Behind The Maestro

Documentary about the art of film editing. Clips are shown from many groundbreaking films with innovative editing styles.

In 1945, two young American soldiers, brothers Budd and Stuart Schulberg, are commissioned to collect filmed and recorded evidence of the horrors committed by the infamous Third Reich in order to prove Nazi war crimes during the Nuremberg trials (1945-46). The story of the making of Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, a paramount historic documentary, released in 1948.

This film tells the life story of Ziva Postec, emphasizing the period when she was editing Shoah from 350 hours of footage.

Legendary film editor and sound designer Walter Murch talks about his work and philosophy. (Based on over 50 hours of Murch's lectures, interviews, and commentaries.)

Edward is a friendly, harmless film editor in the splatter and gore department of a horror film company. Ed is assigned to work on the new Loose Limbs series of horror films after the previous editor killed himself with a hand grenade. Later his reality begins to twist and distort into a horrifying world where nothing is as it seems. Soon enough this turns Ed into Evil Ed!

American crime reporter John Jones is reassigned to Europe as a foreign correspondent to cover the imminent war. When he walks into the middle of an assassination and stumbles on a spy ring, he seeks help from a beautiful politician’s daughter and an urbane English journalist to uncover the truth.

New York in the 1920s. Max Perkins, a literary editor is the first to sign such subsequent literary greats as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. When a sprawling, chaotic 1,000-page manuscript by an unknown writer falls into his hands, Perkins is convinced he has discovered a literary genius.

Josie Geller, a baby-faced junior copywriter at the Chicago Sun-Times, must pose as a student at her former high school to research contemporary teenage culture. With the help of her brother, Rob, Josie infiltrates the inner circle of the most popular clique on campus. But she hits a major snag in her investigation -- not to mention her own failed love life -- when she falls for her dreamy English teacher, Sam Coulson.

Embittered after serving time for a burglary he did not commit, Joe Bell is soon back in jail, on a prison farm. His love for the foreman's daughter leads to a fight between them, leading to the older man's death due to a weak heart. Joe and Mabel go on the run as he thinks no-one would believe a nobody like him.

The ennui of a filmmaker, trapped between aspiration and reality, frames Lana Jing’s quirky, sarcastic, and cinematic-joke filled quarter-life crisis. At her lecture hall job, where aging white men wax on, self-involved, Lana accidentally frames her friend and co-worker when she destroys the only copy of an aging tech-bro’s high-profile lecture. Lana is forced to navigate stop motion animation, a secret admirer, and terrible bridge traffic to sort out a way forward to her destiny… kinda.

When a major newspaper accuses wealthy socialite Connie Allenbury of being a home-wrecker, and she files a multi-million-dollar libel lawsuit, the publication's frazzled head editor, Warren Haggerty, must find a way to turn the tables on her. Soon Haggerty's harried fiancée, Gladys Benton, and his dashing friend Bill Chandler are in on a scheme that aims to discredit Connie, with amusing and unexpected results.

Yokozawa meets a man (Kirishima) and his life is turned around. Kirishima starts to blackmail and tease Yokozawa, but Kirishima might actually be trying to help him recover from an emotional period of his life in the process.

The film's main theme is obsession. An obsession with love, with art, originality, copying, with success, money and... with oneself. Sooner or later, if we lose our rational upper hand over it and let ourselves be dragged down by it, every obsession leads to destruction. But it is only when being dragged down, in spite of all the cuts and bruises, that we find a unique DELIGHT, if only for a few short moments - and what else is life really about? It is like a drug. What at first seems to be weak and trivial is capable of expanding and growing into a serious problem that can appear to be absolutely incomprehensible and absurd to those who have never experienced anything like it.

A womanizing reporter for a sleazy tabloid magazine impersonates his hen-pecked neighbor in order to get an expose on renowned psychologist Helen Gurley Brown.

While recovering in a hospital, war hero Jefferson Jones grows familiar with the "Diary of a Housewife" column written by Elizabeth Lane. Jeff's nurse arranges with Elizabeth's publisher, Alexander Yardley, for Jeff to spend the holiday at Elizabeth's bucolic Connecticut farm with her husband and child. But the column is a sham, so Elizabeth and her editor, Dudley Beecham, in fear of losing their jobs, hasten to set up the single, childless and entirely nondomestic Elizabeth on a country farm.

A film director and sound designer discover a disturbing sound cue hidden in the mix of their short film, forcing the director to confront demons from his past.