The DIY editing trick Thelma Schoonmaker used in ‘Raging Bull’
No Martin Scorsese picture feels complete without the involvement of Thelma Schoonmaker, regarded as the legendary filmmaker’s most trusted advisor and right hand, with the pair creating cinematic magic together countless times over the course of their partnership.
Schoonmaker has been at Scorsese’s side ever since his 1967 feature directorial debut Who’s That Knocking at My Door, but after reuniting three years later as part of the six-person editing team on seminal documentary Woodstock, they remained apart for a decade.
However, they were reunited for Raging Bull – which won Schoonmaker her first Academy Award in the ‘Best Editing’ category – and they’ve been inseparable ever since, with Killers of the Flower Moon the 20th consecutive film they’ve collaborated on. It’s a partnership that’s landed her another seven Oscar nominations and two wins, and one that isn’t going to end anytime soon.
The arduous production was described by Robert De Niro as the most challenging of his entire career, but his sacrifices were worth it and then some when he didn’t just win an Oscar for ‘Best Actor’, but went down in the history books as having given one of the all-time great big screen performances.
Lauded by many as Scorsese’s very best film, anybody who doesn’t place Raging Bull at the very pinnacle of his filmography is nonetheless forced to concede that it’s right up there. The biopic of boxing sensation Jake LaMotta traces his ups, downs, personal trials, and professional tribulations in stunning fashion, with Schoonmaker’s dedication to ensuring things were as real as possible extending far beyond simply assembling the final cut.
For the scenes that show LaMotta’s home movies, the dynamic duo wanted the footage to look as realistic as possible to convey to audiences that what they were seeing could have conceivably have been captured in the 1940s, despite Raging Bull releasing four decades later.
To accomplish that, flash frames were spliced into the negative during post-production to create the illusion that these ‘home movies’ had been affected by wear and tear over time, with Scorsese doubling down on that approach by scratching the negative with a razor.
The home movies appear around the midpoint of the story and stand out as even more jarring as the only splashes of colour in the monochromatic movie. The images of a happy family in full colour make a jarring counterpoint to the bone-shattering boxing sequences and bursts of uncontrollable rage that characterise De Niro’s LaMotta throughout, with Scorsese and Schoonmaker’s DIY approach to making them more convincing on-screen only enhancing their power within the context of the story.
These days, that sort of thing would be easily accomplished via some digital trickery, but the illustrious pair didn’t gain their reputations from doing things the easy way.
