Straight Cut by Madison Smartt Bell

survive it, though it will not be Kevin nor any thought of him which gets me out of it next time. But I must give credit where it is due. I owe Kevin the motive that got me off the bed, sleepless or not, wretched or not, and inspired me to work and live through the days that followed. It was neither my love nor my hate that he engaged on this occasion, only my curiosity. But curiosity is itself a form of hope.
    Mimmo, poor boy, must have thought that I was mad at everyone again. By the time I arrived at QED on Thursday I was in somewhat better shape than I’d been in the night before. I’d even slept a little, sitting up. I could walk, but I couldn’t make conversation yet. It must have seemed fairly grim, and none of it was Mimmo’s fault at all. He’d taken delivery of the work print as promised, and somehow managed to make sure that Dario and the others were not around. I knew it was unfair to be mean to him, but I was still too twisted to make nice.
    So I didn’t try to make nice, didn’t even say a word. I walked in, shut down the room light, and threaded the first roll of film on the Steenbeck. Mimmo perched on the edge of a chair next to the flatbed, intent, waiting for me to say something, anything. I watched three, four, five rolls of the film, at speed. Finally my poisoned humor began to disperse, replacing itself with ordinary professional irritation. I began to curse and take the name of the Lord in vain.
    “What?” Mimmo said. “I don’t understand?”
    “Your first lesson,” I said. “American swear words. They’re very important for editing film.”
    Mimmo laughed, relieved. And after a moment I found that I was laughing too. And now that I had found my tongue again, I began to explain things.
    I explained to Mimmo the whole problem of the sync-up, and told him that what I had been doing for the past several hours was looking for a clue, some vestige of a relationship between the picture and the sound. I hadn’t found one yet. But I had found plenty of other things, most of which fell into the category of bad news.
    The footage I’d watched was an uneven mix of interviews, shots of what appeared to be rather violent encounter groups of some kind, and scene-setting panoramas and traveling shots with no people in them. There were a lot of locations, and without the sound it was difficult to tell which ones were which. Already there was a problem here, though of rather an abstract nature: not enough action. What I was likely to end up with was a talking-heads documentary. But that wasn’t really my problem. You work with what you’ve got.
    From the standpoint of movement, composition, and so forth, a lot of the camera work was pretty good. Some of it I could even admire, if a little grudgingly. Some of it I thought was dreadful.
    Scratches, tramlines, and other damage resulting from the mishandling of the original negative seemed to add up to less than I’d feared it might. But there was plenty of other technical trouble.
    For instance, screen direction. It was worst with the encounter-group shots. The groups, evidently, had taken place in circles, and the cameraman had wandered around and around these circles like the hands on a clock, completely disregarding the famous imaginary line. Which meant, as I explained to Mimmo, that the close-ups and cutaways were not going to make a great deal of sense. People who are addressing each other would appear to be facing in opposite directions. And so on. A trying situation for the editors, namely him and me.
    Then there was the matter of light. Generally speaking there was not enough of it. Film density was poor throughout much of the footage.
    Here Mimmo interrupted with an explanation of his own. Dario and his cameraman, who turned out to be the frizzy-headed fellow I’d watched cheerfully ripping his own film to shreds the day I arrived, were both devoted to the concept of “available light.” Ah, yes. Mimmo began to elucidate the precedents, but