Editing David Lean (section)

==Style==
As Lean himself pointed out,{{sfn|Brownlow|1996|p=483}} his films are often admired by fellow directors as a showcase of the filmmaker's art. According to Katharyn Crabbe, "[t]he rewards of watching a David Lean film are most often described in terms of his skillful use of cinematic conventions, his editing, his alertness to the ability of film to create effects."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Crabbe |first1=Katharyn |title=Lean's "Oliver Twist": Novel to Film |journal=Film Criticism |date=Autumn 1977 |volume=2 |issue=1 |pages=46–51 |jstor=44019043 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/44019043 |access-date=5 June 2022 |archive-date=5 June 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220605192728/https://www.jstor.org/stable/44019043 |url-status=live }}</ref>  In his introduction to ''David Lean: Interviews'', Steven Organ claims that Lean "often straddl[ed] that fine line between commercialism and artistry. To view one of Lean's films is to see the complete spectrum of tools available to the filmmaker – and used to their fullest potential."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Lean |first1=David |last2=Organ |first2=Steven |title=David Lean: Interviews |date=2009 |publisher=University Press of Mississippi |location=United States |isbn=9781604732351 |page=viii}}</ref>

According to [[David Ehrenstein]], "What all [his] brilliant, seemingly disparate works have in common is the clarity and precision of Lean's filmmaking technique, as well as his steely resolve in using it to attain poetic grandeur."<ref>{{cite news |last1=Ehrenstein |first1=David |title=British Invasion: David Ehrenstein on the films of David Lean |url=https://www.artforum.com/film/david-ehrenstein-on-the-films-of-david-lean-21084 |access-date=18 July 2023 |work=Artforum International |date=12 September 2008}}</ref> [[Michael Sragow]] calls Lean "a superb romantic moviemaker and one of the slow but steady innovators of the cinema … Though Lean is usually praised for his 'film sense', as though it were divorced from his other faculties, he's done as much as men of the theater like [[Luchino Visconti|Visconti]] to merge the illusions and grand passions of the stage with the verisimilitude and immediacy of the screen. His ability to combine factual filigree and larger-than-life characters in a sometimes hallucinatory atmosphere has inspired generations of filmmakers to try to fuse the most ruthless documentation with the most elaborate myth-making." He further highlights Lean's use of "highly charged staging and editing and a lucid, fluid realism to depict the contrast between ongoing life and life at its extremes."<ref name="David Lean's Right of 'Passage'"/>

On the occasion of Lean's centenary in 2008, writer and broadcaster [[Andrew Collins (broadcaster)|Andrew Collins]] praised him as "more than just cinema's great choreographer of scale":

{{cquote|Certainly, he set the bar high for heavily populated, location-shot period sagas from literary sources, but it would be shortsighted to see Lean's greatest achievements as the filmic equivalent of skyscraping architectural edifices: good because they're there. The people may look like ants when first glimpsed against the vast sand dunes of an exacting Lean composition, or the icy Russian mountains, or the concrete façade of a dam, but we are soon invited to alight on individuals, and through the use of simple, visual clues, wonder about them and care about them.<ref name="The epic legacy of David Lean">{{cite news |last1=Collins |first1=Andrew |title=The epic legacy of David Lean |url=https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/may/04/features |access-date=19 July 2023 |work=The Guardian |date=4 May 2008}}</ref>}}

[[Alain Silver]] analyses Lean's technique as "one that elucidates story and characters through pictures." He states that Lean is able to subjectify a film's perspective through visuals regardless of whether the film has a "third-person" or "first-person" narrative:

