The Yorgoses first met while making television commercials. In the nearly 25 years since, the Greek film editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis has cut all of Yorgos Lanthimos' films, beginning with his feature debut — 2005's Kinetta — and including The Lobster (2015), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), and The Favourite (2018).
A graduate of the London Film School, Mavropsaridis says of the origins of their creative partnership, "Although I was a very experienced editor at the time and I had edited a lot of commercial Greek films, I had to break this attitude of mine. I saw a genius director in the making, one that wanted to express things in his own particular way, and I realized that this was a marriage that made me better."
Mavropsaridis received his first Oscar nomination for his work on The Favourite. The duo reteamed on Lanthimos' latest, the dark comedy Poor Things, for which Mavropsaridis is once again nominated for Best Film Editing at the 96th Oscars. The secret to their collaboration, according to the editor, may seem counterintuitive.
"We don't talk much," Mavropsaridis explaions. "He isn't very talkative. I'm not very talkative as an editor, but I can see what he wants to express. He's always very demanding as a person. He's not easily satisfied, and you have to go beyond your limitations all the time. Now I know the way he approaches things... but each new film presents a new challenge because the language has to be written again from the beginning."
Below, Mavropsaridis shares with A.frame the five movies that most inspire him, including the Oscar-nominated French film that he considers a masterwork in film editing.
Directed by: Alain Resnais | Editing by: Albert Jurgenson
I watched My American Uncle for the first time in 1980. The film forced me to question the self that had been formed till then and to reconstruct it anew. It juxtaposes the story of three fictional characters with the scientific ideas of the cognitive behavioral psychologist, Henri Laborit.
I have studied the film several times since and consider it a thesis on editing, in the way it refers to how the mechanism of editing works similarly to the way the brain perceives and experiences reality: As present, in the projection of the film and in our day-to-day experiences; as past, how we form habits and the familiarity with the particular world of the film; and future, as the expectations and anticipations formed, both in life and in the viewing of the film. It is a theme that has occupied the great teacher, Alain Resnais, all his life.
Directed by: Andrei Tarkovsky | Edited by: Lyudmila Feyginova
In this autobiographical film, Andrei Tarkofsky offers us a poem about time and memory. There is no plot, but instead personal memories meeting collective ones. Past, present and future are sculptured into the filmic expression of time. The unexpressed finds the closest expression not in words — the protagonist boy stutters — but in images born from a higher order.
In opposition to [Sergei] Eisenstein's intellectual and conceptual juxtaposition of images, Tarkofsky's time-rhythm montage means that the element in the shots captured during the shooting — the inherent flow and internally-felt sensation of time — determines the length of the shots: It's the organic, spontaneous time image that creates the rhythm, and not the other way around.
Directed by: Stavros Tornes | Edited by: Danae-Despo Maroulakou
An old man carries a coffin; it's his own coffin. He spends his last days after his physical death magically revisiting the memories of his past, before departing into another realm. He meets a young taxi driver who brings the old man's past to life. They revisit the places of the old man’s youth, his fond memories, his unfulfilled desires, his regrets. The two men then meet a prostitute, named Karkalou, whom the old man once loved and the young taxi driver will love now.
It is an extraordinary, poetic film that surpasses the descriptive, representational aspect of cinema. With its editing, Karkalou transforms the experience of cinema to an initiation, a transcendence, a mystic experience.
Directed by: Stanley Kubrick | Edited by: Betty Steinberg
No other film expresses more fully the futility of our Sisyphean efforts to control our fate. The involuted editing runs in concentric circles, repeating the same horse race, and each time giving us more details about a heist that has been planned meticulously. It somehow makes us believe that with this precise planning nothing will go wrong. But in the end, the certainty collapses due to a seemingly unforeseen event — an accident.
In retrospect, on closer examination, we understand that which was at the time hidden from us: The outcome has been predetermined all along by its participants' inherent flaws, our human flaws, that are the agents that determine our fate. Thus, the non-linear narrative leads us to discover the inner workings of the human psyche: It was the extreme suspense that temporarily blinded us.
Directed by: Alexis Damianos | Edited by: Matt McCarthy
A soldier and a prostitute fall in love, despite all of the stereotypes and social conventions of their time. Damianos' film goes against the conventions of both society and cinema of the time, which demanded a happy ending. Their love is not idealized. It is a fight and a struggle. It’s a pagan scream that abolishes words. They communicate with wild looks and maddened laughter, with muffled voices and grunts. When they first meet, his advances are expressed with a powerful zeibekiko dance. They secretly meet in the high mountain, away from people, and their exhilarating love affair is expressed with the swing the soldier hangs in a tree, pushing her above the abyss. She relishes in the excitement and the danger.
Evdokia looks like it was made of sun and soil. It's a natural phenomenon and not a movie. Damianos made cinema without being a 'professional' filmmaker — and that was his greatest asset. There is no technical perfection, smooth storytelling, flawless editing. It's all passion. Alexis Damianos may not 'know' but he 'does' cinema.
