In the meantime, Words and Thoughts in RGB is still making the rounds. People living in or visiting the Serra da Estrela area may watch it at the Imago Film Festival in Fundão, which started last Saturday and will end next Sunday. You may catch WTRGB this Thursday the 5th, at the Docs in Shorts #2 session at 6 o'clock in the afternoon.¶

The lost art of film editing, or another round in the endless mise en scene vs cutting debate. But anyway perhaps it's just me who gets annoyed by this kind of articles. I've always refused to acknowledge the existence of a "MTV style" of editing as something totally new that appeared in the 80s and changed cinema history for good. If you look at it, that kind of editing goes all the way back to the 20s, to the French avantgarde and Dziga Vertov.

There's just something elementary that goes beyond MTV: the higher the caliber you're shooting (eg. 35mm), the larger the canvas, therefore, you can have quite a level of detail without resorting to the kind of shots that demand a higher rate of cutting, such as close-ups. In a large format canvas, a close up is an exceptional shot, but in low caliber formats (Super8, television) pehaps it is best to shoot a dialogue entirely in shot-reverse-shot close-ups. Try watching an old 3:1 Cinerama western in a letterboxed DVD and you'll know what I mean — even if you have big big screen or home projector, there's no way to avoid the fact you're looking at an image with 300 or so lines of vertical resolution. It is a fact that since videotape came out many movies started to be shot differentely to allow for their exhibition on TV, and nowdays many multi million dollar movies are shot in 35mm or HD as if they were to be shot in common video (or even in the very-fast-cutting-for-economic-reasons style we relate to Super8), but for me this has nothing to do with music videos or advertising, just look at how many directors get radically different when they get to direct feature films.

Does this kind of evolution translate as editing becoming a 'lost art'? No. Definitely no. There's just good editing and bad editing, as sure as there is good directing and bad directing, good films and bad films. Bad editing is the kind of editing that just gets in the way, MTV style or not. Look at how producers of today's war movies — those in which too much editing and very shaky, confusing camerawork censor the violence (or lower production costs) —, do this deliberately, this editing that makes a scene less clear. Is this the music video's fault?

Like a good plot twist, a good cut is entirely predictable but still unexpected. It's satisfying to watch. Just because many videos nowdays are edited by kids with Mac laptops going totally bezerk with a Razor tool, leaving simple concepts such as syncing cuts with the tempo of the music to the realm of probability, this doesn't mean anything other than bad editors doing bad editing. Many music videos are masterpieces in creative and precise editing, and some require virtually no editing at all (see Massive Attack/Michel Gondry's Protection — the Rope of music videos? — or in a totally different style, the wondervid of the moment, OK Go's Here it Goes Again). Same goes for film.¶