Contemplating the Cut is co-presented by: Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program & the Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship. Contemplating the Cut 2017 took place Saturday, April 1, 2017 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.
Panel 1: History in the Making: Creative Use of Archival Footage
Editors: Joseph Krings (Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon), Mary Lampson (Millhouse, Underground) and Maya Mumma (O.J.: Made in America, Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown) in conversation with Ashley Clark (writer and film programmer, BFI, BAMcinématek), examine creative approaches to editing with archival footage.
Ashley Clark:
It’s really great to see such a full house here. I’m absolutely thrilled to be here to talk about craft with so many kinds of great professionals. The panel today, History in the Making: how it’s going to work is that each panelist is going to show some material – one from a film that has influenced them or affected them in some way or something they’re very fond of. And then they’re going to show something from their own work, and we’ll discuss each in turn with a specific focus, hopefully on how the archive is used in a creative or interesting way. When all of the panelists have spoken on their clips, we’ll throw it open for audience questions. But if you do have a burning desire to chip in, please do, and as Kristin said, make sure you request a mic. We have lots of ground to cover, and we want to get things moving at a clip. So without further ado, I would like to introduce our panelists. First up, please welcome Maya Mumma:. Maya began her career with the Academy Award-nominated documentary Restrepo. Most recently, she was an editor on the Academy Award-winning documentary O.J.: Made in America. She has also edited Which Way Is the Front Line From Here, a beautiful documentary about Tim Hetherington, the Peabody Award-winning Mr. Dynamite The Rise of James Brown and A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers. So once again, please give a round of applause.
Next, I’m absolutely delighted to introduce Mary Lampson:. Mary is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and editor whose past projects include the Academy Award-winning Harlan County, USA, Until She Talks, Queen of Versailles and The Bad Kids. Mary has been a fellow and an advisor at Sundance Institute’s Documentary Edit and Story Lab and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Last, but absolutely not least, Joseph Krings:. Joseph is a documentary and narrative feature editor who has worked on Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, Captain Fantastic, Wolves and most recently Rebel in the Rye. Krings is a Sundance Institute Sally Menke Memorial Editing Fellow and is currently working on What Carter Lost.
So now that we’ve all sat down, I think we might need to stand up again as we open with the first clip. This is a film called Grizzly Man, which I’m pretty sure almost all of you have already seen in here. In short, it is the story of Timothy Treadwell, an eccentric man with an affinity for bears, but everyone who’s seen the film will know it goes a little deeper than that. So, can we please roll to the first clip, which we’ll discuss afterwards.
Grizzly Man clip plays
Ashley Clark:
So that can double as my opening monologue. Maya, what a great choice to begin with. Sometimes when we think about editing, we think about cutting and that’s something that kind of opens the film, and you’ve chosen something with no cuts whatsoever. I’m wondering if you could elaborate on the reasons for choosing this film and perhaps how that archive footage helps to set the tone.
Maya Mumma:
I mean I chose this clip first because when we were asked to do this panel, we were asked to show archival, something from an archival film or an archival clip that has inspired us or spoke to us. This was not the first thing that I thought about, and this movie was not the first thing that I thought about. I actually didn’t think of it as an archival film initially, and then looking back at it, I realized that it is a film completely composed of archival material. What I love about this film, and it’s something that I try to think about whether or not I actually have ever done anything like this which I don’t think I have, is to let the character or the subject of the film speak for themselves. That doesn’t necessarily mean not cutting, but it’s something about listening to what they’re saying, listening to what the footage is telling you and to let them tell their story themselves. What I love about this clip is I think you could cut it in probably six different places, but it keeps going and it keeps going and it keeps going and actually keeps adding these layers that will connect throughout the film. It basically summarizes to me the entire film in this 2 minutes and 23 seconds clip. That’s kind of something that I’m always thinking about when I’m looking at footage is how can I let it speak? How can I let the people who can no longer speak for themselves – now that we can’t sit down for an interview – how can they speak and tell us their story? Sometimes, that does mean cutting them and arranging them with other images, and sometimes it just means letting the material play and speak for itself.
Ashley Clark:
Because there’s a compulsiveness to Timothy. You think he’s done, but he keeps coming back. When you’re sitting down watching that footage intellectually, how do you respond to that? You know.
Maya Mumma:
I kind of feel satisfied, and then he kind of throws me for a loop, and then he takes me again on another journey that takes me deeper inside his brain or takes me left inside his brain or takes me right inside his brain. My favorite part is when he is talking to himself after he stands up. It’s fascinating to me that he’s both performing for the camera, but he’s also doing it for himself, and he’s doing it for the subjects, the bears that are behind him as well. It’s something that when I think to the Tim Hetherington film, we played a lot with the opening as well. We kind of let Tim speak for himself in a way that revealed his character. So that’s something, this kind of idea of letting somebody play and reveal their character by just letting something play. It can be very effective for openings, but also, I think, throughout a film.
Ashley Clark:
I noticed the brackets for his age are there as well. So I think there’s an ethical question there. Did you ever think, ‘Do we leave off that information?’ Because there’s a sense of doom.
Maya Mumma:
Yes, I definitely do when I look at this question. I’m sure it was a debate about whether or not to put that there, because it definitely changes how you look at that scene. But there is something, perhaps, more haunting about it. Again, the idea that we’re setting up an entire film here. In the end, I think that would be why they kind of chose to do that; knowing that he has passed away was important up front because you then spend a lot of the film with him alive in a way, very much alive. And then, you get kind of pulled back and forth between his death and how people deal with his death. That’s something for me that has been important in films as well. I’ve often worked on films about subjects who are not alive anymore. How do you bring them back to life and then remind people of their death if their death was important, meaningful or connected to history in some sort of way? It’s something that I’m often thinking about.
