When The Shooting Stops ... The Cutting Begins: A Film Editor's Story (Da Capo Paperback) by Ralph Rosenblum & Robert Karen

Author:Ralph Rosenblum & Robert Karen [Rosenblum, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2009-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

Inside again, she offers her hand. There is a long pause. He doesn’t take it. He walks to the door, and as it shuts behind him the blur of a speeding train fills the screen.

This is now the beginning of the third major flashback, the one that audiences responded to most profoundly. The blur slows and reveals a train stopping in a noisy subway station. Nazerman gets on. Shaken, unshaven, unkempt, he looks deranged and on the run. He suspiciously studies another passenger, a Jewish man about his own age. The man eyes him back. Nazerman is so disturbed by this, he moves off down the car, looking back a couple of times as he goes. Finally he stands in the center of the car, and the camera scans the other passengers, simulating the sweep of his eyes. Each new set of eyes is staring right back at the camera, at Nazerman, curious about him in some way. Intercut with this panning-camera survey of the subway car are instantaneous memory shots. By now we automatically associate these flashes with Nazerman’s mental processes. And this time they seem to suggest dissolution.

Nazerman is leaning against a pole in the center of the car. Again, he looks at the other passengers, and as the camera sweeps their faces, we again intercut flashback segments. The flashback material ultimately reveals a packed Nazi freight car bearing camp-bound Jewish families, but the initial flashes are so brief that the content is not immediately clear. And because the memory film is sweeping the Nazi freight car at a speed and angle that suggests a continuation of the subway pan, we are disturbed for a moment without knowing why—a factor that contributed to the unsettling power of this scene.

The passengers are staring back inquisitively at Nazerman. The first flash is four frames, and each one is progressively longer— growing to eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty, twenty-four, and finally twenty-eight frames, always returning to the searching eyes of the New York subway riders. The last memory cut—one and one-sixth seconds—seems to linger for a long time, enough to make out the suffering faces of the herded, hungry, exhausted people being transported for extermination. When at last we cut back to Nazerman paranoically clinging to his pole, we feel as if we ourselves have been jolted out of a reverie.

Nazerman turns and flees, anxious to escape this haunted car. We see him through the window of the adjoining car coming our way, staggering and frantic. As he opens the exit door of his car, the train noise increases. He reaches desperately for the second door, opens it, and looks up into the next car. Horror comes over his face—he’s right in the midst of the Nazi freight train again, only this time the camera is not panning and the cut is not a brief one; a full flashback is upon him. Sound editor Jack Fitzstephens charged the onset of horror with the combined shriek of a baby’s cry and a piercing European train whistle.

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