{{cquote|Since most of Lean's narratives are organised in a way which is neither "first" nor "third" person, shots or sequences […] may suddenly shift the film into either mode without disrupting or overwhelming the basic structure. Subjectivity might be accomplished in several ways. The narrative itself may be literally bracketed by being presented as a flashback from either the central character (''Brief Encounter'', ''The Passionate Friends''), a subordinate one (''Doctor Zhivago''), or a combination (''In Which We Serve'' and, implicitly, ''Lawrence of Arabia''). In any narrative context, shots may be intercut to suggest the thoughts or sensations of a character, as in ''Oliver Twist'' and ''Brief Encounter'', or characters, as in the sparking streetcar terminal when Zhivago and his still-unknown future love, Lara, brush against each other early in that film. Shots may become literally what the character sees; or shots of the character may be manipulated to focus on an interior state. Simple instances would be the hanging in ''Great Expectations'' (1946) or the Cossack charge in ''Doctor Zhivago'', where there is no point-of-view shot of the terrible event but merely a slow move in to reveal the horror on the actors' faces.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Silver |first1=Alain |title=Lean, David |url=https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/great-directors/lean/ |website=Senses of Cinema |date=23 June 2011 |access-date=27 July 2023}}</ref>}}

Lean was notorious for his perfectionist approach to filmmaking; director [[Claude Chabrol]] stated that he and Lean were the only directors working at the time who were prepared to wait "forever" for the perfect sunset, but whereas Chabrol measured "forever" in terms of days, Lean did so in terms of months.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/great-directors/lean/|title=David Lean – Great Director profile|website=Senses of Cinema|date=21 May 2002 |access-date=7 October 2017|archive-date=7 October 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171007120950/http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/great-directors/lean/|url-status=live}}</ref> Similarly, [[Hugh Hudson]], writing shortly after Lean's death in 1991, called him "[a] man driven to achieve the perfect realisation of his ideas and ruthless in that pursuit." He goes on to describe the filmmaker's method of working with actors:

{{cquote|Lean always had a clear idea of how his characters should be portrayed and would not accept much deviation. He had a reputation for being tough with his actors and for refusing to let them indulge in "their natural propensity for histrionics". Yet once the rules were laid down, Lean allowed his actors considerable space for interpretation and he showed a genuine understanding of their exposed position in front of the camera … Lean would set his actors in the landscape by giving them the feeling of being in that time and at that place. This is where the talent of a great director comes in—setting a scene (mise-en-scène), creating a climate, painting a picture within the story and at the same time never losing the telling of that story.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Hudson |first1=Hugh |title=Dreaming in the light: Hugh Hudson on David Lean |url=https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/dreaming-light-hugh-hudson-david-lean |access-date=24 July 2023 |work=Sight & Sound |date=25 March 2022}}</ref>}}

===Themes===
Steven Ross has written that Lean's films "reveal a consistently tragic vision of the romantic sensibility attempting to reach beyond the constraints and restrictions of everyday life", and that they tend to feature "intimate stories of a closely-knit group of characters [whose] fates are indirectly but powerfully shaped by history-shaking events going on around them." He further observes that, in his work, "setting [is used] as a presence with as much dramatic and thematic form as any character in the film."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Ross |first1=Steven |title=In Defense of David Lean |journal=Take One |date=July–August 1972 |volume=3 |issue=12 |pages=10–18 |url=http://davidlean.com/page1/Articles/articles.html |access-date=12 April 2019 |archive-date=12 April 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190412231059/http://davidlean.com/page1/Articles/articles.html |url-status=dead }}</ref> Similarly, Lean biographer [[Gene D. Phillips]] writes that the director "saw in his style an attraction to characters who refuse to accept defeat, even when their most cherished hopes go unfulfilled. His protagonists seek to transform their lives, but often fail to do so. Pip in ''Great Expectations'', Colonel Nicholson in ''The Bridge on the River Kwai'', and T. E. Lawrence in ''Lawrence of Arabia'', among others, struggle against the limitations of their own personalities to achieve a level of existence that they deem higher or nobler."{{sfn|Phillips|2006|p=5}}

According to Silver, "Lean's signature characters are ordinary dreamers and epic visionaries, people who want to transform the world according to their expectations... The tragic flaw in Lean's characters is a self-centeredness which can lead to misimpression, which can prevent them from seeing what is so clear to everyone else."<ref>{{cite web |last1=Silver |first1=Alain |title=Lean, David |url=https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/great-directors/lean/ |website=Senses of Cinema |date=19 July 2002 |access-date=17 May 2023 |archive-date=22 April 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230422055620/https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/great-directors/lean/ |url-status=live }}</ref> In Sragow's view, Lean has "depicted the need for constricted modern men and women either to act out their dreams ''or'' preserve the life they have by making a scene or putting on a show―indulging in the histrionic to renew their sense of self and purpose."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Sragow |first1=Michael |title=David Lean's Right of 'Passage' |journal=Film Comment |date=1985 |volume=21 |issue=1 |pages=20–27 |jstor=43453017 |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/43453017 |access-date=19 July 2023}}</ref>