Ashley Clark:
There’s a huge responsibility attached to setting that tone in the very first instant. Do any of our panelists have anything to comment on that first clip? It’s really no problem if you do or don’t have any.
Joseph Krings:
I’m not entirely convinced that this isn’t all a hoax and that was Crispin Glover.
Ashley Clark:
Well Crispin is here. No, he’s not really. Okay well I think in that case, we could move on to Maya’s second clip which comes from the quite incredible O.J.: Made in America, which you worked on. Can you tell the audience which parts you worked on?
Maya Mumma:
I did basically the first three hours: birth to murder. It’s the easiest way to explain it. It’s a chronological film basically, so that is the chronology.
Ashley Clark:
And, you know the Oscar recognition, and it’s just a truly incredible piece of work to sit down and absorb. I think you know – hands up who’s seen the whole thing in here? Great. So can we run the clip please and then we’ll talk about that afterwards.
O.J. Made in America clip plays
Ashley Clark:
So that clip is what, two minutes, maybe?
Maya Mumma:
I think it’s one minute, 40 seconds. It was much shorter actually when I was pulling out the clip than I had thought it would be. That scene is kind of big in my head in some way.
Ashley Clark:
Can you just talk about the process of assembling something so dense with so many layers of irony and critique?
Maya Mumma:
Yeah that was something that came, I don’t know – it took awhile to find the right balance of stuff. It was an idea that Ezra and I kind of generated at some point. I would say maybe halfway through the edit as the USC section was coming together. The USC section of the film is very important, because it kind of launches O.J., who was in this very protective world at USC, into the public sphere. Then, it literally launches them into playing professional football, and it’s what made people start to know his name. It’s a very interesting environment that he’s in, and very special. We talked a lot about whether O.J. would have become who he was if he hadn’t been at USC. That was something we debated a lot. There had to be some kind of ultimate culmination of both the worlds that we are exploring because we’re switching back and forth. This is very important, especially through the first three hours of the film, switching back and forth between the outside world and the inside world of O.J. What’s going on in American culture, American politics and American society? What’s going on with O.J., and how those things are or are not intersecting? That was one of the biggest challenges: creating that first three hours of the film so that those different parts would come together. It’s something that I particularly love doing in films, and it’s been a way that I try and think about archival films in particular. I guess historical archival films more than, let’s say, something like Grizzly Man or the Tim Hetherington film.
It was very important to me on the James Brown film that I did where we had a board laid out of James Brown’s life, James Brown’s professional life, what songs were being released, what other songs were being released and kind of the public sphere, what was going on in America at the time and how those things intersected. For me, that was the foundation of that film, and we brought that to O.J. It was so important in this film.
There was just something about, well, O.J. in this protected environment, and he’s not necessarily engaging with what’s going on around him in 1967 and 1968. He’s asked to be engaged with things that are going on outside in the world in 1968, but he chooses not to. So it felt like some sort of culmination, something needed to come together that both launched him into the next phase of his life and really kind of stirred the pot of what was going on in the world – a world that he was entering into. Then that bite from Fred was just – there’s something about it that just stood out to us in a way. He has, to me, a twinkle in his eye. I think he knows that he’s a smart guy. He knows what he’s saying, but he’s being honest and truthful and that this was his experience at USC. That’s all they thought about, and that was their entire life and it was O.J.’s life as well.
For me, this was a chance to actually kind of flip back and forth very quickly between those stories. Very often, it’s a scene of you know this is going on in the outside world, then O.J.’s going on in the inside world. The James Brown film, it was often very similar, and sometimes the stories would intersect, but to be able to flip back and forth between those layers and do something creative with it, it was really hard to kind of figure out how to make it work. We just did it with the photographs first. I’d always loved that Bob Hope footage because it kind of is like he’s about to get the Heisman Trophy like right after that. It’s just like he’s God there at USC, and you just feel it, and there’s like the horse that comes out at the beginning I think you see that, right? It’s just this kind of crazy, surreal thing. He’s surrounded by an incredible kind of white wealth – there are lots of old trustee look-alikes, and stuff like that. It’s kind of an interesting way to juxtapose those two worlds and also summarize the world that he’s entering into. Also, because 1968 was just such an incredible year with so much going on, we were able to kind of pull it together, but it didn’t always work. It took kind of a while to make it work. Some people took it very literally at first that this was going on at USC while Martin Luther King was being assassinated. But, I think by weaving in different points of time, people get that this is something we’re trying to transcend in order to say something.
Ashley Clark:
Well that was something I was specifically going to ask you because so much happened in ’68. In documentaries across the board, a lot of familiar touchpoints will come up, and certain assassinations. They’re not always used in an imaginative way, but you have this incredible inscrutable character at the heart of it which allows you to kind of frame it with some real irony.
Maya Mumma:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean when Bob Hope, the thing that just drew me into the Bob Hope thing is when he says,”Is USC really a college. You haven’t had a riot.” And, it was kind of true. To me, the fact that Bob Hope is pointing out the irony of what’s going on at this university as well. Not just USC, this was – there are other places as well – but also to be in Los Angeles and to be in California, which was the heart of so much activism. It was even more sharply divided, and pointed out in that way which was fascinating, I think, to us. So, we were really kind of trying to make that transcend something.
