Best Editing/Structure in Film History - Movies & TV

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

Just getting this started before I work on it a bit more. Recommendations are welcome.

Best Editing/Structure in Film History
Citizen Kane - Orson Welles (1941)
Nashville - Robert Altman (1975)
Mirror - Andrei Tarkovsky (1974)
Persona - Ingmar Bergman (1966)
Last Year at Marienbad - Alain Resnais (1961)
8 1/2 - Federico Fellini (1963)
Touch of Evil - Orson Welles (1958) [Restored Welles' Cut, 108 minutes]
Taxi Driver - Martin Scorsese (1976)
Three Colors: Red - Krzysztof Kieslowski (1994)
Memento - Christopher Nolan (2001)
Wings of Desire - Wim Wenders (1987)
Hiroshima, Mon Amour - Alain Resnais (1959)
Battleship Potemkin - Sergei Eisenstein (1925)
The Wild Bunch - Sam Peckinpah (1969) [Director's Cut, 145 minutes]
Point Blank - John Boorman (1967)
Metropolis - Fritz Lang (1927) ["The Complete Metropolis", 147 minutes]
Psycho - Alfred Hitchcock (1960)
Pulp Fiction - Quentin Tarantino (1994)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - Michel Gondry (2004)
Peppermint Candy - Lee Chang-dong (1999)
Mean Streets - Martin Scorsese (1973)
M - Fritz Lang (1931)
The Conversation - Francis Ford Coppola (1974)
Walkabout - Nicolas Roeg (1971)
Raging Bull - Martin Scorsese (1980)
21 Grams - Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu (2003)
Shadow of a Doubt - Alfred Hitchcock (1943)
Petulia - Richard Lester (1968)
The French Connection - William Friedkin (1971)
The Big Heat - Fritz Lang (1953)

DEFINITELY -- UNDECIDED ON RANKING:
The Man With A Movie Camera - Dziga Vertov (1928)
Rashomon - Akira Kurosawa (1950)
Mr. Arkadin - Orson Welles (1955) [Comprehensive Version, 105 minutes]
North By Northwest - Alfred Hitchcock (1959)
Breathless - Jean Luc Godard (1959)
Once Upon a Time in the West - Sergio Leone (1968)
The Godfather - Francis Ford Coppola (1972)
Chinatown - Roman Polanski (1974)
Days of Heaven - Terrence Malick (1978)
Apocalypse Now - Francis Ford Coppola (1979)
Brazil - Terry Gilliam (1985) [The Final Cut, 142 minutes]
Satantango - Bela Tarr (1994)
The Kingdom - Lars Von Trier (1995)
Underground - Emir Kusturica (1995)
Lost Highway - David Lynch (1997)

POSSIBLY/UNDECIDED::
Strike - Sergei Eisenstein (1924)
October - Sergei Eisenstein (1928)
The Passion of Joan of Arc - Carl Theodor Dreyer (1928)
Un Chein Andalou - Luis Bunuel (1929)
L' Age d' Or - Luis Bunuel (1930)
Alexander Nevsky - Sergei Eisenstein (1938)
The Magnificent Ambersons - Orson Welles (1942)
The Lady from Shanghai - Orson Welles (1948)
Late Spring – Yasujiro Ozu (1949)
Ikiru - Akira Kurosawa (1952)
Othello - Orson Welles (1952)
High Noon - Fred Zinneman (1952)
Rear Window - Alfred Hitchcock (1954)
Vertigo - Alfred Hitchcock (1958)
The Trial - Orson Welles (1962)
The Birds - Alfred Hitchcock (1963)
Andrei Rublev - Andrei Tarkovsky (1966)
Marketa Lazarova - Frantisek Vlacil (1967)
2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick (1968)
Dirty Harry - Don Siegel (1971)
Zardoz - John Boorman (1972)
Don't Look Now - Nicolas Roeg (1973)
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - Sam Peckinpah (1974)
The Traveling Players - Theo Angelopoulos (1975)
F For Fake - Orson Welles (1975)
Dressed to Kill - Brian De Palma (1980)
Come and See - Elim Klimov (1985)
Insignificance - Nicolas Roeg (1985)
Reservoir Dogs - Quentin Tarantino (1992)
Hard Boiled - John Woo (1992)
My Joy - Sergei Loznitsa (2010)

Last edited by AfterHours on 09/19/2018 02:08; edited 18 times in total

PurpleHazel

Hard to argue with most of these. I'd just add that Roeg's Don't Look Now is in the same editing league as Walkabout, possibly a little better.