Michael Newton of ''[[The Guardian]]'', analysing ''Brief Encounter'' and ''Doctor Zhivago'', says:

{{cquote|Today, 50 years on, we can see how the scale of Zhivago forms the measure of its appeal, and its gorgeousness seems intrinsic to one of cinema's virtues. With [[Charlie Chaplin]], Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, Lean is one of the greatest film directors this country has produced. Like all of them, he is a romantic, and romanticism was his subject matter: the flourishing and the breaking of inordinate desires, the dangerous lure of beauty, of adventure and the untrammelled life. Both films demonstrate the impossibility of an illicit love finding a place in the world. In ''Brief Encounter'', social convention and decency prevent it; romance flourishes only to be worn out by the talk of casual acquaintances. In ''Doctor Zhivago'', it is history and the political realm that prove to be love's enemy.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Newton |first1=Michael |title=Loved but not lost: David Lean's Brief Encounter and Doctor Zhivago |url=https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/13/in-praise-of-brief-encounter-doctor-zhivago |access-date=12 April 2019 |work=The Guardian |archive-date=12 April 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190412231127/https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/13/in-praise-of-brief-encounter-doctor-zhivago |url-status=live }}</ref>}}

Hudson considers the director an important chronicler of the British character in the 20th century:

{{cquote|Born in the Edwardian era, Lean experienced first-hand the decline of the British Empire. He lived through two world wars and matured as an artist during the 50s, when Britain was being forced to re-examine her new role. His natural taste was for a mixture of the nineteenth-century novel and landscape painting of the same period – something he never tried, nor wanted, to change. But having grown up during the demise of British influence in the world, he also had an acutely critical view of British society.

So Lean's work contains an interesting paradox: the strong visual and literary legacy of British culture, which he loved and understood so well, combined with biting insights into the ludicrous aspects of a nation being forced to accept a less important role in the world. A perfect example of this ability to illustrate Britain's dilemma is the portrayal of the colonel in ''The Bridge on the River Kwai'' (1957). Here is a man using the military discipline that was the result of hundreds of years of British tradition to survive the hardships, torture and degradation of being a Japanese prisoner of war, yet whose addiction to that same discipline and tradition has turned him mad. The man is both a hero and a fool – a remarkable device to illustrate the state of Britain as she clung to meaningless tradition in a futile attempt to save her identity in the face of declining power.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Hudson |first1=Hugh |title=Dreaming in the light: Hugh Hudson on David Lean |url=https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/dreaming-light-hugh-hudson-david-lean |access-date=5 June 2022 |work=Sight & Sound |date=25 March 2022 |archive-date=5 June 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220605182714/https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/dreaming-light-hugh-hudson-david-lean |url-status=live }}</ref>}}

Several critics have found a close relationship between style and theme in Lean's work. John Orr, author of ''Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema'', examines Lean in terms of "the stylised oscillation of romance and restraint that shapes so much of his work", as well as of "the intersection of culture and nature, where a story's momentous events are not only framed against landscape settings but also integrated into the very texture of the image that his camera produces." He argues that "Lean could have given us kitsch, syrupy imitations of landscape photography, but his staging and cutting blend so fluently that his evocation of the romantic sublime is linked, inextricably, to his ''découpage'' and sense of place."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Orr |first1=John |title=Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema |date=2010 |publisher=Edinburgh University Press |location=United Kingdom |pages=64, 69}}</ref> In ''The Rough Guide to Film'', Tom Charity argues: "It's in the cutting that you feel both the romantic ardour and the repression that create the central tension in [Lean's] work."<ref>{{cite web |title=TSPDT – David Lean |url=http://www.theyshootpictures.com/leandavid.htm |website=They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? |access-date=21 October 2018 |archive-date=21 October 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181021232247/http://www.theyshootpictures.com/leandavid.htm |url-status=live }}</ref>