RESEARCH

How does an editor disrupt reality to craft a profound emotional impact on viewers?

The process of editing my first capstone film Skin (2023), and my research question are intricately intertwined. This connection is established through consistent testing, hands-on experiences in the filmmaking process, reflection on my research domain, conceptualising findings, and iteratively testing them back into the editing phase. This cyclical approach aligns with the Kolb Learning Cycle (Schön, 1987). The unique opportunity to engage in such a process for months is noteworthy. It allows for an in-depth exploration and understanding of the core study without incurring additional costs. However, it's important to acknowledge the rarity and difficulty of practising creativity in this manner. Similar narratives are often heard in independent art house films or large productions with enormous amount of budgets, where filmmakers dedicate years to collaborative endeavours.

Initially, Skin has a distinctive European art house texture at its core. When I first heard my director Dylan pitching his original idea, I found it particularly attractive. The concept of Anna fleeing from the communist depression in Budapest during the Cold War, following her husband to a desolate foreign land—remote Australia—captivated me. Years later, the family settles down, solemnly renounces their Hungarian nationality. The feeling of emptiness, alienation, dislocation, and soul-crushing emotions resonates deeply with me. It forms a tangible link to my own memories—from the stories I heard of my parents and my grandparents spanning post-World War II to post-Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, as a first-generation migrant myself, the literal experience of abruptly finding oneself in a foreign land, learning to communicate from scratch like a baby, mirrors my own journey since I turned 18. Hence, the project's multiple layers of resonance, coupled with Dylan's unique narrative and aesthetic approach—moody, authentic, poetic, and strange—stimulate my curiosity to delve beneath.

Since coming onboard, I've instinctively delved into expanding my imagination around our main character Anna, particularly during the pre-production phase—a step I fondly refer to as ‘the warming-up’. As I began constructing the character in my head, I aimed to understand her as a real person, drawing from both my first-person life experiences (automatic recollection) and the imaginative reassembly of various fragments in life and cinema (attentive recollection) (Deleuze, 1988, p.51). Human’s conscious mind is frequently preoccupied with technical aspects and mundane life obligations. Intriguing myself to switch it on and off becomes crucial at this stage, allowing me to tap into my subconscious and engage in tasks with emotion rather than purely logical thinking and analysing. 

One of my long-term personal habits is to quickly jot down on my phone or any accessible medium when lucid dreams occur, before my conscious mind erases them completely. Over time, I've noticed a recurring adventure-like style in my dreams, blending elements from real life—such as places I've lived and people I've interacted with. However, this surreal, out-of-order narration doesn't follow conventional logic or spatial relationships. Despite this, it leaves a delusional impression of climax or conclusion in my head.

In contrast to pure avant-garde (Smith, 1998), my dreams reveal an authentic and remarkably coherent emotional arc in their unpolished drafts. These arcs travel from curiosity to the desire for exploration and risk; from the tangible feelings of love to disappointment or sadness; and from playful tricks to utter absurdity. The trajectory or transition isn't always a straightforward A-B; there's often a tonal or emotional shift. Yet, despite the apparent rulelessness, there's a distinct smooth flow and a sense of reality that I can feel even by reading these initial drafts. This realisation leads to a deeper reflection on how my subconscious tends to follow a certain form. While it might seem unregulated, it possesses a strength that shapes seemingly irrelevant particles into potent emotions. Psychologically, I recognise the need to leverage the strength of my innate sensibility (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999, p.337) and channel it into a sensory approach to editing.

Except for the realisation and exercise of my own empathetic and creative muscle, I also felt the urge to resonate with Anna’s character in a specific manner. Anna’s obsession with sewing and hanging the curtain with a traditional Hungarian pattern, and her grasp of the last piece of her fabric, resonate in depth with my inner connection to my birthplace. Having spent half of my life in foreign lands, I perceive nostalgia not as a singular emotion but as a complex conflict. I find myself suspended in a grey area, unable to fully return to alleviate homesickness, but also unable to embrace a complete sense of belonging to my current environment. This sentiment, I believe, is a prevalent and universal experience, particularly among first and second-generation migrants, which creates a sort of existential dilemma regarding one's identity recognition and the motivation to either stay or leave.

Through engaging in this warming-up process for my extensive imagination, a portrait of Anna began to take shape in my mind: sensitive, stubborn, sceptical, idealistic, moody, tough, and, of course, a mother. However, this portrayal remained in a constant state of flux.