Ashley Clark:
Speaking practically about wading through the archives, can you talk about kind of your emotional reaction sometimes to finding some of that footage? In thinking, ‘I really want to use that, but I don’t quite know how?’
Maya Mumma:
There are some sections of the film that allowed us to really dig in deep, like in the Watts Riots, to really convey and tell a really sharp story with other voices, and kind of pull us through it. I guess there were scenes where we were pointing to this very particular period in time and then moving onto another period in time or moving on, like flipping back and forth between that story and O.J.’s story where we then would spend some time with O.J. In these particular instances, it wasn’t like O.J. wasn’t playing football when Martin Luther King was assassinated. It wasn’t football season at that time. You know there wasn’t a way to kind of juxtapose those things in a direct way. So those things kind of did sit at the side. I used to have the Bob Hope show kind of woven with people just talking about O.J., who was really great at this point. He was the most famous college person. It didn’t really help though, because we already see him being lauded and cheered. We didn’t need to hear other people saying it. All of the sudden when we were faced with creating this kind of 1968 pool of stuff, all those elements spoke to each other. For me, particularly, looking at the Robert Kennedy assassination footage was really emotional and moving. It’s so chaotic. I think I loved the chaos of the crowd and the kind of controlled crowd of USC. So, those are things that are emotionally and visually resonating with me. Same thing with the Chicago demonstrations that are in there too: just kind of that chaos of things. I mean, I guess all of those, the clips of Martin Luther King, RFK and the Chicago riots were all very active and chaotic in kind of juxtaposition to this controlled kind of beauty of O.J.’s event, in a way.
Ashley Clark:
And, you know, you just did birth to murder. No big thing. So can you talk about the kind of the psychology of knowing that you’re working on a very finite segment within such a huge and expansive project? I mean, how does it feel to be a part of that?
Maya Mumma:
For us, the entire idea of the film and structure was laid out when we started to edit. We sat down on our first day, and Ezra had a 300-page selects script that was roughly laid out in scenes in chronological order. So, it actually did start with birth, you know, O.J.’s childhood and birth. That was at the very beginning, and we kind of knew that wouldn’t necessarily be the beginning; it would be woven in throughout. But that’s what we started with, and we watched the stringouts first. So we always knew where we were going, even if it changed. You know, ultimately I feel like, especially the last hour-and-a-half, was kind of amorphous and really came together in a unique way as well throughout the process. We always knew where we were going. We always knew the beats. We always knew the thesis, which was very important. It was very important to understand why the country reacted the way they did to the verdict. So that was something we were always working with. So as I was layering these stories back and forth and building up O.J., who O.J. is, and then also understanding whom the country is at the same time, we were always kind of the pushing force through the whole thing.
In my section, we had to make O.J. a hero and make everybody love him. Make everybody realize why the country embraced him and loved him, because he’s an incredibly talented athlete. Just, I mean, astonishing. And people feel that. I feel like our goal is to make people feel that in the edit. And then we can flip back and forth between the other stories that are going on and kind of peel back the layers, and understand; again, continue to understand the world that he’s navigating. When he ultimately kind of comes into the spotlight that most people know him, which is the trial.
Ashley Clark:
Again, I think we’re talking about the responsibility of constructing somebody who already has quite a powerful public presence. Maybe you could talk a little about the discussions you had about not wanting to push your representation of O.J., because it is a representation. Even if you’re using archive footage, it’s how you use it, in one way or another, without wanting to build him up too much.
Maya Mumma:
For me, it’s interesting watching the football sequences and just being astonished by his talent and using that. Using people who were there, who were witnesses to just show how astonishing it was, and what the crowds were like. How it affected them growing up, and then how it affected them once they got to know him. Then, once the murder and trial happened, how that changed their views of him. A very important thing for us during the film were the interviews, which we didn’t see in this clip. But, the interviews were from people who were there and connected. They were connected emotionally and physically. I feel like we ping back and forth between these viewpoints and let the people also reveal who O.J. is. We learn a lot about O.J. through their emotional reactions to him as well. Like right before this scene is actually Ron Shipp, who becomes very important later on in the trial. He’s a kid, and he saw O.J. play at USC, and then O.J. comes and speaks to his football team. O.J. points him out because he knew his brother. Ron Shipp falls in love with him. He thinks he’s this amazing man and holds that idea for the rest of the film. So, whenever we’re with Ron Shipp in a scene, we know that that’s how Ron Shipp feels about O.J., you know? Then we can show a different side of O.J. We can let O.J. reveal himself maybe in a different way through the archival footage. Through an interview, you know?
Ashley Clark:
This is something that perhaps we can all discuss a bit later, and perhaps if you guys wanna get involved. Do you think about how the audience is going to consume material of this kind of breadth and depth? Given how patterns of media consumption have changed and that you know what people watch things on. Does that enter into your mind actually the audience’s attention span, as an editor?
Maya Mumma:
That’s interesting. I don’t think necessarily as we’re making the film. I think we’re always trying to make it as interesting and engaging as possible. And if we feel it is, then hopefully the audience feels it. We’re trying – I’m trying – to make the audience feel what I feel. If they feel that, then they’ll be engaged with it as well. For us, the biggest thing was kind of the idea revolving around the audience – a lot of first reactions were I don’t wanna see a film about O.J. In the first 15 minutes of the film, we spend a lot of time away from O.J. We set up the Watts Riots. That, for us, was a way to let the audience know that this is going to be something different. It sets the tone for the film in that way, and I think that’s ultimately what brought people in and kept them watching.
Ashley Clark:
Thank you.
