Introduction

The fascinating odyssey of investigating and appreciating the lives and careers of more than two dozen editors from across Europe has reminded me of my own initiation into the craft. Many of my contributors entered the cutting room by accident rather than intention. Certainly the majority did not choose editing as a career until after their initial experiences. Their innocence at the outset, even their naivety, may in some cases have made them better candidates for the job since, in my opinion, a lack of preconceptions gives the aspiring editor certain advantages.

Ironically, by the time I had graduated from university with a degree in sociology, which had been a strange diversion from reality, I knew categorically that I had to work in film and moreover that I wanted to be an editor, despite having never entered a cutting room or even read a book on the subject – the pleasure of discovering Karel Reisz’s ‘The Technique of Film Editing’ came later, and if I had read Eisenstein and the other Russian theorists I might well have been put-off the idea all together. However I had fallen in with a group at college who shared a passion for the cinema and I became obsessed with the medium which could deliver such a spectrum of pleasures from ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ to ‘The Seventh Seal’.

After a dreadful autumn and winter trying and failing to break into the business, I got my first job as a dogs-body in a small film company in London’s Soho, just as I had resigned myself to the idea of working in a processing laboratory to get a Union ticket – an essential passport to the industry in those days. Just as important as the job was enrolling in evening classes at The London School of Film Technique which was housed in a run-down Victorian house in Electric Avenue, Brixton.

The course taught me next to nothing: the lecturer in direction, a veteran of the Berlin Studios of the 1930s who claimed to have worked with G.W. Pabst, whose ‘Pandora’s Box’ had transformed the career of Louise Brooks, only appeared twice. His unfortunate wife usually substituted for him and amongst other subjects coached us in how to make the best goulash outside of Hungary.

The axiom of the editing tutor, who was very articulate about coping with the privations of cutting in the inhospitable climate of West Africa, from where he had just returned, was that in cutting ‘if it looks right, it is right’. The one skill I acquired was to make cement joins in 16mm film which stood a fair chance of holding together when projected. For our final project groups of us were given hundred feet of black and white 16mm film, which lasts two-and-a-half minutes, to make a silent film. It was hardly a step to Hollywood or even Pinewood.

But over the six months, on two evenings a week, I made two wonderful friends – an Indian, Durga Ghosh, and an Australian, Ron Porter. Their knowledge of cinema was far greater than mine and their passion had brought them to this institution from the other side of the world – much to my embarrassment. Durga was to gain some success as an editor for German Television in Stuttgart before he succumbed to kidney failure. He was one of the most cultured and stimulating men I have ever met. I still have a copy of the film he made about Rabindranath Tagore, that remarkable writer and thinker.

Ron, on the other hand always wanted to be a director, and the following year sunk all his savings in a modest film which I helped to conceive and subsequently edited. It was a simple story of an encounter between a young man and a young woman, set against the background of London’s Portobello Road Market, which we shot over several weekends with a crew of volunteers. The cast were Norman Mann, an aspiring actor, and Niké Arrighi, a trained ballet dancer who was to go on to some success in movies including the role of the make-up girl in Truffaut’s ‘La Nuit américaine’ (Day for Night).

The film was shot silent and often took advantage of the passing parade which is the life of the Portobello Market. As it was silent and the narrative was only loosely predetermined, we had to find the shape and rhythm in the editing. Ron and I met of an evening in a Soho cutting room and experimented with juxtapositions – placing reactions of the two characters against each other and the environment they moved through.

We were playing with the form without having learnt any conventions or rules. I can’t say we lacked anxiety, but we possessed a nervous energy born of ignorance and a concern that we would not be able to make the best of the material. After all if the film worked at all it might lead to other opportunities for one or other of us. Eventually we completed a twenty odd-minute final cut and ‘The Market’ was chosen to be shown in the London Commonwealth Film Festival, an honour that I like to think was not entirely due to Ron being Australian. My involvement merited a short article in the Kent Messenger, the local paper where I grew up. More importantly it helped me to get one of twenty places on the newly launched BBC trainee editors scheme in competition with twelve hundred other applicants.

In the next few years I developed as a ‘proper’ editor, acquiring the language and the rules to deliver an efficient cut of conventional narratives, almost as if my initiation with Ron had been a shared self-deception. Yet when we cut our film Godard had already made ‘Breathless’ and the Nouvelle Vague had challenged conventional film-making fundamentally, including the way editing functions.

To put my editing experience in perspective, although many of the films I cut were run-of-the-mill drama and documentary for TV, I also had the good fortune to work on some of Ken Russell’s best films for the small screen, including ‘Song of Summer’ and it was extremely liberating to be given material that allowed, even invited the use of less hidebound editing techniques.

I now realise that the naivety with which I had approached working on ‘The Market’ made me open to using editing as a remarkable tool without the shackles of ridiculous rules. Many of the editors in this book had to reach the point of a crisis of confidence before they could work without the safety net of conventions. Often this was associated with developing a working relationship with a remarkable director. In some cases the revelation was a shared journey. For others the editor benefited from a journey in film-making that the director had already made.

You can sense the excitement experienced by these editors as you read their testimonies. They share an involvement in the variety which European cinema represents. None have had an ordinary predictable career. I have brought some of these ‘cave dwellers’ out of their normal, abnormal habitat, blinking in the light of day, despite a shared fear of confessing the details of their voluntary commitment to a closed world. It remains to be seen whether future generations can look forward to a similar richness of cinematic forms emerging from the edit suites of Europe.

Agnès Guillemot with Roger Crittenden (© Roger Crittenden)