Since this is my first-time collaboration with Dylan, I actively participated in editing a one-minute teaser during pre-production. I believe that, as an editor, the most effective way to initiate creative communication is by engaging in a collaborative creative process. The teaser was initially designed with a psychological horror tone in line with Dylan's original genre vision. However, over the 10-week in editing process, we discovered a genre pivot, influenced by various factors that unfolded during the process. This tonal shift was primarily driven by the materials, performances, and the extensive testing and experimenting involved in cutting, refining, and piecing together the film in diverse ways.

At the beginning of my assembly process, I made the spontaneous decision to cut Scene 8 (the dinner scene) first to serve as a jumping-off point for delving into Anna’s family dynamics and her perspectives on her husband Adam and son Andrew. Positioned in the first quarter of the shooting script (24 scenes in total), this scene contains the heaviest live-action dialogues among all the others.

Considering this scene as a starting point allows me as an editor to thoroughly analyse the relationships among the three characters, and gradually build other scenes around it. This approach serves as a strategic test to immerse myself in Anna’s perspective. Focalisation narratology, as highlighted by Jong (2014, p.47), is not a simple practice of standing behind the primary narrator and treating all secondaries as mere props. It is necessary to study and comprehend the interactions among all narrators and their impacts on each other, adopting the point of view of the primary narrator’s focaliser. By examining the rushes of the dinner scene and constructing the scene, I started to discover the family dynamic: 

• What are the subtle eye movements when they talk to each other?

• What do they think of each other?

• What triggers an argument?

• Why do they have to endure each other?

• How long have they been communicating in this manner?

• How do they individually interpret migrant experiences and assimilation?

• What are their respective desires?

From examining these questions, Anna’s household emanates a stifling and bland atmosphere, there’s a strangeness and seriousness surrounding Adam’s decision to live in remote Australia. Andrew, growing up, naturally adopts a survival mode, inclined to follow his father's guidance. However, it becomes evident that the kid has encountered something beyond the confines of a typical family setting—perhaps an early memory of war or exile, revealing trauma in his eyes. Starting from the dinner scene and considering the multiple viewings of other footage, a refined portrait of Anna emerges, characterised by enhanced emotional clarity: her self-esteem; her yearning for home; a passive-aggressive attitude; her deep love for Andrew; a complicated parenting situation with Adam; the regret and guilt associated with committing to a one-way journey to Australia without a farewell to her mother. I observe shades of my own grandmother in Anna, who, despite her stiffness and vigilance in a depressive political environment, projected a contrasting passion and love. This perspective has a similar trait with viewing Anna through Andrew’s focaliser and adds another layer to the whole editing perspective. An argument surfaces, reflecting back on my research: using my emotions as a reflective tool for editing involves not only editing from Anna’s viewpoint, but also assessing her from the standpoint of others. Subjectivity of an editor remains fluid throughout the process, yet the ultimate goal of the edited outcome is to prioritise Anna’s subjective perspective.

Given that the majority of our tonal resonance aligns with the art-house spectrum, inspired by Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1975) and The Fall (Glazer, 2019), I leaned towards a visual and audio style when constructing the narrative. It features minutes-long shots alternate with quicker-paced segments, accompanied by more than 10 tracks of sound effects, atmospheres, and music, all working together to simulate a subtle environment in a specific slow-fast-slow pacing, stimulating a sense of temporal amplification. A variation of vibration frequency sounds is also underlying some tension-building moments. The vibration trembles our brain, evokes a physical response such as goosebumps or nervousness, without consciously registering as musical or tonal cues.

Assembly Timeline Screenshot.

However, during the process of rough cut, a significant challenge arises from the abstract nature of the narrative. A lot of reviewing feedbacks circled around the challenge of associating with the eerie figure’s intention, also Anna’s ‘death’. Through the phase of finding a solution to rationalise Anna’s narrative with more clarity, I told Dylan what quite interested me is Anna’s desire to write a letter to her mother, and I want to know what she would say to her mother in real life in these circumstances. Since Dylan and I both have real-life experience living in a foreign land for years, we were intrigued to discover this domain. Dylan started to write this letter driven by an authentic tone and strategically built it to serve the narrative in an interesting way, as the voice-over we now hear in the film. 