Maya Mumma:
They wanted to know where it was going.
Ashley Clark:
So, on that note, we’re going to move on to the next batch of clips, as selected by Mary. The first comes from Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, which is a kind of wonderful poetic documentary hybrid with Samuel L Jackson as James Baldwin in an interesting voice casting choice. Can we please – I didn’t mean to infer anything, I’m just British. Can we please run the first clip? Thank you.
I Am Not Your Negro clip plays
Ashley Clark:
It’s a very powerful clip, thank you for choosing it. Again, it’s another clip that is so dense with meaning and imagery. Can you just talk a bit about why you’ve chosen to present that today?
Mary Lampson:
So, it actually was really hard to – I had this thought I wanted to show something from the film. Then I went to look at it, and it’s like really hard to pick two minutes out. Do you know? It’s like that kind of film where I think it’s just this incredible cumulative kind of thing. So that’s why I sort of just defaulted to the opening kind of thing. The reason I picked it is because I think that the curse of archival, how it often is used as, using a word that I really hate, “b-roll.” Treating it as just sort of wallpaper b-roll. The other word that I really hate is “sound bite”, you know? It’s sort of actually reducing the whole idea of what we do with these stupid oversimplified sort of little bits, right?
Here’s a film where actually the words are incredibly important. The film is driven by the words. I think that’s so interesting to look at that, and to try to understand like, well, what’s the difference? Do you know what I mean? So, words necessarily aren’t, and b-roll – just like the idea of b-roll – is that you lay down the bed of the words, right? The papers. The script. And then you just sort of wallpaper on the images. So, the reason I hate the word is because ‘b’, right? It’s less; the images are less important. There’s a hierarchy there which I think doesn’t do justice to the kind of work that we all try to do when we’re putting together this kind of a film.
It’s really a losing battle. I decided actually when I was thinking about this, I think I’m gonna call it “a-roll.” Cause you know, you just can’t not use it without sounding slightly like a little bit of an asshole, right? So that was why I actually wanted to sort of think about this film, and to try to understand why this is good. Because what I think, and I think this is true again in everything that we do, it’s the interplay between the images themselves, and then the story or the words or whatever as expressed in words. The tension between them. All the elements should be on the equal playing field. That’s sort of the palate that one is working with.
If you sort of start thinking about it in a different – in that kind of way, I think, then all of a sudden it opens it up to making those sort of connections. Sometimes the images can amplify what the word is saying. Sometimes, as you know, in a lot of the great sort of use of archival like what you did, and a lot of people do, where the actual archival material carries the story. You actually see the story unfolding without any words all. And it’s like vérité. There are so many different things that it can do. So, that was why I chose that clip.
Ashley Clark:
Cause you see it right there, I mean it’s making the audience do some work, too, in drawing connections, you know? It doesn’t spoon-feed.
Mary Lampson:
Well, isn’t that the point of making a movie?
Ashley Clark:
Absolutely. If only it were always the case that you were left to do that kind of work as an audience member.
Mary Lampson:
Well, I mean, I think that’s the trap that we sort of are all facing, especially – I mean maybe this isn’t completely fair, but in a world where now television has become sort of the place where one reaches one’s audience in a way that is a little bit new. And so all of this, and b-roll I think is like a TV word, in my mind. You know what I mean? It’s a word that sort of came out of news or PBS kind of early. Again, not to trash it cause some beautiful, beautiful films were made in those early days. But, the sort of concept comes from TV. So, I’m always super suspicious of that. I think that one should expect the audience: A, to be smart; and B, to be in a place where they can be drawn in, engaged and pulled into the story by more than hooks. Another TV word that I can’t stand, but do you know what I mean? That you have to trick. It sort of implies trickery, which I think might not – well sometimes it’s pretty handy, but you might start with a trick and then you might find actually a more elegant or interesting way of doing the same thing. Do you know what I mean? It’s like you constantly should be challenging yourself.
Ashley Clark:
I think something so notable about that clip is the pivot in the middle when you hear Baldwin’s words and then…
Mary Lampson:
It’s unbelievable. It’s just like whoa. And that happens consistently in that film the way it’s constructed. It keeps unfolding in these incredibly surprising ways by using images that are actually really simple and could be used by other people. They could be clichés, right? But they aren’t, I don’t think, in this film the way that they’re used.
Ashley Clark:
Particularly that kind of assembly of what might, in the wrong hands, be quite innocuous seems so incredibly sinister. And it made me think of something like the end of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, which is one of the greatest pieces of montage assembly I think in film history. The film is constantly throwing things like that at you in a variety of styles too. You know, the materials that are used.
Mary Lampson:
Which is so, I mean, this film is great that way. I think your film does that too. The really great films – that’s a really interesting thing to sort of play around with as an editor. It’s in the cutting room that you can sort of find a way to experiment with, you know, with those, and find the things that work and don’t work to constantly sort of challenge the form in a way or something, whatever.
Ashley Clark:
Do any other panelists have a kind of comment on I Am Not Your Negro generally and kind of how you’ve responded to that? And just the, I guess, confidence, and the wizardry of that assembly. I’ve watched it three times and I think I’m not finished.
Joseph Krings:
I don’t have anything smart to say about that exactly, but one thing that struck me differently about I Am Not Your Negro, which is not about the art of it or anything but is sort of sad to me, is all of our modern footage looked so terrible in that movie. It’s all super compressed and digital. The stuff is all shot somewhere and is beautiful somewhere, but how could they not go get a good master of it? Cause a lot of it is really compressed. You get all this beautiful film and it looks amazing, that stuff looks great. But anytime it’s modern or even sometimes 70s or whatever, it looks like it was all just really digital and compressed. I really hate that.
