The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing (2004) on Netflix
NR20041h 38mDocumentary
Film editors talk about their craft, joined by directors, actors and producers who work alongside them. The clips are taken from a hundred years of movies with innovative editing styles.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.7/103,322 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes83%
Trailer
Plot summary
The documentary is built on interviews with thirty film editors and seventeen other people, among them directors, actors and producers. It looks at the history and craft of editing, covering techniques such as cross-cutting, close-ups, cutting on action and jump cuts, and names pioneers of the field including Edwin S. Porter, D.W. Griffith, Dziga Vertov and Lev Kuleshov, whose Kuleshov Effect it discusses. Behind-the-scenes footage from The Matrix Reloaded and Cold Mountain appears. Women held many editing jobs in the early years, when the work was compared to sewing, and the arrival of sound films in the 1930s shifted the field toward men; Margaret Booth, a supervising film editor, is noted for the length of her career. Trends of the early 2000s, among them quicker cutting and computer-generated imagery, come up as well.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing (2004)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Wendy Apple and executive producer Alan Heim got the rights to nearly 300 film clips for free from Judith Singer, Warner Bros.' head of clips, who liked the idea; the clips would normally have cost millions.
- The documentary's budget was under a million dollars, and an extra $20,000 was spent on music rights, yet the filmmakers still had to cut a track from the 1980 film Raging Bull.
- Srujana Adusumilli, editor of the 2023 Indian film Mem Famous, said the documentary inspired her to become a film editor.
