Editing isn’t about childish cross-fading; it’s about threading emotion with a razor blade. And that’s a very modern shave: while storytelling, acting, photography, and music accumulate millennia of history, editing is uniquely cinematic and very recent. Only film brought us Kuleshov’s experiments, the montage, the jump cut — a purely 20th-century invention that continues to differentiate the art from the rest.
I stumbled into editing belatedly, starting from scratch in 2011 when asked to cut my first moyen métrage. What I quickly learned was that editing is the ultimate and subtle “make or break.” A clean shave or a slit to the veins — an expert editor can save mediocre footage, while a rushed hack can massacre even the best cinematography. The Mirror, Tarkovsky’s assemblage of memories and reproaches toward his parents, only came to life on its seventh reshuffled edit — with the desperate addition of archival footage showing Soviet WW2 soldiers trudging through the mud of Lake Syvash.
Editing is where the magic — and the torment — happens. I’ve spent days debating whether to move a cut by a single frame. Left or right? J-K-L again.
It’s an esoteric process, bordering on the supernatural. Accidental overlaps on the timeline have, more than once, created unplanned cuts so perfect they made it into the final film. Can you guess which ones?
Because I’m often also the director and DP, I shoot with editing in mind — leaving pre-roll and post-roll “head and tails” to experiment freely. It’s not just about following the protocol of the script; it’s about preparing for the lucky accidents. The best takes? Often the first or the last, driven by actors’ request to give it another try. A request I always grant as a director, even though the producer in me screams about the delay.
But as one of my mentors used to say in my early days of photojournalism, back in the 1990s: “Film is cheap. Editing is priceless.” He was referring to still frames, but I transposed the adage to motion (and thankfully digital is cheaper still). So as a DP, I shoot more than necessary, knowing that the cut will decide everything.
Filming is lights, camera and a hundred creatives having fun outbesting each other. Editing is a display array, a rendering rack and a solitary slog of endurance in the dark.
Editing is a delicate balance of sensory manipulation and invisibility. Critics praise the editing in my films, yet none have pinpointed where my most subversive jump cuts land — or why they work. That’s by design. If the audience notices, I’ve failed. Editing must alter the viewer’s emotions without their awareness, threading together visuals, sound, and music into a seamless flow. A uniting paradox of absence.
I know the rules, the conventions of cinema. Only to better break them at their weakest. My documentaries import scripted fiction technique, and fiction films play with a real street scene to change the emotional pitch. Precisely when and where I want to switch an octave. Isn’t cinema an art of fooling the intellectual and stirring the emotional?
Compared to other disciplines, film editing is deceptively minimalist. Just compare the number of tools available in Photoshop to any editing suite.
Whether on an old-school Moviola or a subversive “magnetic timeline” of Final Cut Pro X, I can’t hide behind such naked simplicity: up to me to decide. Every single cut.
I choose Final Cut for its unorthodox flexibility — I turned my uncultured handicap into a fresh look at the traditional workflows. Unless you insist, I don’t “picture lock,” — I cut, arrange music, edit and repair audio in parallel. It’s a dynamic and methodical process — Final Cut running alongside Ableton Live and Adobe Audition, while the music team pulls their hair out (perhaps that’s why I work with Robert Henke, who hasn’t much left).
A process impossible without prior theoretical and practical foundations in music. But wait! Back in the crumbling USSR, I was “The lucky kid with outstanding musical talent. Must. Absolutely. Attend special music school.” On top of the regular one, of course.
Maybe if my parents had told me I would have needed those skills 20 years later, I would have shown more enthusiasm for composition theory, notation systems, and music history. Back then, dissonant chord progressions sounded like math, and being ‘best of class’ meant leading the choir as a reluctant soloist.
And yet, the results sound for themselves, and you will hear that from sound design specialists who wonder where such soundscapes come from. I guess, from a combination of Swiss Alps and freezing Moscow nights?
Speaking of layers… my STEM-heavy educational background adds another dimension. While many editors crumble under the current digital weight of technical details, I ffmpeg all the way, writing my own software in Bash, Rust or the omnipresent JavaScript.
I never liked my physics profs, but understanding debayering, LAB color spaces, and optical imperfections as mathematical models lets me extract maximum detail from every frame — removing aberrations, posterization, and artifacts with Swiss precision. Did they secretly know what I would face? That will forever remain a mystery. Like my editing choices — an amalgam of technical precision and sensory intuition, deceptively transparent to the audience.
Editing is weirdly subjective, the “you know it when you see it” kind almost impossible to judge for non-professionals.
The only metric I trust is personal: can I watch my edit 1 000 times without puking? I have to — when finalizing and checking the DCP. If the result still moves my soul and not my bowels on the 1 001st viewing, it’s a success.
Ultimately, the best way to understand my approach is to watch my films. Think you’ve spotted a subterfuge? E-mail me the timecode. Or better — your next project.
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