Maya Mumma:
I wondered if that was intentional?
Joseph Krings:
I think it was.
Maya Mumma:
Yeah and my question with this particular scene is whether some of that footage was colorized and whether it was colorized by the filmmaker or whether that was somebody who had colorized it. Because it was also something that was bringing a different layer to footage that people have seen before maybe. And I need to search the internet to figure what the answer to that was. But it’s something that I was often kind of looking at and thinking about with this film was how they were treating maybe potentially the archival images to maybe have us look at them in a different way.
Joseph Krings:
Yeah, I don’t know.
Maya Mumma:
And I don’t know the answer to it. But it’s something-
Joseph Krings:
I assumed it was actually really color footage. Because it’s nice when you uncover the-
Maya Mumma:
I think it’s colorized. I do. I mean, I don’t know but that’s my-
Mary Lampson:
Do you really think they would’ve done that?
Maya Mumma:
I don’t know.
Ashley Clark:
Because the grain, and the sheen, and the quality of the film.
Mary Lampson:
Anybody here work on that movie?
Maya Mumma:
I know. I’m going to figure this out. But that was my initial gut reaction to it, that it had been colorized?
Ashley Clark:
Usually a gut reaction is quite right. You know, we respond to different formats and grains in very different ways. So that’s something.
Mary Lampson:
See, I thought it was like 16mm reversal film. You know and it has that look to it. It has that like gnarly ugly kind of harsh look to it. Which, because you know, is my era when I started. I actually like the way that looks. I love the kind of ugliness of it, actually. Or I find that interesting. More than just to date it historically. More than to just say oh this must’ve been from that era. I don’t know. Again, I don’t know how other people feel about it.
Joseph Krings:
So, I was thinking that stuff was so beautiful and whenever they go to more modern stuff it wouldn’t be; it would now be compressed. I would never consider it ugly. I always think that’s the most beautiful kind of footage. It’s a two-minute clip or so, and it just comes in three very distinct sections. So you start like it’s pretty much all driven by that color footage. So they chose to do that intercut with some black and white clips and were driven by that. But, like it’s all that and then when it switches to his narrative point of view, it kinda goes into a black and white exclusive archival; lot of stills. And then as it shifts you out, it’s about representation; it goes all to this advertising. Really bright, brilliant colors. So like, it’s bookended by color, and in the middle is this black and white as he’s talking. And I think – I don’t know exactly what the intention on all of that is, but it’s really beautifully put together.
Mary Lampson:
Well I think probably cause it’s towards the beginning of the movie, I think he’s sort of laying out the elements and the palate that he then uses throughout the film. I don’t think that’s the purpose of that scene, but I think that was an intentional sort of choice to do that, do you know what I mean? So then they could continue, and push that in all different directions as the film unfolded.
Ashley Clark:
And speaking of pressure, Raoul Peck was given full access to the James Baldwin archive. Which nobody has ever really been given access to. And he had one shot and he was in there for ten years. And he had to get this just right. So, we’re kind of crack on now to a film that Mary worked on. Millhouse, directed by Emile de Antonio from 1971. It is a 1971 documentary following Richard Nixon’s political career from his election to the House of Representatives in 1946 to his election as president in 1968. So please can we roll the clip?
Mary Lampson:
Just one thing: this is a pre-Watergate film. So, this film was made way before the unmasking of Richard Nixon, which is important to remember.
Ashley Clark:
Oh, also important, it’s subtitled A White Comedy.
Millhouse clip plays
Ashley Clark:
What a fantastic way to open a film.
Mary Lampson:
He loved “Hail to the Chief.” He had it played everywhere he went, Nixon did. And he got those people at the beginning dressed up in those costumes. They don’t always do that. That was him. That was his set design.
Ashley Clark:
This seems to be a great example of just allowing and giving somebody enough rope in a way, like hoisting someone by his or her own petard. I don’t know what a petard is or we can talk about that afterwards.
Mary Lampson:
I like that phrase. Very British.
Ashley Clark:
Yeah. I have to watch that, I think. But yeah, talk about kind of just coming to work on the project and the conversations you had beforehand about how to represent such a public figure with available record on the archive.
Mary Lampson:
Well yeah, so actually, it started with archive. We were working on a film actually called Painters Painting about the New York art scene. De Antonio came into filmmaking really late when he was in his mid-40s. He was very much in the sort of abstract expressionist thing, and totally bored by filmmaking. So, he came with that sensibility. He then did this film called Point of Order about the Gene McCarthy hearing. So he was always a sort of political person. He didn’t have any intention of making a film about Nixon. Somebody had actually appropriated the footage in the NBC archive that they had been storing up for his, Nixon’s, obituary. Part of that had the entire Checkers speech, which was a famous speech that he gave in the 50s, that had been pulled from view. No one had ever seen it. So someone called D up and said,”Well, we happen to have this stuff,” and, “Are you interested in it?” He said yeah, so it came. Then we sort of started looking at these shards of stuff. Part of it was cause the Checkers speech was there so it was a way to actually get to material that actually had been suppressed and sort of unpeel it, and tell the story of his life. The stolen archive was sort of genesis of that film.
