hasn't completely internalized the lines will get lost, disastrously, in front of a paying audience. It is never enough to rely solely on your craftsmanship. Good enough is never good enough.