Gabriella Oldham

First Cut offers an opportunity to learn what film editing really is, and to learn from the source. Gabriella Oldham's interviews with twenty-three award-winning film editors give a full picture of the complex art and craft of editing a film. Filled with animated anecdotes and detailed examples, and updated with a new preface, this book provides a comprehensive treatment of both documentary and feature film editing.

"First Cut 2: More Conversations with Film Editors" presents a new collection of twelve interviews with award-winning film editors who discuss the art and craft of editing in the twenty-first century. As a follow-up to the successful "First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors" (now celebrating its 20th anniversary), this new volume explores the transition of editing from the age of celluloid to the digital age. These extraordinarily articulate editors share their passion about film, offer detailed practical examples from their films to explain their process as well as their challenges, and imbue each interview with unique personality, humor, and cinematic insights. "First Cut 2" continues the tradition of the first volume by interviewing fiction and documentary editors, contributing to a rich, holistic appreciation of editing. It also introduces a significant interview with an independent filmmaker/editor to emphasize today's multiple opportunities for aspiring filmmakers to make their own "small films" and achieve success. Together with the first volume, "First Cut 2" offers a panoramic survey of film editing and preserves its history through the voices of its practitioners. The stories told will engage students, inform general filmgoers, and even enlighten industry professionals.

Filling a major gap in the critical canon, Keaton’s Classic Shorts: Beyond the Laughter chronicles the rapid growth in the filmmaker’s understanding of what makes both comedy and film successful. Keaton developed his major themes in these nineteen silent short films shot between 1920 and 1923, creating his persona “Buster” with his trademark stone face. These short films clearly indicate Keaton’s love of the camera and his concern for composition, symmetry, and images that delight the eye and startle the mind.Oldham reconstructs each of these rarely seen films to enable the reader to “watch” Keaton’s performance, devoting a separate chapter to each. She analyzes each film’s strengths, weaknesses, and prevalent themes and threads. She also enables readers to plumb the depths of what seems to be surface comedy through philosophical, biographical, historical, and critical commentary, thus linking the shorts together into a cohesive study of Buster Keaton’s growth through his three-year independent venture as a filmmaker. Beyond the laughter and beyond the great stone face, Oldham presents a treasure of cinema comedy and a unique philosophy of life as captured by a great filmmaker.