Feeling the Screen Story’s Pulse: Karen Peralman’s Cutting Rhythms: Creative Film Editing

This third edition by Dr Karen Pearlman, entitled Cutting Rhythms: Creative Film Editing, marks an important revaluing of intuition as an overarching descriptor for a wide range of acquired skills and maturing expertise – identifying the director’s desires in expression, designing the story structure, noticing and responding to potential emotional nuances, perceiving potential visual and aural rhythms in uncut material, choreographing the shaping and phrasing of events and emotions – all supported by technical expertise in the tools of editing itself. But such intuition/expertise may go underutilised and undervalued if editor and director fail to foster and sustain a productive collaboration or what Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo describe as “participatory sense-making” (p. 212).¹ For Pearlman, all this is grounded in conscious, bodily awareness of movement to which we can all have access as human beings. There may be many rich surprises in the outcomes of the editing journey along the way, but editing is not a mysterious conjuring trick that is only accessible to a chosen few – one can learn how to cut rhythms in a meaningful and stimulating way if one is willing to stay open and attuned. That’s what Pearlman offers those who wish to foster their own unique expression of editing. Cutting Rhythms honours and celebrates the unique and embodied heritage, habits and perceptions that every editor brings to the task at hand.

This text is structured into a series of 12 chapters that each contribute screen editing examples and practical experiences for editors wishing to learn how to transform raw filmic material into something truly creative and impactful. Crucially, undergirding the wisdom and expertise offered by Pearlman in each chapter, is the foundational belief that rhythm is what makes editing work for an audience. It is a felt experience that guides an audience through cycles of tension and release that ultimately generate meaning-making. From a choreographic perspective, rhythm evokes and manipulates time, energy and movement (Chapter Three), through the shaping of timing, pacing and what Pearlman defines as “trajectory phrasing” (Chapter Four, pp. 72-75). Her own background as a dancer, and her experiences and training in various so-called efforts that particularise different tones or moods of energy are informed by the experimentation and insights of 20th century choreographer, Rudolph Laban, and his student Irmgard Bartenieff (ibid). Efforts are about attitude and intention and it is these efforts, phrased through various applications of trajectories, that shape one’s experience of the unfolding narrative of a film. This doesn’t remain theoretical. In this chapter, Pearlman invites editors into a practical exercise to help attune them to the qualitative differences they can experience by playing with trajectories in offering different efforts (attitudes and intentions, expressed in variations in time, space and energy) for a scene. This is a particular strength of the chapters in that Pearlman offers insightful case studies and practical exercises so that nothing she proposes about the primacy of rhythm can be discarded as peripheral or non-essential.

However, while aspiring editors might consciously embrace and foster a heightened awareness for how the raw material is informing them about potential choices in creating the most appropriate rhythms to drive a narrative home, Pearlman establishes some important ground rules in the first two chapters, before presenting her case for the editor as choreographer in Chapter Three. The opening chapters speak to common misconceptions about intuition and taken for granted cognitive actions of editors. Pearlman identifies what is considered intuitive and reframes each quality as a sign of expertise making it, “easier to identify the kinds of experiences editors have that are so deeply embodied that they simply feel intuitive” (p. 7). Rather, Pearlman advocates that editors’ own bodies can be unique and invaluable sources of rhythmic information that shape their work in the edit suite. The practical exercise in this opening chapter invites editors to heighten their kinaesthetic empathy – feeling with the movement of others – by watching café conversations between two people, without hearing what they are saying, in order to discern possible feeling states and narratives contexts that would account for the bodily movements observed and felt by the editor. Furthermore, in Chapter Two, Pearlman argues that it is the editor’s kinaesthetic thinking that manages seemingly cognitive yet also embodied actions through the physical tools and practices of editing. The cumulative yet cyclical actions of watching, sorting, remembering, selecting and composing materials are supported by several types of memory, some of which are visible but others that often remain invisible. The memory type that is most obvious is that of remembering how to use whatever mode of editing equipment has been made accessible to the editor. But the two invisible types of memory are those of recalling shot content and value, and that of contextual memory, i.e. how and why each clip may have a relationship to another clip. Thus, in fostering one’s own editing craft, there can be great value in learning how other editors deal with one or more of these tasks. And, in consolidating the message of these first five chapters, Pearlman reminds us that as “the editor is the film’s first audience” (p. 104), whatever is shaped must affect the editor to impact the audience.

The next four chapters are motivated by the deconstruction of an underling myth – “good editing is invisible” (p. 112) – a myth that Pearlman provocatively dismisses. Rather, in Chapter Six, she proposes that editors should be able to identify and evaluate skilful use of three kinds of movement – physical rhythms (movement of images and sounds), emotional rhythms (movement of emotions) and event rhythms (movements of plot, story and structure). Such principles have been incorporated into the Australian Screen Editors Guild Awards judging criteria. Physical rhythms (Chapter Seven) arise out of images and sounds that either require re-choreographing (by using the most dynamic bits of each shot or sound bite) or that provide moments of physical storytelling that help an audience know where they are, and where they have come from. Again, this chapter is well supported by case studies and exercises.

