Philosophy of Editing — Joe Sinopoli

The Medium is the Message:

An Essay on Balance, Filters, and The Medium of Editing

I am watching what I have come to believe is the most endearing show ever aired on television: The Great Pottery Throwdown. I’m tempted to write a treatise on host Keith Brymer Jones’ proclivity to shed tears upon the contestants’ ceramics, but since only fourteen people have watched the show, let’s explore a separate idea that surfaced in the grips of a recent episode.

Throwdown is the only piece of episodic programming I have watched in the last six months, so my attention to its details are keenly attuned. My girlfriend and I trodded through the first three seasons, with each new installment of the series offering slight alterations to the prior ones: a new host here, a new challenge there and so on. As is the case with the evolution of any program reflexive enough to be self-aware, the style and tone gently moves with the seasons. As we forged into the fourth season, new aesthetics emerged.

Along with a new set, higher definition cameras, and all the trappings of a show on the upswing, the editor in me perceived a fresh array of mini-dramas being constructed in post-production. The earlier seasons had featured inconspicuous background music, but now the music levels were tuned up, with sharp stings highlighting unexpected twists of fate. The storytelling of the episode arcs were crafted with more sophistication. The ‘reality show lifeblood’ was more vibrant, saturated and intimate. In short, I noticed the little things that only an editor would clock.

As an editor, people ask me if I’m able to view television unfettered by my occupation. Are you able to just watch stuff or are you constantly aware of the editing? While it’s true that there is some acquaintance to the “man behind the curtain,” I still lose myself in the program if the work is effective. Most content is best served if you’re not aware of The Editor’s hand. While The Editor is markedly formative to the show one is watching -- every single cut being a decision point ripe with ramifications -- the work is primarily silent. Despite the nature of an edit -- in its purest form it is the drastic rupturing of the camera’s POV -- we quickly adapt to the medium. To notice the puppeteer usually means that one of the strings is broken.

Yes, there are moments of editorial exceptionalism. The Editor may, at times, marvel at a “great cut” (a shot’s kinetic and/or temporal relationship to the other shots around it). They may be carried by the fluidity of a scene, or be lifted by the tension of a montage, and The Editor recognizes the artist behind these moves. Just like an honest performance or a brilliant line of dialogue, editing too carries us beyond its form.

But outside of the stellar exceptions and those egregious missteps of continuity, most of the time the cognizance of the craft offers simply an overtone of appreciation to the given program. An authentic consumption of film and video relies on the relaxation of our analytical minds, not its activation. For it is only when the brain stops churning where we all -- editors and plebeians alike -- submit ourselves to real feeling. Feeling. That ineffable gestalt which draws one into a piece or pushes them away from it. Whether the work is suspenseful, stimulating, emotional or none of the above is determined by the mysterious psycho-emotional inclinations of our minds. Our individual backgrounds, worldviews, genetic wirings, and spiritual perspectives all get mixed up with the multivariate dimensions of the different creators behind the screen. Our personal preferences stir into those of the makers (writers, actors, prop masters, etc.) to synthesize into our tastes. The Editor’s contribution to this stew is, markedly, rhythm.

Rhythm -- like its big brother feeling -- is a challenging notion to capture with the written word. Applying to all domains, the sensorial definition of rhythm is, kind of, however we choose to apply it. Whether it’s as lofty as the “rhythm of the seasons” or as minute as the rhythm of this very sentence, humans are naturally at ease in cyclical flows. Samsara, Buddhism’s articulation of the “wheel of life”, pegs this to the constant two-step of death and rebirth: the wheel from which all things unfurl, grow, and recede back into themselves. So goes all things. Every aspect of reality eventually reveals itself to be a participant in this Yin and Yang: masculine and feminine, chaos and order, right and wrong, and so on, back and forth, back and forth. As Conor Oberst, one of the most great songwriters of recent decades, sings:

“First a mother bathes her child, then the other way around.
The scales always find a way to level out.”

From the higher vantage points of ontological speculation, much of the universe (short of the Godhead itself) can be seen to be an exercise in perfecting this balance. And out of such balance we draw this concept of rhythm. Let us try a simple exercise:

Clap your hands as basic quarter notes, to the count of four:

One, two, three, four.

Now clap on the first two measures (one, two) and then leave a pause for the second half of the measure (three, four).

One, two, [rest], [rest].

The rest creates space. Because of the silence, this space creates a different rhythm and balance than the first set of claps. This is an overtly rudimentary and symmetrical example, but this inherent to and fro are the roots of rhythm. Simple musical rhythms of the kind we just addressed compound into highly layered networks of beats which to the uninitiated may sound difficult to parse, but the drummer is always holding that balance within earshot, waiting to release that tension.

