Tout va bien

Well, I'm finally beginning the long and tedious, as well as enlightening editing process. The hardest thing, for me, is finding a substantial beginning, and not giving away too much or teasing with miniscule details. I've also decided to eliminate visual and sound elements which don't "work", i.e. aren't especially interesting as cinema, even if that means removing details and impressions about the subject of this film.

I'm still quite unsure about what this film will look like in the end, as I'm sticking to impressions and thoughts I have in the editing process only, and not taking notes aside from technical ones. There are "unnecessary" segments, ones which work as cinema (I feel) which might clash with, perhaps, less interesting segments which work as details and history. There was never a great combination of cinema and detail, I've found, but alot can be solved with eliminating either the sound or visual, creating cinema, not importing it directly from the master tapes. That to me might be the greatest obstacle.

I've been looking at films lately that I think work extremely well as edited works: "Sans Soleil" and "Edvard Munch", as well as "Portrait of Jason" and "Les Amants du Pont-Neuf." I don't know if I have the ability, considering how much of this film works this way, of shattering the "fourth dimension", time, and arranging things out of order. There are things such as the visuals from Iraq that fit with the footage from last year and this year that disrupts a strict timeline, but with my own footage, it's more difficult. As the sole camera and sound man, I know where I was and what I was thinking with every shot it seems. How to disrupt that as well and move forward, slicing things and arranging them achronologically, is a big obstacle for me. Things seem to work best as presented from beginning to end, and sometimes only work this way, but others are "less important", such as interviews, where I could easily arrange the audio and visuals out of order. However, I'm finding these things to be quite uninteresting, typical, and to be honest, boring to watch and edit: perhaps I should make due without them and see what I think in the end.

Well, I suppose until the next post, I will still be in the infancy of post-production, but I think it's better this way. As long as I can work on this in my own terms, all is well.