The division of responsibility for the editing of a fi lm must necessarily vary from one unit to another. An experienced writer, able to visualise effects which can be achieved through editing, may take most of the responsibility upon himself; an experienced director will insist on making his own decisions. If writer and director have been uncertain about the precise continuity, the main responsibility will remain with the editor.
Depending on the traditions of the industry as a whole or the studio in particular, the personality and ability of the various technicians, the exact set-up will vary from production to production.
In British studios the director is usually the key fi gure in production. He collaborates on the shooting script and supervises the editing. The responsibility for the fi nal continuity of a fi lm rests with him and the editor.
In Hollywood, the reverse normally happens. Writers normally prepare their scripts in much greater detail and leave the director with the comparatively minor role of following the written instructions. In America, moreover, the producer is generally much more closely concerned with the creative part of production than is his British counterpart. The American producer almost invariably supervises the editing of the fi lm — a stage of production which in most Hollywood studios is no longer held to be the director’s responsibility.
There are only half a dozen directors in Hollywood who are allowed to shoot as they please and who have any super-vision over their editing. . . . We have tried for three years to establish a Directors Guild, and the only demands we have made on the producers as a Guild were to have two weeks ’ preparation for “ A ” pictures, one week preparation time for “ B ” pictures, and to have supervision of just the fi rst rough cut of the picture. . . . We have only asked that the director be allowed to read the script he is going to do and to assemble the fi lm in its fi rst rough form for presentation to the head of the studio. It has taken three years of constant battling to achieve any part of this. . . . I would say that 80 per cent of the directors to-day shoot scenes exactly as they are told to shoot them without any change whatsoever, and that 90 per cent of them have no voice in the story or in the editing. Truly a sad situation for a medium that is supposed to be the director’s medium. 5
While Capra’s letter gives a picture which is no longer quite accurate, the improvement does not seem to be very marked. Against it, it must be said that some of Hollywood’s leading directors have managed to get
5 From a letter from Frank Capra to The New York Times, published 2nd April, 1939. Quoted in America at the Movies by Margaret Thorp. Yale University Press, 1939, pp. 146 – 7.
round this seemingly hopeless situation: Preston Sturges and John Huston write and direct their own fi lms;
Chaplin writes, produces and directs; Ford is generally his own producer; Orson Welles was in sole charge of Citizen Kane. The success of the fi lms made by these directors would seem to prove beyond doubt, what common sense alone indicates: that the editing (whether planned before shooting in the script or supervised after shooting in the cutting room) and the direction should be done, or at least controlled, by one person.
But who should ideally be responsible for the writing? Some directors, as we have seen, appear to be at their best with their own scripts. (This does not necessarily mean — as in the case of Sturges — that the director needs to invent his own story: he may only collaborate on or supervise the writing of the shooting script.) Thorold Dickinson has put forward a strong case for this arrangement as being the only possible one. 6 But it does not necessarily apply to all directors. John Ford is said to direct his fi lms ( The Grapes of Wrath , for instance) very faithfully from other people’s scripts. Others have found it most congenial to form a director-writer part-nership in which through a long period of collaboration their two contributions have led to a complemen-tary and harmonious fusion of talents. Whatever the precise nature of the producer-director-writer-editor relationship which obtains on any fi lm, the essential condition would seem to be that the ultimately control-ling mind should conceive and execute the continuity in primarily visual terms, in terms of the choreography and editing of visually telling strips of fi lm.
In practice this means that the director should normally be in charge. It is he who is responsible for planning the visual continuity during shooting, and he is therefore in the best position to exercise a unifying control over the whole production. This implies that he must also be in charge of the editing and be allowed to inter-pret the material in the cutting room as he visualised it on the fl oor.
Although most directors, if given the choice, would certainly wish to retain the ultimate responsibility for their fi lms, most of them do not insist on writing the fi rst treatment of their stories. The invention of inci-dents and the writing of dialogue requires a talent which does not necessarily coincide in one person with a talent for imaginative visual treatment. Writer-director collaboration such as is practised by many British directors has been found to lead to a satisfactory balance.
A clue to the ideal working relationship between writer and director is perhaps best provided by a concrete instance. Discussing Marcel Carn é ’s long period of collaboration with the writer Jacques Pr é vert, and in par-ticular, their work on Les Enfants du Paradis , the French critic Jean Mitry has written:
In the past — when it was a question of works into which [Pr é vert and Carn é ] put all their resources, Quai des Brumes , Dr ô le de Drame or Le Jour Se L è ve — which I take not only to be his masterpiece but one of the rare masterpieces of the French cinema — in the past although the scenarios had always been the result of a close collaboration, Carn é had the upper hand in the breakdown into the shooting script and in the cinematographic construction of the fi lm. After Carn é had made a suitable adaptation of the subject chosen, and had sketched the main lines of the continuity, Prev é rt was content to write the dialogue and to fi t this into the limited and prearranged framework which had already been determined by Carn é . The latter, working in terms of cinema, tried to express himself visually and only allowed the dialogue to act as a reinforcing support on which to rest the images and to allow them to take their full value.
