It's been an experience seeing all the movies I watched first on TV uncut on streaming services. "Edited for content and length" understates the changes they make. It's not exactly the same, but it gives a sense of how much editing affects a movie.
Editing is everything. It literally is what turns footage into cinema. Otherwise you’re just watching a documentary of people playing dress up and pretend.
That’s why there was such an outcry recently when the Academy discussed movie the Oscar for Best Editing out of the main broadcast and into the second tier awards they do off the air. It makes sense when you come at it with the mindset that no one cares about editors. But much less so when you actually understand cinematography and movie making.
I've been thinking a lot about the distinction between facts and narrative. This puts a rainbow-coloured bow on it.
Facts are events. Narrative is the relationships between those events. Unconnected data vs. an interconnected graph, individual nodes vs. integrated network.
It's possible to take the same facts (or a small sample of them, as here) and create an entirely different story.
Or at least the appearance of one. A recut trailer might be sustained by recutting the film as a whole, or not. The Maverick-Iceman romance ... probably ... wouldn't be sustained without a fair bit of extra (or previously cut) footage, but there's definitely enough to cast a trailer-length spell.
Good narratives address more of the facts, concisely and with few contradictions, loose ends, or holes Something often missing even in officially released films.
but a quick perusal of de Motteville's bio suggests she had been exiled from court at Richelieu's behest, so she may not exactly be a disinterested observer, but was probably very aware of court politics in the years before her arrival.
For what it's worth, I haven't been able to find (Isaac de?) "Laffemas" via full-text search of any of the scans of her memoires I've turned up. (Two of them I searched for "innocent", a word seemingly rare in court memoirs, but no luck there either.) Gallica has a much longer scan (about 50% more pages) but it doesn't seem to have been OCR'ed, and I'm not going to manually check 630pp.
My dad on more than one occasion has ranted that whoever did the 'additional' cutting of Star Trek TOS for commercial time obviously was not paying attention to the actual plot of the episodes (because they would often cut out things that helped a lot in making sense of WTF was going on).