Rhythm is one of the roots of the editor’s work. An editorial rhythm is, most simply, established by the length of the shots: two quick shots succeeded by a long shot has a different rhythm than three long shots in a row. In certain lights, it’s just relationship, as was famously explored by the Godfather of editorial theory, Sergei Eisenstein in his mastery of the montage. While these shot-to-shot relationships may take place within the window of a few seconds, the same idea holds within scenes: a short scene and then a long scene has a different feel than two short scenes back-to-back. Within this framework, the filmmaker is able to tinker with the kinetic balance of the moving picture and illicit within the viewer some desired feeling.

Other factors doubtlessly contribute to the feel of a piece. The composition of a given shot, the words of an actor, the text treatment, music, etc. The moving picture is a crucible of different forms interacting at once. So while the editor, in the most classic sense, is “cutting” from one shot to the next, they also act as a control valve to these other functions. What information will be emitted to the audience? When? With what degree of clarity? As noted earlier, every single edit is embedded with a dozen mini-decisions. The editor is controlling the stream of information. They are the filter.

In his seminal work Understanding Media, media theorist Marshall McLuhen lays out his exceedingly prolific concept of “The medium is the message”. This mantra has been recited by film school professors and neo-philosophers since its coinage. McLuhen’s theory posits, with immense clarity, that the content of any given medium influences us less than the medium itself. The medium is what is affecting our consciousness.

For example, if one is to read a book on the history of Europe, while we may remember some of the stuff inside the book, the information which actually alters our mind is the medium of the book itself: a bunch of pages filled with words. You see, the written word is fragmented and atomized -- a body of little individual letters, contained inside separate words, within differentiated paragraphs. In contrast, oral traditions proffer a holistic conveyance of information. Sound, and its collective transmission of the tribal milieu, acts upon our senses and psyches in a far different manner than in the isolated book. A book is individualized, in both form and function. This individuation via literature renders the reader in its own image.

According to McLuhan, all of technology is an extension of man’s central nervous system. The wheel is the extension of the legs, writing the extension of mind, the photograph an extension of memory. Whether it's television, radio, or weaponry, all the tools that we utilize to expand our way of being not only assists us in amplifying our intentions and navigating reality with greater intensity, but since “the medium is the message”, the mediums themselves recursively inform how we parse the world. In short, our understanding of the world is mediated by the mediums in which we perceive it through.

As I have studied and experimented with the nature of human consciousness, this McLuhanian idea has proved increasingly fertile. I’ve examined the different manners in which my experiences and the mediums I frequent have impressed themselves onto my neurological and biological programming.

For one, The Editor is disconnected from the source of the footage they’re working on. Imagine the trope of “the lonely editor” toiling away in a dark room while the rest of the production acts in unity somewhere far, far away. From a practical perspective, The Editor is provided a mass of footage and must cull through it to discover what is necessary for the piece. They must, above all, be attuned to what is truthful. And as the digital revolution explodes the amounts of footage The Editor must ingest, it becomes increasingly necessary that they maintain an acute sensitivity to what is relevant and what should be left on the proverbial cutting room floor. In essence, their distance from both the process and their insular perspective demands that their filtering mechanism, above all, separates the signal from the noise.

This signal-to-noise sensitivity is, as with rhythm and balance, a critical modality to the editor’s craft. And as The Editor’s vocation permeates their entire consciousness -- an effect impossible to escape if enough hours are committed to the act -- the world is understood anew. Man is simply a filtering mechanism. And that filter is malleable. Here is where MacLuhen’s ideas start to soar, as we see that the “medium,” for all of us, becomes the “lens” which can see the world through.

To this editor, living a fulfilling life, it seems, is much about balance. Balance between restraint and release, between the interior and the exterior, between the physical and the spiritual. The Taoists call it The Middle Way -- the perfect place of in-between-ness, in which the enlightened man rests not in “this” or “that,” but above the duality of contrast. It is only here, in the straddling of all polarities, perfectly balanced, where one can actually hear the signal. Everything else is just noise.

And in a world drowning in noise, this may be the most important task. For most of us who are stuck on auto-pilot, the vast majority of our daily lives are disposable: just footage for the cutting room floor. If we’re lucky and aware of our minds and our surroundings -- that is, if we’re not too stuck in the matrix -- we may encounter some moment of transcendence. Clarity and unity of body, mind and spirit. Here, the signal is clear. These moments are what we are to build the story of our lives with. And as one begins to tune into this space, those “rare” moments are suddenly occasioned more frequently. The “usable footage” starts to increase.

As Alan Watts said, “You are under no obligation to be the person you were five minutes ago.” We each have many seasons, many opportunities to shift our music and change our cameras; to re-filter and re-balance. We’re editing our lives as we live them.