Star Wars by Will Brooker;

Author:Will Brooker; [Brooker;, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781839021657
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

As discussed in my earlier chapter, though, Lucas did not restrict himself entirely to avant-garde experiment and documentary. Freiheit and 1:42.08 both rapidly draw the viewer into engagement with their central character, the boy sprinting for his freedom and the driver struggling against the racing car and his lap time. Both also draw on another form of editing; the template established by classical Hollywood, which focuses on a protagonist’s emotional responses – aiming for an emotional, rather than an intellectual response in its audience – and creates a clear, coherent sense of the character’s relationship to physical space.

Similarly, THX 1138: 4EB, while it combines all the techniques that Lucas had picked up during his undergraduate career – mixing vérité and montage with the abstract imagery, static and shapes of experimental animation – diligently follows continuity editing conventions in the later sections, after a deliberately confusing introductory sequence. We are, as in Freiheit and 1:42.08, invited to identify with the titular character through close-ups of his face, and shots are linked according to Hollywood rules of spatial relations: a controller peers into a scope, and we see his POV of THX 1138; THX’s race through an underground garage is constructed from mid-shots and long shots linked through matching on action, keeping to a consistency of direction; THX opening a door is cut smoothly with a shot of THX entering a room. Perhaps significantly, the hero of THX is also the editor – Dan Natchsheim played the main part, and then cut the film.

Note that while Lucas claims he was ‘not into storytelling’, his stated aim was not, primarily, to evoke an intellectual response, but ‘to create emotions through pure cinematic techniques’. Unlike Godard, Lucas had no intention of progressing to the more Brechtian, self-reflective cinema of Tout va bien (1972); and Lucas’s first short animation is the closest he comes to the intellectual montage of Eisenstein’s October (1927). As THX 1138: 4EB, Freiheit and 1:42.08 in particular demonstrate, USC had also introduced Lucas to the work of D. W. Griffith, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and David Lean,130 and he cites William Wyler and John Ford alongside Godard as two of his key influences in 1964.131 Even Kurosawa, whose work Lucas admired for its foreignness and fascinatingly alien social structures, was a fan himself of John Ford; The Seven Samurai is, on one level, an emotionally riveting action film.

Between graduation and the production of Star Wars, three experiences hardened up Lucas’s approach to editing, and confirmed his need for absolute control over his work. In 1967, Lucas was hired to cut a documentary about President Johnson’s trip to the Far East, and he resented the restrictions imposed upon him.

Editors had to discard footage of President Johnson’s bald spot and the First Lady’s prominent profile. Politcally, the footage had to be consistent with American foreign policy, and Lucas was criticized for the way he edited Johnson’s visit to South Korea. […] Lucas was angry enough to abandon a possible career as an editor: ‘I realised that I didn’t want other people telling me how to cut a film.

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