With De Antonio, what we used to do – I was pretty young, I was like 23 – we got all this footage ourselves. We would spend two months, he and I, going together to the archives, mostly in New York for this film cause most of it was housed there. Actually watch the original – you know, back in the day you actually watched the original negative, so there was this incredible sense of these big cans of history just right there. So there was a very tangible and captured sort of these moments that sort of animated what we did. Two months, every day, we’d go, and then we’d ask for these, and then the film cans would come, and we’d sit, and we’d watch. We’d mark the little pieces, and then they’d make a print for us. And it would go back into the lab. So it was a very sort of tactile. You really felt it. I guess where my love of archive comes from having sort of done that. And that was part of the shaping of the film. What was the story, you know, the hidden story in the footage itself? I’m not sure I answered your question.
Ashley Clark:
No that’s great. The archive is often just used as simply official record in the wrong hands to say this person was this, a great person. It helps to kind of foster that great man theory of history. So it must’ve been particularly exciting for you to be working on kind of undoing that with this person still at large in the public eye.
Mary Lampson:
Right, I mean De Antonio ended up on the enemies list. I mean, this was like a very radical film – to show the president of the United States assembled in Madame Tussaud was like whoa. You know it was way out there. And he ended up you know on the White House, literally one of the names on the White House enemies list. It was out there.
Ashley Clark:
Were you thinking about that – of the potential cost of this- when you were working in the archives?
Mary Lampson:
I think that D loved being on the enemies list.
Ashley Clark:
It’s a good place to be, isn’t it?
Mary Lampson:
Yeah I think so.
Ashley Clark:
You’re doing the right things.
Mary Lampson:
The badge of honor, I think.
Ashley Clark:
Yeah. Particularly choosing that as the opening image. This kind of empty suit. This empty kind of plastic thing.
Mary Lampson:
Yeah, well I think when we came across that footage, it was like,”Oh! This could work.” Haha, so any rate.
Ashley Clark:
And what do you guys think about kind of you know, we’re talking in the previous conversation about formats and the way things look different now. The archive of the current administration is kind of thrown at us daily. It’s hard to avoid it. How would a kind of portrait look of the current administration in 20, 30 years or something?
Joseph Krings:
Unless somebody keeps this stuff nicely, it’s all gonna look really blocky and compressed. That’s my problem.
Mary Lampson:
See this is interesting because just in terms of like what something looks like. Part of D Antonio’s sort of aesthetic, he called himself a radical scavenger. And this notion of just picking up little bits and pieces, and this sort of found footage. This is why I mentioned it from his sort of art background. You know of like the paintings of let’s say Robert Rauschenberg or collagey kind of thing; it was very much a sense of just making something out of fragments, constructing something out of it that actually was its own truth or was its own interpretation of something. You can see in this, he actually didn’t give a damn about what it looked like. He liked to leave the rough edges. So, that was interesting.
I was a little bit like that, but I think I like smooth rough edges. It was interesting- there was this interesting sort of tension in his relationship to the footage that is interesting. He liked another film about the Kennedy assassination called Rush to Judgment, which was full of jump cuts. People hated that movie, so a lot of the sort of aesthetic now of the acceptance of jump cuts and the acceptance of sort of revealing the actual process of making it was sort of what he was playing around with. And that’s a really interesting thing, you know, what does it mean to make a pretty image? What does it mean to be cinematic? I think this is slightly a little bit just old fogeyism, but I’m always a little tiny bit suspicious of beauty. Not to say I don’t like it.
Joseph Krings:
And you can use what’s in that; you know if it’s dirty, you can use that as comment too. In 40 years or whatever somebody could use our terrible Internet compression to comment in some way, you know? You could actually be building your own archive at home everyday right now just by pulling all these videos off of the Internet. Cause someday they’ll shut that switch off and we won’t have it.
Ashley Clark:
They’ll be gone forever. I didn’t expect to sit here and talk about Super Deluxe today. Does anybody know Super Deluxe? As kind of the news moves so quickly the function and the means of satire is changing. It’s a guy called Vic Berger who does these kind of super cuts of Donald Trump, which is a particular favorite subject as is Chubby Checker for some reason. I urge you to go and check it out because it’s doing this sort of ugly work. It twists and it bends existing material. So you could see a ridiculous Donald Trump speech and within half an hour, there’s this absolutely bizarre mashup of it with air horns. And it’s starting to feel like the only viable satire at the moment.
I would like us to move on to our final choice of clips from Joseph. The first clip we’re gonna show is from a beautiful yet harrowing film called Must Read After My Death by Morgan Dews from 2009. A fun fact, it was the first film to be released day and date in theatres and online.
Joseph Krings:
I didn’t know that. Good research.
Ashley Clark:
Thank you, Wikipedia too. If we could run to that clip, that’d be great. Thank you.
Must Read After My Death clip plays
Ashley Clark:
Again, thank you for sharing that clip. I think it might be helpful if you could just kind of set a little bit of context for the film and the basic premise of it before kind of talking about why you’ve chosen it.
Joseph Krings:
Yeah that’s important. There was an actual container of stuff that the woman whose voice you hear was marked ‘must read after my death.’ It had all of her personal archives throughout her whole family history. Obviously she didn’t have a very happy family history, but she thought it was important that her grandkids have this, and know what it was really like. You know, not just have the pretty pictures and the home movies where everything looks pretty. She wanted them to have these audio recordings that she had made, and these just desperate journals that she took. All of this stuff. The person who made the film, Morgan Dews, was actually her grandson. He went through, and he’s like, “Wow, this is an amazing archive. It tells a really personal story, and I wanna build this into a film.” So that’s the context, I guess.
Ashley Clark:
Can you just talk about you know why you’ve chosen that clip.
