by way of illustration

Below is my contribution to Ada Lovelace Day.

Despite receiving an Oscar for her work, one of the most unsung women in film who has used technology in her work is film editor Thelma Schoonmaker. Like many filmmakers, she’s not a household name, despite having worked on a raft of movies that are regularly selected for top ten lists and themselves have gained best picture nominations. She’s unsung in as much as when the public talk about loving these films they never say it’s because they’re a Schoonmaker fan.

She’s Martin Scorsese’s editor.

Film directors tend to work with the same editors over and over again. There are various reasons: because they’re very skilled and flexible, they’re able to interpret what the director wants even if the director isn’t even sure what that is and I’ve heard its simply because they can stand to be in the same room together across the long months between the end of principle photography and the locking of the film ready for release, shaping the material, willing to be in the trenches when the studio says their masterpiece is half an hour too long and they have to excise a sub-plot.

So when I say that she’s Martin Scorsese’s editor, it’s because since Raging Bull, at least in feature films, he hasn’t worked with anyone else. They met at film school and she helped him to complete his student films and for over thirty-fives they’ve been together even through the lean years of the mid-80s when Scorsese couldn’t get a project off the ground. He even introduced to her to her husband, the legendary director Michael Powell. I don’t think that you can specifically describe a Scorsese film without mentioning an idea she must have contributed.

Whenever someone thinks of a Scorsese film, the style of it, a large percentage of it is the editing, the speeding and slowing of the shutter speed, the pacey cutting and also know when a scene needs space to breath, to emphasise the performances and script over everything else, all of the things that are an editor’s job to make happen and work. True, the extended tracking shot in Goodfellas as a job of cinematography, but the placement of the thing so that it structurally works within the body of the film and the place to cut in and out of the scene is (as far as we can tell) all Schoonmaker.

Here’s a useful quote from her Wikipedia biography. She says: "You get to contribute so significantly in the editing room because you shape the movie and the performances […] You help the director bring all the hard work of those who made the film to fruition. You give their work rhythm and pace and sometimes adjust the structure to make the film work ﷓- to make it start to flow up there on the screen. And then it's very rewarding after a year's work to see people react to what you've done in the theater."

Ever the contrarian, my favourite film directed by Scorsese is Life Lessons, his contribution to the portmantau New York Stories. It’s about an artist played by Nick Nolte and his fiery love affair with his assistant Rosanna Arquette. Across its half hour there are many scenes of Nolte at work, standing dwarfed by a giant canvas, brush in hand looking for motivation. Each offers an expression of his inner turmoil, from confusion over her return to his life, through inspiration, lust and anger.

They’re some of the best montage sequences I’ve seen on film of an artist working, as Schoonmaker cuts from Nolte’s hairy features, to the pallet to the canvas, demonstrating the pandemonium that this artist must engender in order to produce his best work. His brush strokes are chaotic and haphazard and so is the editing, a mess of close-ups and midshots slowly becoming more focus as the results are revealed, also keeping time with the emotions expressed by the music that fills his studio from Procal Harem to Bob Dylan. The later bio-pic Pollock has similar scenes, and these must has owed a debt to Life Lessons, as Ed Harris sprawled across the floor with his tube of paint.

The first minutes of Life Lessons, by way of illustration:



As for her attitude to technology? Another quote, this time from the Pinewood Dialogues: "And now with digital editing, one of the problems is that we’re working on a rather degraded image. They have to compress the information so that we can get a lot of information into the towers that store our footage, and we’re not always looking at the best possible image. I remember after Casino, I was looking at the film on a flatbed—it was a finished print—and I saw something in De Niro’s eyes that I’d never seen before. And I was very sad about that. It didn’t mean I would’ve edited it differently, but I was upset that I wasn’t seeing it."