On Saturday at the Biltmore Hotel, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association held its 48th annual awards banquet. (Our full list of winners is here.) I was honored to present our Best Film Editing prize to Blair McClendon for Aftersun, my pick for 2022's best film. Here's what I said from the stage:
Memories are a way we interpret the world, constantly sifting through faded mental snapshots of what once was in order to reconcile who we’ve become. But our brains are a flawed storage facility housing those stray images and foggy impressions that constitute our entire existence. Memory is all we have, and it’s rarely enough.Photo by Matt Harbicht. Still tickled that Claire Denis was able to attend so we could give her our Career Achievement prize in person. And pleased that Barry Jenkins made the time to be our special surprise guest in her honor.
Movies are memories, and few have been as piercing as writer-director Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun. And, tonight, we honor her frequent collaborator who helped shape this beautiful meditation, editor Blair McClendon. The movie is about a young girl, named Sophie, who’s on vacation with her father. But the film is constructed to be Sophie’s recollection years later as an adult. She is trying to solve the mystery of who her dad was, although Aftersun doesn’t contain typical, static flashbacks — rather, they seem to be floating, morphing inside Sophie’s head, a rough approximation of past events filtered through emotion and distance. McClendon’s technique may be hard to articulate, but it’s very easy to grasp — we are watching on screen what it means to try to remember.
We experience this vacation in fragments. Crucial scenes are intermixed with seemingly random interludes that are representative of the strange things our brain holds onto. Weaving together Sophie’s past and present, carefully molding sequences so that they feel ephemeral but also incredibly resonant, McClendon achieves with his dreamlike editing something I’ve never seen before: a movie that is, itself, as fragile and elliptical as a memory.
When our mind returns to Aftersun, this extraordinary film comes back to us in emotionally charged snippets — a shot of a brilliant blue sky, an image of a rug, the sad smile of a father doing his best. Every moment tells its own story — every moment becomes its own treasure. Memory is imperfect, but Aftersun is flawless.
Please join me in congratulating our Best Film Editing winner, Blair McClendon.