Joseph Krings:
When I was first in college, I worked at the Nebraska State Historical Society and they would take everybody’s home films, and offer them back a VHS. Another example of getting something back less. At least they’d take care of them. They are actually in a nice refrigerated library somewhere in Nebraska. That turned me on to like people’s home movies. I just love them. I’m so in love with Super 8 and 8mm films, and just seeing them. That started that for me to the point where it became a sickness, and I’d buy people’s home movies on eBay, and store them. I’ve finally gotten rid of them, but I used to make things out of them, you know? Like projections for bands. I’ve always liked how could I try and make a movie out of the stuff that I have. Morgan went ahead and did it because he had a very personal one. The difference there is that he had the audio. That’s a really rare thing. I mean there are tons of home movies but the audio. That this woman was so vulnerable and open and honest on tape, and that he was able to use that to work as a counterpoint to the images. Because no matter what, when you see Super 8 it’s instant nostalgia and this sort of warm and happy feelings. Unless you see something actually violent happening on the screen. You know, it’s imbued automatically with that. If you‘d seen that stuff, you’d think they were a happy family. To hear this woman just like laying it all out just undercuts all of that. I love that juxtaposition. So that’s what I chose it.
Ashley Clark:
Yeah it’s an extremely harrowing piece of work.
Joseph Krings:
Yeah.
Ashley Clark:
We haven’t really talked about music yet. The music in that film is minimal but also quite powerful. Can you talk generally about again trying to get the balance right with particularly emotional and personal material? With the music, you don’t want to overdo it.
Joseph Krings:
I don’t really know how to answer other than like, yeah you never want to overdo it. That’s the thing I always want to avoid. I want to avoid like blasting music all over everything. It’s just a by feel and by touch thing. This is a score that was written for this but I imagine that while he was putting it together you start looking at the images and you start putting the audio with it. When I do it, I try to do everything without any music first. Get it to omething that I think feels good. Then, start to try to play with what kind of music might work with it. I’ll start with something obvious, and you know, then try something that maybe is not as obvious. Eventually, it seems like if you put together a sequence in a good way, they’ll be a piece of music that sort of just slots in. You don’t really have to touch it that much. There’s some universal rhythm that you matched up with somebody. You found your musical soulmate for that sequence, and that’s how I tend to approach that.
Ashley Clark:
The available audio for that film is kind of like the Holy Grail as well.
Joseph Krings:
That would be amazing. I’ve never seen something like that or uncovered something like that where it’s just – I mean, it’s like the Timothy Treadwell thing. He’s just being himself, and very honest on camera. But this woman obviously was an emotional wreck, and saw way too many psychologists. I mean she made reference two different doctors there. I don’t think that’s-
Ashley Clark:
Two minutes, yeah.
Joseph Krings:
I’ve never had that but to be able to craft that out of somebody’s, you know – what they’ve left behind is pretty amazing.
Ashley Clark:
It’s one thing for him as a family member to do it. Have any of you been in a position where you’ve had a real ethical dilemma about existing record that you would be integrating into a work or sharing with the public? Negotiations with family about what to release or not. That’s just something I’m personally quite interested in to see as an editor: how you deal with that ethical question?
Maya Mumma:
It was challenging with the Tim Hetherington film, I would say. Tim had not passed away very long before we started making the film, and it was still very raw to a lot of people. We were looking at his public life. But in order to understand someone’s public life, you often have to understand the personal life as well. And history. And context for it. So I think everybody kind of came to the film in the time that they needed to take to get there, but it was very very difficult, and knowing that people would have a very emotional reaction to the film regardless of what it was. They just would. That was something that we were always always very aware of in the edit room. We had a large kind of archive from his studio as well where we were just kind of sifting through images and outtakes, and all sorts of stuff. Trying to kind of find the balance of how to convey him.
Mary Lampson:
So I mean I think it’s interesting: the director-editor different roles. Often times the director will actually have a very close personal relationship and will be much more sort of torn by some of those kind of issues. Then, as the editor, it’s like, “This is really complicated,” and, “Let’s do it.” I always try to say to myself, and also to the director, let’s just do it. I would say that as long as there’s some truth there, that you’re not manipulating, you know what I mean? As long as you’re representing what you consider to be true, often times at that very painful screening, all those fears will go. I think you have to sort of go there, myself. I mean, as an editor, that’s what I try to do – let’s just do it and see. Don’t worry about it now, but just make the movie. I don’t know, does that make sense? You guys, too?
Joseph Krings:
Absolutely.
Maya Mumma:
The film, if you achieve something with the film, in the end then-
Mary Lampson:
Well if it represents the truth in its complexity instead of sort of shying away from it, but it’s very difficult and complicated, I think. I mean even the Nixon film, you know? Like ‘hoisted on his own petard’ means essentially use his own words to condemn him instead of manipulating something that he said in a sort of Trumpian way. Right?
Ashley Clark:
Well, I do that on Twitter every day now; it’s out there in the public. So, thank you for that. We’re gonna have to move onto the final clip now, which is the wonderful Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon edited by this gentleman. It’s a portrait of a kind of a talent manager general gadfly inventor of the celebrity chef concept. Without him, there would be no Thursday night Top Chef for me. Which is a big deal.
Joseph Krings:
Right exactly. Somebody would’ve done it. But he was there first.
Ashley Clark:
It’s a fascinating film, and we’d like to roll to the final clip, please. Thanks.
Supermensch clip plays.
Joseph Krings:
Needed that after Must Read After My Death.
