Jasper looks back on one week of IDFA and pretends he hands out the Best Editing Award.
And the winner is...
‘A great edit is in itself music, really’, I read exactly one week ago in an article about the IDFA PLAY Award for Best Music Documentary. Never before, so many music documentaries were screened at a festival. That’s a feast for someone like me. My week was one unbroken succession of getting up, drinking coffee, working, eating soft cheese sandwiches, watching films, running, flying, drinking coffee again and sleeping. And the next day all over again.
I’ve rarely watched so many films in one week. Now that I’ve more or less processed all impressions, it is time to look back. “I happily leave the reviews to the IDFA Daily, so I will apply the first line of this blog to what I’ve seen this week.
A great, inventive edit has an essential influence on the final result, on how a film is seen and interpreted in the end. Three examples immediately spring to mind: the best cut ever between two scenes is in
2001 – A Space Odyssey, the pace and madness in
Requiem For A Dream is especially in the editing and
Thelma Schoonmaker gave her best editing performance for Martin Scorsese’s
Raging Bull.
I’ve seen quite a few gems at this IDFA edition, too. A special mention goes to Michael Rapaport for his portrayal of A Tribe Called Quest. ‘What was the hip-hop scene in New York City like in the mid-1990s? Well, like this’, a male visitor told his girlfriend when leaving the cinema. Hard, raw and streetwise. And that’s what the editing of
Beats, Rhymes and Life shows as well. An average scene: street scenes, loitering groups of black kids, boom boxes, sweaty clubs, polo shirts. Cut, cut, cut. Spewed out like the rhymes of Q-Tip and Phyfe Dawg themselves. Music in itself?
But my award goes to the portrait of Mark Sandman (
Cure For Pain). This would never have had such a devastating effect if the editing had been different. ‘Wooooow...’, a female spectator sighed in the back of the cinema during one of the last scenes of the documentary. Everybody knew what was coming at the end: will they show footage of Mark Sandman collapsing on stage? I bet they will. But they didn’t. Cutting to black, starting this
soundtrack and showing a blurry black-and-white photograph of a collapsed body on stage. Minimal means, devastating effect. I heard someone swallowing audibly. Someone four rows down, that is. That says everything.
It won’t get any better.
Jasper van Harskamp