Pumping Iron, Editing Analysis

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PUMPING IRON Editor Geof Bartz Co-Editor Lawrence Silk Directors George Butler and Robert Fiore Release year 1977 Synopsis Pumping Iron (Butler and Fiore 1977) is a cinema verite stylized docu-drama, which explores the culture of body building in the mid-late 1970s. The film follows, over the course of a year, the trials and tribulations of a group of professional and amateur body builders as they prepare for the all-important Mr Universe and Mr Olympia championships held in South Africa. Pumping Iron features a youthful Arnold Schwarzenegger as the charismatic prankster defending his five-year reign as Mr Olympia. Arnold’s main contender in the race for the title is a shy, 24-year-old deaf man, Louie Farrigno, coached by his father, and determined to unseat Arnold for the crown. Editing is essential to our experience of the cinema; as Mark Le Fanu (in Cunningham 2005, p. 237) argues, ‘(s)tories may be told without editing… but in an important way the beginning of editing is the beginning of cinema itself’. The centrality of editing is particularly evident in documentary genres, which often condense or elide large periods of time into a single moving image experience. According to Megan Cunningham (2005, p. 236), the documentary editor ‘is like a sculptor whose materials are restricted to found artifacts of media: photos, footage, archival material, home movies, interviews and music. All of these assets are at their disposal to construct a cinematic storyline.’ Cunningham further explains that “(d)ocumentary editing ties together seemingly mundane moments that may lack inherent drama in a way that moves the plot forward, creates intrigue, portrays an engrossing reality and brings the larger significance of the events to the surface of the film.’ (p.236) This essay will explore the ‘assets’ at the ‘disposal’ of the

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