Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [66]
Finally the editor gave up. I don’t know if he ran out of strength or if he was reassured by my putting everything back together the way I had found it. But at last he came to lend his tacit approval to my fumblings with film in his editing room. Later, up until his death, this man worked as chief editor on all my films.
I learned a mountain of things about editing from Yama-san, but I think the most vital among them is the fact that when you are editing you must have the intelligence to look at your own work objectively. The film that Yama-san had labored painfully to shoot he would cut to pieces as if he were a total masochist. He’d always come into the editing room with a joyful look on his face and say things like, “Kurosawa, I thought it over last night, and we can cut that so-and-so scene,” or “Kurosawa, I thought it over last night and I want you to cut the first half of such-and-such a scene.” “We can cut!” “I want you to cut!” “Cut!” Yama-san in the editing room was a bona-fide mass murderer. I even thought on occasion if we were going to cut so much, why did we have to shoot it all in the first place? I, too, had labored painfully to shoot the film, so it was hard for me to scrap my own work.
But, no matter how much work the director, the assistant director, the cameraman or the lighting technicians put into a film, the audience never knows. What is necessary is to show them something that is complete and has no excess. When you are shooting, of course, you film only what you believe is necessary. But very often you realize only after having shot it that you didn’t need it after all. You don’t need what you don’t need. Yet human nature wants to place value on things in direct proportion to the amount of labor that went into making them. In film editing, this natural inclination is the most dangerous of all attitudes. The art of the cinema has been called an art of time, but time used to no purpose cannot be called anything but wasted time. Among all the teachings of Yama-san on film editing, this was the greatest lesson.
I didn’t intend to write a handbook of filmmaking technique here, so I’ll put an end to this discussion. But there is one more incident involving editing and Yama-san that I would like to relate. It took place during the editing of the film Uma (Horses), which I had co-scripted and which Yama-san had put entirely in my hands for cutting. There is one place in the story where a foal has been sold and the mare frantically searches for her baby. Completely crazed, she kicks down her stable door and tries to crawl under the paddock fence. I edited the sequence most diligently to show her expressions and actions in a dramatic way.
But when the edited scene was run through a projector, the feeling didn’t come through at all. The mother horse’s sorrow and panic somehow stayed flat behind the screen. Yama-san had sat with me and watched the film as I was editing it any number of times, but he never said a word. If he didn’t say, “That’s good,” I knew it meant it was no good. I was at an impasse, and in my despair I finally begged his advice. He said, “Kurosawa, this sequence isn’t drama. It’s mono-no-aware.” Mono-no-aware, “sadness at the fleeting nature of things,” like the sweet, nostalgic sorrow of watching the cherry blossoms