Thursday afternoon saw two-time Oscar nominee Yorgos Mavropsaridis share his expertise in film editing with an informative masterclass, moderated by Mediterrane Film Festival’s Artistic Director, Teresa Cavina.
Deep-diving into Yorgos’ career as one of the great European editors and the trusted editor of all of Yorgos Lanthimos’ films, the session brought the audience behind the scenes and into the editing room on some of Mavropsaridis’s biggest hits, including Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015), The Killing of the Sacred Deer (2017), The Favourite (2018), Poor Things (2023) and the recently released Kinds of Kindness, also screening in competition at the Mediterrane Film Festival this year.
Throughout the session, the audience were shown clips of Mavropsaridis’s work with Lanthimos, beginning with an Ultrex commercial that, although very different in form from the feature films they went on to work on together, kickstarted a highly successful creative working relationship that went on to result in several award-winning films.
Mavropsaridis then broke down some of his key editing techniques and showed examples of these from his films, such as title placement, cutting back and forth between scenes, and creating sequences with jumbled timelines that leave the audiences to decode and create their own meanings. Often in his edits, Mavropsaridis represents cause and effect simultaneously, with the meaning coming together at the same time.
A signature technique discussed by Mavropsaridis was how he plays with the linearity of time, with flashbacks that tap into the human perception of time based on the past, present and future all at once. Discussing his workshopping process, he explained how he begins by directly following a script in the edit, then deconstructs it to see how altering the linear timelines could create different meanings, and force audiences to make connections between the moments themselves.
Mavropsaridis described how his editing style respects and trusts the viewer to make sense of what they are seeing on screen, using techniques from his theatrical background like epic theatre to both immerse the viewer and reward their own patterns of thinking. He asserted that “one of [his] biggest aims is to make us face who we are” in his editing, placing human experiences and behaviours at the centre of the meaning created.