It became crucial that when using a voice over, creators need to be carefully avoiding heavily relying on it and filling the narrative holes. Voice-over’s function must have a reason, contrasting what is shown on screen indirectly and theatrically. Editing the voice-over remains following a strong emotional rhythm; there is no difference from crafting the rhythm of performance. It has to breathe on the same wavelength as the character is doing on screen. Voice-over should not interrupt the watching experience and drive the movement by a disrupting force or over-explanation. If writing or editing the voice-over is doing the wrong work, it either feels like a total disruption, or a comfort blanket filmmakers hand to the audience so they can distance themselves from the character, which is completely opposed to my research.

An example of the Dam scene, with and without voice over.

Another intriguing aspect is examining the relationship between the linear and non-linear narrative structure, point-of-view focalisation, and voiceover, specifically in how to leverage the same material in versatile ways. Given the pressure to condense the initial 25-minute length of our fine cut down to 15 minutes, the challenge of conveying the same core feeling in a shorter length became paramount. The non-linear approach was employed as a solution because ruthlessly pacing every scene at a faster speed would compromise the emotional rhythm at its core. Even so, condensing a short film into almost half of the screen time would still force us to cut out scenes we love and treat them as a transition or linkage for the more important parts.

Despite the loss, experiencing the non-linear approach is similar to a reviewing process to uncover a deeper connection between the sequences of moving images, or each single shot we have in different sequences. This is an opportunity to generate a freshly stronger collided energy, keeping the audience engaged, challenging them, and encouraging their active thinking. It reflects back to the disruptive impact of the unconventional narrative structure as discussed by Kiss & Willemsen (p.91;92), further emphasising the insightful discussion of Murch, who likens film to a dream-like juxtaposition (Murch, 2004).

One of the significant challenges while doing the non-linear version is the bush scene, where we witness Anna being consumed by her 'eerie'-self. During the rough cut phase, I grappled with a significant uncertainty about this scene. Cutting the initial coverage together in continuity created a haunting horror with actions, which, while entertaining, felt disjointed from the previously established mysterious tone. After a number of attempts in the fine cutting process, we reflected on the most crucial aspect of the story: the feeling of sadness and disassociation, rather than an overemphasis on spookiness of a scary horror. Dylan expressed his desire for a melancholic and poetic film, where the audience leaves with a naturally unfolding sensation. Although the literal conclusion may remain open in distinctions based on different individual's life experience, the subjective interpretation is the essence we provide for the audience to identify with. That said, maintaining a literal pronunciation in this climax scene, explicitly showing the eerie figure’s manifestation and interaction with Anna, might jeopardise my director’s intention to impress his audience. However, this issue persisted for weeks because, regardless how we trimmed or twisted it, it didn't resolve the main problem. Then, one day in the cutting room, I moved things around and made changes along each scene while we were discovering the possible solutions for restructuring the film as non-linear narrative, I parked on one single shot of Anna’s face in the bush scene, and from there Dylan questioned: what if all we need is this moment, after all?

Ellipsis, as extensively discussed in editing, literature, and public speaking (McShane, 2005), became a pivotal aspect of solving this scene, expands my research scope. It involves narrators jumping in space and time to emphasise crucial moments in the story through punctuation, providing spectators the freedom of resonance and imagination, in the meantime conveying a strong sense of rhythm and beat. This strategic use of ellipsis is not merely a capricious stylistic choice but rather a deliberate application inspired by experiments and reflections on narrative structure.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to maintain all elements in chronological continuity, stitching literal coherence like A-B, B-C, using ellipsis allows me to witness its power. Fortunately, exploring, experimenting, and reflecting on this method is a valuable opportunity for me as I develop into an editor. In this particular case, choosing to stay with Anna in this very moment enables both me and the audience to empathise and engage intelligently, unfolding the narrative in an interesting way that fosters a feeling state, and leaves room for an extensive thought process about the narrative after watching the film.

This discovery serves as a motivation for my exploration into a border definition of non-linear narrative structures, tackling the challenge of condensing a 25-minute film into 15 minutes while preserving its fundamental emotional impact, by taking into consideration the insightful theories of Kiss & Willemsen (p.91;92), Murch (2004), and Powell (2005). The significance lies in recognising how a non-linear or discontinuous approach in film editing can not only heighten emotional resonance but also evoke profound thinking and feeling for the viewers.