Since Les Visiteurs du Soir , the jobs have been reversed. It is Pr é vert who conceives the subject of the fi lm, who develops it, writes the continuity and often breaks it down into an extremely detailed form. Carn é ’s job is then confi ned to
6 Sight and Sound. March, 1950. The Filmwright and his Audience.
writing into the script the necessary technical notes and to planning the changes of camera angles. They are no longer Carn é ’s fi lms with dialogue by Pr é vert, but Pr é vert’s fi lms, directed by Carn é . It is another world.
Where Carn é makes a point visually, Prev é rt makes his point with words. He allows the visuals the sole purpose of showing, presenting and placing the characters in situations cleverly contrived, but controlled by his text. Hence the visu-als emptily serve only to identify outwardly characters of whom we know nothing except from what they say; the visuvisu-als serve only to illustrate a story whose development is never indicated except in words. The text becomes the pivot, the life, the structure of the fi lm, and the visuals serve as the reinforcing support by showing the shapes which the words represent. 7
Mitry ’s account suggests a reason for the extraordinary visual emptiness of Carn é ’s post-war fi lms. It is not that the images are dull — they are, if anything (in Les Visiteurs du Soir , particularly), too striking: but they serve to illustrate rather than to tell the story.
It may be objected that dialogue-bound scripts are not necessarily written by all writers, but only by bad ones. Experience shows, however, that where the writer is given ultimate control, where the director is made to shoot to a tight script which he is not allowed to modify, fi lms tend to become static and wordy. Often, this is a matter of deliberate choice. The normal Hollywood practice of making the writer and producer the controlling members of the unit is, no doubt, made possible by the comparatively great skill of the writers.
But it is also a symptom of the Hollywood system of fi lm-making in a much wider sense.
Behind a great proportion of fi lms made in Hollywood is the simple intention to exploit the box-offi ce appeal of the studio’s contracted stars. Films are written, directed (and edited) around the particular talents of the leading players. Scripts are written primarily in terms of dialogue which can most economically bring out the special box-offi ce attractions of the actors involved, and the visuals are designed to fl atter the stars ’ appear-ance. The effect on editing is equally strong: it becomes not so much a matter of working to the specifi c dra-matic needs of the story, as of presenting the leading players in the most favourable light. The most obvious effect of this is the superabundance of dramatically meaningless close-ups which so often ruins a fi lm’s pace and movement. As anyone who goes to the cinema at all regularly can testify, the outcome of this star-centred system of fi lm-making is a consistent level of dramatic mediocrity.
But there are exceptions. Many of the fi lms built round the personality of Greta Garbo, some of the Paul Muni biographies or Marcel Pagnol’s fi lms featuring Raimu, are little more than ingeniously contrived star-vehicles, yet they cannot be dismissed as worthless. Here, all the various creative elements of sound fi lm-making are sacrifi ced to the one element of acting, and the appeal comes to depend on the virtuosity of the central player. With performers of the stature of Garbo good fi lms occasionally emerge, but the same tech-nique applied to a star who may happen to be a current box-offi ce favourite can only lead to a formula suc-cess or boredom. One need only imagine Queen Christina without Garbo or La Femme du Boulanger without Raimu to perceive the weakness of this star-centred production technique as a general method.
There are other kinds of fi lms which do not owe their primary appeal to the director: the fi lms of Preston Sturges are essentially the work of a brilliant dialogue writer; the main credit for many good musicals may often
7 Sight and Sound, March, 1950. Translated by Thorold Dickinson. The Filmwright and his Audience.
be justly assigned to the dance director; a good case could be made out for the set designer as being the key fi g-ure in a de Mille epic. These fi lms are fi rst and foremost the work of a technician other than the director.
But it should be noticed that they are all unrealistic in their approach to their material. In various ways, they create their own level, their own distorted atmosphere: the caricature fi gures of a Sturges comedy, the majes-tic, larger-than-life fi gures created by Garbo, the light-hearted abandon of a good musical or the spectacular excesses of a de Mille epic, all these make an appeal on their own artifi cial level. They do not attempt to show events realistically but gain their strength through their own particular stylistic distortion.
When one comes to consider fi lms which attempt a more rigidly authentic approach to reality, it becomes obvious that here the director must be mainly in charge. The great fi lms of the sound period — The Grapes of Wrath , Le Jour Se L è ve , Bicycle Thieves — are all essentially “ directors ’ fi lms. ” The story and characterisation are conveyed in the fi rst instance in the pictures — through the “ choreography ” and editing of signifi cant images. The major creative impulse (whether it comes from the man who is given on the credit titles as the writer, the director or the producer) fi nds expression in the making of signifi cant images. Dialogue-writing, set-design and acting all become subjugated to this central purpose.