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Man With a Movie Camera is the peak of editing as an art in and of itself for me (as well as the peak of numerous other things including possibly cinema as a whole lol)

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

PurpleHazel wrote:

Hard to argue with most of these. I'd just add that Roeg's Don't Look Now is in the same editing league as Walkabout, possibly a little better.

Thank you, on a purely technical level I might agree (it employs similar craft). Not sure I would agree it is as masterful a merging of image/montage & cutting/emotion/concept as Walkabout though. But thats based on my memory of Dont Look Now from quite some time ago. Dont Look Now is a great example in its own right -- and I do need to revisit it, and will likely add it once I do. Until then, Im not sure where to rank it, and it also would depend on how far I decide to extend this list and what its cut off point will be (50? 100? etc).
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AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

dividesbyzero wrote:

Man With a Movie Camera is the peak of editing as an art in and of itself for me (as well as the peak of numerous other things including possibly cinema as a whole lol)

Thanks it will undoubtedly be included. It is a masterful demonstration of technical possibilities and should rank quite highly (probably top 10, maybe 20, when its all said and done). Keep in mind that the very top selections are not only technical marvels of editing but do so in extraordinary structures, and tend to utilize editing in particularly meaningful ways towards the ends of the film's expressions. Citizen Kane is unbeatable because not a single shot is wasted throughout its entirety while it's technically among the most astonishing of all time while functioning as a complete gallery of editing executed in flawless integration with its (very elaborate) themes/emotions.
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AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

AfterHours wrote:

Thank you, on a purely technical level I might agree (it employs similar craft). Not sure I would agree it is as masterful a merging of image/montage & cutting/emotion/concept as Walkabout though. But thats based on my memory of Dont Look Now from quite some time ago. Dont Look Now is a great example in its own right -- and I do need to revisit it, and will likely add it once I do. Until then, Im not sure where to rank it, and it also would depend on how far I decide to extend this list and what its cut off point will be (50? 100? etc).

Meaning that Im not sure I find Dont Look Now as successful as Walkabout in how deftly, lyrically, violently, seamlessly and transcendently the cutting/montages express the coalescing/merging concepts/emotions of the work. And then, the more elongated and methodical visions of the Outback/"paradise/Eden" are all very beautifully conducted as well.
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SquishypuffDave

Gender: Male
Age: 33

Although it's overall not one of my favourite movies, if we're talking about the unbridled joy of expressive film editing, Scott Pilgrim vs The World is a delight.

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

SquishypuffDave wrote:

Although it's overall not one of my favourite movies, if we're talking about the unbridled joy of expressive film editing, Scott Pilgrim vs The World is a delight.

Agreed! Not sure how highly I'd rank it -- might need to revisit -- havent seen it since shortly after its release.
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undefined

I know they aren't usually noted for their editing, but I think many Ozu films are an excellent example of that extremely powerful very subtle approach to editing whereby you don't really notice the editing. Which is to say it's not flashy or technically advanced by any means but there's a simplistic beauty in how smoothly everything melds together on the editing table

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

dividesbyzero wrote:

I know they aren't usually noted for their editing, but I think many Ozu films are an excellent example of that extremely powerful very subtle approach to editing whereby you don't really notice the editing. Which is to say it's not flashy or technically advanced by any means but there's a simplistic beauty in how smoothly everything melds together on the editing table

Great point. Particularly Late Spring comes to mind. He is tough to rank in terms of editing. I will consider him, among others.

Though nothing like Ozu, Polanski's Chinatown is maybe the supreme example of editing of the more "ultra-concise, smooth, measured and precision" based variety. Lang's Big Heat as well <-- not a single movement is wasted, ultra concise scenes, masterful precision, right to the point, matter of fact, brutally simple/upfront (paralleling the themes and perhaps corresponding to the state of mind of Ford's cop that isnt really thinking things through to their full ramifications, instead acting on only his first impulse). I haven't decided yet how to rank these, and the Ozu's/Mizoguchi's/Bresson's/Renoir's of the world might be an even tougher case. It will probably come down to revisiting these and paying closer attention to the approach (which isnt trying to draw attention to itself so...good luck to me).
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