The first assembly of Around the Bay was three hours and forty-five minutes. The first assembly of Canary, finished last weekend, was 93 minutes.

The 96-minute final cut of Around the Bay prompted critics to say, "bracing," "gets to the point," "a clarity to the proceedings which lodges the film in your brain." This quality resulted from reducing a film which was comfortable and emotionally rewarding at four hours to an hour and a half. At some point during the editing process I said I wanted it to hit like a hammer despite its fundamental identity as a small-scale slow-moving character piece. If Around the Bay did in fact hit like a hammer, this cut of Canary hits like a guillotine.

Around the Bay was in large part bucolic, so Canary’s cramped, urban, eight-million-stories aspect should definitely feel like an inversion, an up-ending, a description of alienation not from one's own family members but from society. It doesn't need a larger canvas, but a tighter one. If Around the Bay had a molecular density like water, then Canary has the molecular density of molten lead poured into the same glass--the number of characters, the brisk elaboration of each episode. Watching this 93-minute cut, I realized what it captured was the frenetic production itself, or my hysterical incoherent thought processes. It's like an X-ray of my head. (Not a good thing.)

Though Around the Bay allowed room for some fiddling and rearranging of scenes, it was definitely conceived with a three-act structure. Here we have something far less predetermined, something held together by rhythm rather than structure (I felt this way about a recent second viewing of Mr. Arkadin, too). There are threads which long to come together but don't; there are moments which feel conclusive, or have the timbre of a denouement, and so they meander into a climactic position as if volunteering for the job because no one else will--or can. I hope this quality isn't mistaken for "improvisational" in the Idiots or Timecode sense. I plotted each episode; I fabricated the characters and allowed very little wiggle room in the scenarios. What I did not do was contrive to apply narrative thrust or systematic ideology to what is essentially a kaleidoscope of moods, or meditations on a loosely defined theme.

Anyway, I've learned a lesson. A short first assembly is a bad idea. I kept threatening to have a two-and-a-half-hour rough cut, and I should have stuck to that. It's easier to whittle a thing than to reconstitute it.