The technique of film editing (1958)

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The ease and effectiveness of the two ironic twists given to this short passage hide a great deal of editing skill. Since it is perfectly obvious what the passage is intended to mean, it will be most useful to see how this seemingly effortless effect was achieved. An editor brought me1 the news that he had just found a synchronised speech with Baldwin addressing an audience. I heard it and decided that it had something. There was a pompous intonation in the way he started : "A National government is a great ideal ..." I saw ironically funny possibilities if it were cued in at the proper moment. So I worked backwards, as it were, and then towards it, like this : (1) A Scot comments dourly on conditions on the Clyde. (2) A woman's voice picks up — bitterly dry — over Jarrow. (3) A Welshman picks up with philosophic Welsh humour over South Wales and ends up by saying : " The chaps started to march to London. Why not ? They had nothing else to do ! The time I went we got as far as Hyde Park — and that was as far as we did get ! " (Shots of marchers in Hyde Park which also brought us filmically to London.) " We found the government had resigned." (4) After this, we cut to the passage quoted above. The point I am making is that this gag needed a considerable build-up, but this build-up presented something worth showing in its own right too. We were able to cut from the cue — " Mark you, a lot of us weren't very clear what a National government was ! " — straight to Baldwin's opening sentence. The effect was threefold : one, it emphasised Baldwin's words ; two, it gave an indirect comment on Baldwin himself ; and, three, it gave a smooth and amusing continuity. When we had got Baldwin speaking from the platform, we found that our next shots (for other reasons) had to be open-air, happy, out-of-door shots. If we had cut straight from Baldwin to the open air, the effect would have been inadvertently that Baldwin was responsible for all this outdoor happiness. We frankly didn't think so. That was the first difficulty. The second difficulty was that Baldwin's speech was delivered indoors at night while the following shots were out of doors and sunny ; a cut therefore would not have been very happy. In cases of this sort experience tells us not to scrap the idea but to look around for some other way out ; often, if we find it, the effect will be all the better for the difficulties involved. So, in this case, it struck me that the song " Looking on the Bright Side " might effectively bridge the gap between night and day — whilst also having symbolical overtones. That was stage one. But when I brooded on the lyric, I was overjoyed to find that when laid back over Baldwin speaking (as it had to be for mechanical reasons) there were delicious satirical overtones. Witness : Baldwin posturing and Gracie Fields singing, " sticking out my chest, hoping for the best, looking on the Bright Side of Life." Even if the audience did not get the finer points of the satire, the song was still doing its major job of bridging the gap between night and day. There are two examples in this extract of the use of colloquial commentary which are perhaps worth noting. It is a golden rule for me in all commentary writing, that the metaphor or figure of speech should, where possible, spring from the visuals. For example, how dull and unnecessary it would be to say 1 Notes by Jack Ho wells. 202