Film Editing Is the Invisible Art

The director Neil Labute once said about film editing: "Together, you and your editor fashion something new and fresh from a pile of celluloid. Without question, it is here that I now feel that one's real film is born."

Many members of the film community acknowledge the importance of editing, but Oscar seems all too content to assume that the best picture must also be the best edited. (Since 1981, about two-thirds of best picture winners have also won for best editing.)

Realistically, there’s no way to celebrate the multi-faceted process behind this “invisible art.” It’s impossible to measure elements like “who had the most horrendous acting to work with in dailies and then transformed it into an award-winning performance?” Or “who created the best dramatic moments out of hundreds of subtly different takes?"

It’s often in the creative problem solving and the gradual process of discovery where some of the “best editing” takes place.

That said, after “The Bourne Ultimatum” won best editing in 2008, I figured that the award, if failing to win in tandem with best picture (the honor went to “No Country for Old Men” that year) simply went to the movie with the most editing.

“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” another 2007 movie, struck me as an interesting counterpoint to “Bourne.” Admittedly, they’re wildly different films with equally different editing styles. But in watching the assassination scene in “James” alongside “Bourne’s” Waterloo station, both of which end in gunshots to the head, the latter feels like an action scene set to “puree,” while the former provides an intense slow-boil of the characters’ deepest emotional conflicts.

Originally edited by Dylan Tichenor ("There Will Be Blood," "Zero Dark Thirty"), who had to leave the film early because of another project, the movie had several other editors take whacks at it. The movie risked spiraling out of control until Curtiss Clayton, a longtime editor of Gus Van Sant films, stepped in to preserve Tichenor's choices and streamline the narrative. The result was some of the most brilliant editing I’ve ever seen – invisible, as it should be, like so many others that are too often overlooked on Oscar night.

Also completely invisible to the Oscars is documentary editing, even though it plays a vital role in nonfiction storytelling. It can take months – sometimes years – in the editing room to carve a compelling documentary narrative out of a slab that may consist of thousands of hours of raw material.

In this sense, Oscar could really use an upgrade. Perhaps the evening could be opened up to recognize the art of process and the process of art that both fiction and nonfiction editors live in every day.

What’s the downside, anyway? It would just be one more non-celebrity to get played off before thanking his or her spouse. Better yet, that could just be edited out.

Invisible editing: "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"

Correction: An earlier version of this post credited Curtiss Clayton exclusively with the final editing of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford." Dylan Tichenor, the movie's original editor, was responsible for the bulk of the editing.

Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate.