On the editorial intelligence of Thelma Schoonmaker and why she's one of cinema's most important artists.

Schoonmaker has edited every Scorsese film since Raging Bull. In an industry where editors are often undervalued, she has been consistently recognized — three Oscars, multiple nominations. But I want to make a specific case for what she does.

The editing of Raging Bull is doing something that no prior American editing had done: it's editing at the pace of a disturbed mind rather than the pace of narrative. The fight sequences don't cut at the pace of the action — they cut at the pace of Jake LaMotta's perception, which is irregular, fragmented, and sometimes too slow and sometimes too fast.

In Goodfellas, she and Scorsese created the most studied long sequence in American cinema — the Copacabana tracking shot, then the subsequent sequence of acceleration that turns the film's register from celebration to dread without a visible transition. The film speeds up. You feel it before you understand it.

In The Irishman, she does something her previous work had never done: she slows down. The patience of that film's final hour is a deliberate inversion of everything she and Scorsese built their collaboration on. It's an editor commenting on her own style.