Films › Editing
Cold War
Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, 2018
The film covers fifteen years in under ninety minutes by cutting to black between chapters and trusting the audience to fill the gaps. Each ellipsis removes exactly the scene a conventional screenplay would consider essential. Academy ratio and static compositions make the omissions feel deliberate rather than rushed. Music performances mark the passage of time and political change simultaneously. Pawlikowski and editor Jaroslaw Kaminski reportedly cut far more conventional connective material during the process and then removed it, which is a useful discipline for any filmmaker afraid of leaving gaps, since the film proves an audience will supply causality on its own. The choice to end scenes at their emotional peak rather than their narrative resolution forces every remaining shot to carry more weight, and the black frames themselves function almost like punctuation marks rather than simple transitions.
What to watch for
Watch the cuts to black and list what the film refuses to dramatise.
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