Jonny Stenton

Today I had the pleasure of meeting and listening to one of the most unusual people I will ever meet. At times he seemed absent minded and gave the impression that he was unorganised and unsure about what he was going to talk about. But after over two hours of listening to him speak I realised that he has a great passion and interest in the film industry and loves his job as a film editor.

In the beginning Jonny seemed unsure about what he wanted to say searching through his laptop, while taking long pauses between talking as if he didn’t know where to start. But when he eventually got started he would begin to explain his impression of film editing and to what I could only work out to be the evolution of editing.

He first got me hooked by trying to use dreams and perception to give examples of how editing has changed over the years. Being a great fan of dreams and things that dreams represent I found myself intrigued and wondering how this has anything to do with editing, he started by explaining that dreams are a disturbance of an image: he explained that dreams are memories or experiences played back to us, recreated with imbued meaning.

He then went on to show us a clip from the film Amour by director Michael Haneke, this 2012 film is a love story based around a husband dealing with his wife’s dementia. The clip showed a dream sequence and how editing can help the people watching the film go without realising that the characters have fallen into a dream until they wake from it.

Jonny then went on to talk about Gilles Deleuze and how he explained that in his view Deleuze said time is freedom. Jonny spoke about past and future and also the present explaining how past and future is virtual: memories, fantasy and desire, things that you dream about, things that you want and people you have lost and miss and how the present is actual: real things here and now, you can touch and feel.

Jonny explained the way films showed a dream sequence pre-World War II, using techniques like fading away and staring off into the distance and was very different to how it was viewed post World War II, when they started to just cut into dreams leaving the viewer’s guessing and more intrigued as to what’s happening.

I will admit that in bits such as when he was trying to explain the section on time and Gilles Deleuze  I wasn’t really sure of the point he was trying to make, and understand that this could probably mean that I have missed the point all together.

However, I really enjoyed listening to, what turned out to be extremely passionate and enthusiastic guy and would recommend anyone with an interest in film editing to go see and listen and take away just as much excitement and passion as I have and undoubtedly will again if I ever get another chance!

By Corey Hatton and Nikki Rynne Level 2 students in Film and Television.