Possibly a more delicate and nuanced type of rhythm is that of emotional rhythms defined in Chapter Eight as how editors, “shape emotion driven exchanges on screen and emotional responses of audiences” (p. 133). Pearlman invites the editor to ask three questions when working on emotional rhythms: which shot? where in the sequence? how long? This requires a special appreciation of how emotional energy is thrown from one shot to the next creating a cause-and-effect chain. And, usefully, Pearlman provides both a practical activity to feel into the throwing of energy and a case study of a key sequence in The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002) to demonstrate this.

In discussing how to shape the most impactful rhythms of the events unfolding in the film (Chapter Nine), Pearlman draws upon another useful metaphor, architecture, to appreciate how various structures shape the audience experience. Often it is the first scene that needs to establish the stakes of the narrative in order to build tension and release. This can be informed by not only knowing what the initial dramatic question is but by introducing subsequent dramatic questions that raise the stakes even higher. Furthermore, Pearlman reminds editors that the shaping of event rhythms must take into account the physical and emotional rhythms that already provide energy, pace and timing.

The final three chapters of Cutting Rhythms address particular editing issues and emerging opportunities with regard to style, collaboration, and what Pearlman refers to as onscreen drafting. Chapter Ten offers two intersecting ways of discussing and analysing film style: a spectrum of choices from thematic montage to continuity editing, and, a range of stylistic choices from collisions to linkages (these last two terms are derived from the work of two key Russian filmmakers, Eisenstein and Pudovkin, who had different perspectives on how film works on its audience). Usefully, Pearlman models the value of these two spectrums in four style case studies: Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), demonstrating continuity cutting and collisions; Apocalypse Now (Francis Coppola,  1979), demonstrating thematic montage with linkages; Breaker Morant (Bruce Beresford, 1980), demonstrating continuity cutting with linkages; and Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000), demonstrating thematic montage and collision.

Pearlman’s boldest advocacy for the unique role of the editor is exemplified in Chapter 11 with the intriguing title – “Collaboration and the Vulcan Mind Meld” (a nod to a fictional device in the ninth episode, “Dagger of the Mind,” of the science fiction TV series Star Trek (Vincent McEveety, 1966) in which it was revealed that Vulcans could read the minds and intentions of those they wished to understand more deeply). This allusion to the desire of the editor and director to be of one mind in service to the film may appear to be the ultimate aim of collaboration. However, Pearlman reframes this notion with her own account of what makes for an effective collaboration: “in the creative process of shaping a film’s movement, editors persuasively and skilfully extract the thoughts of directors, producers and audiences and filter them through their own perspectives and expertise” (emphasis mine, p. 209). So, collaboration incorporates, firstly, decision-making (much of which is done by the editor before showing the director anything, and then asking “how about this?”), secondly, responsive creativity (where the director may request changes, but the editor will ask “what are you looking for?”), and thirdly, consciously synchronising with the director (using the director’s sense of how things flow). Crucially, Pearlman regards matters about equality between editor and director as asking the wrong question.

Finally, in Chapter 12, Pearlman offers an important re-framing of the expertise and supposed intuition of the editor that has informed each chapter of this book by proposing editing thinking as a process of sensing, hypothesizing and realising structure and rhythm. It is initiated in the felt response to movement in each piece of unedited raw film material (visual and aural) and relies on constantly accumulated and honed sensitivity and re-membered expertise. This, according to Pearlman, is “thinking by doing” (p. 224). As a consequence, because the editing process can begin with the first film and audio shot/recorded, Pearlman argues that editing should no longer be treated as a downstream step, as it often is located. Rather, to shift this mindset, Pearlman proposes the initiation of an “onscreen draft” (p. 223) that is a “no-budget digital rendering of the screenplay” (p. 227). This draft is a creative artefact in itself that will teach editors about their own experiences and emergent capacity for playing with form, playing with the structural anatomy of the film’s body, playing with rhythmic pattern composition. As a rapidly generated prototype of the final film, it allows the film’s creative team the opportunity for risk-taking and informative failure by enforcing short development cycles for each draft that in turn constrain creativity in a productive way.

Cutting Rhythms: Creative Film Editing is more akin to a users’ manual for embodied, rhythm-informed editing rather than an editing textbook that only engages cognition. Pearlman’s primary intention is to reaffirm that the editing skills we might attribute to intuition are the acquired and constantly shifting remembrances of both editors’ capacity to watch, sort, select, compose and their attuned sensitivity to choreograph and shape movement through timing, pacing and trajectory phrasing. These cutting rhythms impact how audiences sense, feel and embody filmic experiences for themselves. Pearlman’s specialised analysis of the numerous case studies within this publication, coupled with her dance-informed sensitivity to, and practical exercises for, the bodily rhythms that shape our perception and experience of film as either filmmakers or film audiences, make Cutting Rhythms a text you want to move into again and again.

Karen Peralman, Cutting Rhythms: Creative Film Editing, 3rd edition (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2025).

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