Cinema Canada (Dec 1976-Jan 1977)

factory. It has one of the most astounding sound tracks which I have ever experienced in a film. There is no conventional music or narration in the movie; it is a visual, acoustical tone poem which works more on the level of abstraction and rhythm than on standard documentary information. The sound track consists of orchestrated sound effects, musique concrete coupled with a woman’s voice alternating quotes from the Bible with dull repetitive statistics of the town. ““Thou shalt not kill... thou shalt pay income tax and union dues... but the machine said...” It is a film which uses its techniques not in an arty, irrelevant way, but unified with its subject matter to produce a powerful and lasting effect. . Editing Editing is difficult to teach because if done well, editing is not something that you are aware of in a film. The best way to learn editing (aside from having people actually do it) is to look at a film in a viewer going backwards and forwards over the cut points to see how the cutting works. In teaching a class, a projector with good motion control is essential. Most go into reverse fairly easily, many allow you to project a single frame at time without burning a hole in the film. There are any number of National Film Board films which can be used to teach editing; here are two. Corral (12 minutes, B & W) was Colin Low’s first film — he has since produced and directed dozens. Corral is an extremely simple film about a cowboy selecting a wild horse from the herd and making his first attempts to saddle and ride it. It is an almost perfectly structured film with a clear beginning, middle, climax and ending and it relies entirely on the visuals to tell its story. Because of this simplicity, it serves as an ideal introduction to the art of editing. Students have found it a valuable experience to. take this film and analyze it shot by shot on a viewer. They see how even the simplest of films relies on many shots to tell a story and how these different shots are combined together to produce different effects. ‘ A second film gives a very curious introduction to the art of film editing. Descent (30 minutes, color) is a film about Canada’s National Ski Team and was. directed by Gilles Walker and edited by John Laing. The film is interesting in terms of editing because of one particular scene, the climactic race against the clock by David Murray, one of Canada’s most promising Resynthesizing reality: key to the art of editing downhill skiers. The film must be shown twice. The first time, the audience will be caught up with the excitement of the event and naturally look upon the final event as a continuity. The second time the film is shown, ask the audience to particularly notice the number Murray is wearing. To their amazement they will see that it changes from shot to shot in this apparently continuous race. This film, like many others, was an amalgam of a great deal of footage. The final race sequence is the result of shots from many races taken around the world and edited on motion into one smoothflowing continuity. Once this key is noticed, the creative work of the editing becomes visible as does the whole creative role of the editor in terms of resynthesizing reality. The magic of film is such, however, that even when the number changes are noticed, the sequence still works and still flows smoothly. Structuring Somewhere between editing and the final film comes a process very familiar to all filmmakers, that of pacing the film, arranging the edited in Descent, skier David Murray’s changing numbers give a December-January / 51