Ashley Clark:
Yeah. That’s a big atonal, yeah. That must’ve been a lot of fun to work on.
Joseph Krings:
Yeah, absolutely. That was a good intro to, well, I guess I did one documentary before that, but that was a good intro to like really working with archival a lot. Absolutely.
Ashley Clark:
Let’s talk, because we haven’t come across it yet, but the idea of inserting reconstruction. And versus archive, do you think of making them seamless, or do you know how you approach that?
Joseph Krings:
Every director has a different viewpoint on that. I’m not gonna be the one to come in and impose a viewpoint on whether you should use recreation or not use recreation, whether it should be this way or that way. I mean, I might have a conversation with them about it. In this case, it was clear. We’re taking from every single possible source we can take from, you know? We’re not gonna be concerned about anything exactly. Whether things match that well, you know? We’re gonna throw in recreations, and we’re gonna do this. Actually part of this is, we weren’t gonna do any recreations; it sort of became a necessity. We got told legally sometimes when we’d mention drugs or certain things, if you had very visible people in there, you couldn’t use it. The best way to do it was to do some recreations. In this case it was like, it’s gonna be obvious that it’s recreation but we should at least try to make it seem like it looks like that. Because it’s gonna be collaged in. It’s not like we have a recreation section, then we have an archival section. It’s all interwoven. We wanted to try to create at least a certain amount of stuff looking like the same thing, so we put on the film grain, and did that stuff. We took some shots that are like Getty Images shots of pools with hotel, or hotels with pools. We needed to make that look more like the home footage that we had of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
Ashley Clark:
It’s kind of a polar opposite to our first clip, which was the one static shot.
Joseph Krings:
Yeah.
Ashley Clark:
This is speedy, you know? Can you talk about kind of pace and this, just the clip this film rolls at. You’ve got his laugh as almost a punctuation point.
Joseph Krings:
That’s the only time we ever pause and breathe is when he (laughs). You know? Well, that’s again the nature of the director that’s Mike Myers, you know? He was always concerned. He’s like, ‘I want the thing to keep rolling. I’ll stop on top of a laugh of a laugh if I got another laugh coming,’ you know? He really wanted everything to be fast and frantic, and feel that way most of the time. Except there are some pauses in the film when we would go into more introspective things. When it’s all the legend and building up these great stories, it was just like let’s just keep firing on all cylinders at all times. And I mean I would do things the way I kinda thought and he’d be like, “Faster!” Then, I’d make it faster, and eventually we ended up there.
Ashley Clark:
I think it’s worth opening out to all three of you about kind of that relationship with the director. How much of your creativity you can bring to it, of course it’s gonna change on a case by case basis. Perhaps if you could give some examples of when you have really kind of influenced the creative direction of the film with pacing or assembly?
Joseph Krings:
Well, it’s in that assembly moment, that’s your purest time. You’re gonna put it together the way you see it. You know? Garret said something about what Errol Morris said about Karen Schmeer. Something about a great editor makes something possible that would not have been possible without that particular person. So as an individual, you’re going to bring a way of seeing and putting together something that nobody else will. That’s always gonna influence the whole thing. No matter what. That first moment with everything is when you’re gonna be able impart I think the most creative influence on where the film will eventually go. Then, of course, as you’re building it, you might see some great idea, and discuss that, and put that in. If that answers your question?
Ashley Clark:
Anyone else?
Maya Mumma:
For me, when we started working on O.J., Ezra very much was on paper with the interviews that he had captured. They were some of the most brilliant incredible interviews I’d ever seen conducted. He’s an amazing interviewer, and what he got was so special and unique. The stories that they related, and they open themselves up to us. That was very precious. When I approach the edit, I’m looking at everything as equal. I’m looking at the interviews, and I’m looking at the archival footage, and I’m listening to music, and I’m looking at photographs. They all have equal play to me. They’re all kind of up for grabs. Each scene when I approach it there may be an interview that draws me in, that gives me kind of the opening thrust. It may be something that grabbed me from the archival. It may be a mood that I wanna set. Sometimes that’s with music. Sometimes it’s with sound. I think for me, when I’m able to kind of step back from an initial plan, maybe, that exists for the film, and then figure out how to actually make it a film. Make it lively and visual, which it ultimately has to be. My favorite part, for me, is kind of what’s gonna actually go up on the screen? What’s gonna make this work?
Mary Lampson:
I just think it’s a push and a pull. I think there are times it works, and there are times it doesn’t. I think that, as an editor, it’s sort of my responsibility. It’s like what you were saying, but to somehow absorb what the original intent of the director was in some way as sort of captured in the material, be it archival, or be it interview, or be it whatever it is. Then try to sort of understand what that is, and then take it to a place you know, then go with it. It’s this very interesting, very complicated relationship. When it goes bad, it’s pretty awful.
Ashley Clark:
I was hoping we’d have a slightly upbeat way to open to-
Mary Lampson:
Sorry but I mean it. Sorry.
Ashley Clark:
I think it’s a good time now with all of this talent, and experience, and knowledge, to open it up to audience questions. If you could just raise your hand, and please wait for the microphone when it comes. If anybody does indeed have a question. Right at the back there.
Sound Recordist: Jay Arthur Sterrenberg
Transcriber: Brad Kimbrough
Copy Editor: Seth Trochtenberg
Read the transcript for Panel 2 here.
The Sundance Documentary Film Program supports non-fiction filmmakers worldwide in the production of cinematic documentaries on contemporary themes.
Awarded annually, the Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship was created in 2010 to honor the memory of gifted editor Karen Schmeer.
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