The Original Film Editors
Being in post-production right now, Who Cares About Actresses has been thinking about the women behind the camera, particularly those who make magic out of raw footage. The scarcity of women editors, sound mixers, and such, is very apparent--but how about a hundred years ago? The Four Unsung Pioneers of Film Editing were ahead of their time. As Premium Beat says:
“Women working as editors dates back to the early days of cinema. In fact, the term “editor” was not even used as a job title. When working with actual film reels, editing a film required you to literally cut and splice scenes together. This gave rise to the term cutter. In the early days of film, cutting was seen as unskilled labor. Practically anyone could be hired for the job, and it actually became a common position for women. The reason most people don’t know this comes from the fact that all of those cutting positions went uncredited in the films.”
Do these early pioneers get the credit that they deserve? And what about the field of film editing now? Today, film editing has a higher percentage of women than other jobs in the film industry. They’re still greatly outnumbered by men, though; the Motion Pictures Editors Guild has 21% women in its membership. (It’s a little concerning to us that this number seems to be an accomplishment.) Even though women brought this art form to the spotlight, it seems as if in doing that, more men became involved and the field became yet another with a huge gender disparity. Yet there seems to be a general consensus that editing is much more a woman’s world than any other field in the industry; Mary Jo Markey said to the NYTimes ““A lot of women go into editing because women go into editing.” People come out of film school wanting to be directors, she said, and the odds of that are long. “It makes sense to me,” she added, “that women would see what a viable option editing is, and it’s one that women are succeeding in.””
Photo: Greta Garbo in The Mysterious Lady, which Margaret Booth edited.
More recently, there has seemed to be more attention paid to women film editors. MTV looked at “9 Female Film Editors You Can Thank for Your Favorite Action Flicks,” and a couple of years ago The Hollywood Reporter published a short article; “Top Directors Reveal How Female Film Editors Shaped Their Movies” We’re not sure why women editors couldn’t just be upheld for their own work, and not through the lens of male directors. This speaks to the often background role that women editors seem to play. So often, we are focused on the writers, directors and actors of a movie.
The original cutters of film were considered to be menial workers, but women like Margaret Booth and Anne Bauchens worked their way up. Booth started off as a cutter for D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, and received her first Oscar Nomination for Best Film Editing in 1936. By 1939 she was editor-in-chief for MGM. So when Who Cares About Actresses feels hopeless at the state of the film industry, we look back to women such as Booth, Anne Bauchens, Barbara McLean and Dorothy Spencer, and remember that we have women to thank for making film editing into an art.
Thanks to Matt Wolf for sending along the article that inspired this post.
