The film accomplishes so many complicated goals that it is a bit of a miracle. It is an almost academic study of the effects of bilingual education. It is a human story of struggle and triumph. It has a tone of journalistic objectivity that is fair and inclusive of different viewpoints.
At the film after-party, I spoke to Ken and bemoaned my current, never-ending editing project, which, like "Tongues", is unscripted, attempts to be objective, and requires the weaving together of several characters and their storylines.
Editing is the only aspect of filmmaking that has no similarity to earlier art forms. Writing a screenplay is similar to writing a play. Directing on a set is comparable to directing for the stage. Editing a film, and in this case, editing a documentary, isn't like anything else that ever came before in human history. In a sense you are writing, or creating a narrative, a story, but from images and sounds of real events. You can cut a scene many different ways, and get a completely different effect. But the individual scenes serve a larger narrative that must have coherence. It needs to be more than the sum of its parts. It is also a temporal experience, like music, but with images, like a mosaic that you view one tile at a time. When it is over, you stand back, and see the entire picture as a thing, in your memory.
I asked Ken about the editing process of his complicated narrative. He talked somewhat ruefully about the sheer, hard slog of the edit. He talked of the process of refining the scene, arranging the shots until its central idea emerges in a distilled form. This requires re-ordering the shots, re-ordering scenes, trying different combinations. But he used an odd word - "iterations". It isn't a word you use every day. Wikipedia defines it as:
"the act of repeating a process usually with the aim of approaching a desired goal or target or result. Each repetition of the process is also called an "iteration", and the results of one iteration are used as the starting point for the next iteration."
It is interesting that the word "iteration" is associated with mathematics and computing, and not artistic pursuits, which might use a word like "revisions", "versions" or "variations". Warhol's "100 Soup Cans" and Bach's "Goldberg Variations" come to mind. An iterative approach to editing allows one to re-order scenes and experiment with different openings and various endings. Luck comes into play, serendipity, when you try butting two shots together that vields an unexpectedly exciting result. The word also connotes the possibility that sheer chance plays a role. Sometimes whole scenes can be re-ordered easily, more often than not a new order requires multiple small tweeks - like when a variable change in a spreadsheet has an unforeseen cascading effect that completely alters the filmmaker's perception of the material.
I am reminded of a story told by Bob Geldoff in "Is that it?", his account of producing the "We are the World" concerts. A news editor, whose name has been lost to history, had the idea of putting footage from Ethiopian famine on top of the song "Drive" by the new wave band "The Cars". While the song played ("who's going to pick you up, when you fall?...We can't go on, thinking nothing's wrong."), there was an excruciating shot of a starving child crawling in the African dust. The biggest spike in contributions during the multiple-hour concert occurred when this altered music video aired. Neither the news cameraman or Rick Ocasek ever imagined combining these two completely incongruous parts, and certainly never anticipated the heart-breaking sum. But these kinds of moments happen all the time in the editing room, and it is why editing is so exciting. Non-linear editing systems allow for this kind of play, and these moments of serendipity.
On the other hand, Spielberg reportedly still edits on a Moviola. "I need the time it takes to make a cut to think". In other words, he makes every cut consciously, and rarely goes back to tweek. Old-school editors, who used non-linear Steenbecks and Moviolas can often be heard to dismiss youngsters brought up on Avid and Final Cut Pro as "Have a look" editors. Try it one way, have a look. Try it another way, have a look. Old school will tell you that art isn't about trying stuff out, it is about making choices. And no doubt non-linear editing systems can enable indecision.
The trap of iterative editing is that you never stop pushing the paint around. The trap of old-school is that you become an machine, immune from inspiration.
Whatever your personality as an editor, success will probably come down to what it has always come down to - what carpenters call "time on tools". Skill and mastery in anything - editing, sports, writing, playing the piano, comes down to those three things that Arthur Rubinstein said might get you to Carnegie Hall - practice, practice, and practice - which, in addition to developing technical skill, leaves you open to serendipity - happy accidents.
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