Today we were tough about the importance of pacing in editing. Giving an edit pace can add a lot to the fell and the narrative of film. It can create tension in clips and tell the audience what is going to happen in the clip before it even happens. The thing about editing is that when it's done right, almost no one notices it, and when it's really noticeable, it's nearly unbearable or just disjointed. To understand if a film is good you should study each film like a piece of music.
It's nearly impossible not to notice a song that goes off rhythm or changes tempo too quickly because our ears are naturally inclined to react to those changes. But our eyes aren't as well trained to transmit that information. Given the onslaught of abrupt images, our eyes have been conditioned to believe a shot per second is a standard tempo. So I find more and more in film reviews, people will confuse a slower pace to a bad one. But it's not.
A perfect example of this would be Goodfellas. I'll always remember Martin Scorsese saying he had people requesting he make a film like the last 15 minutes of Goodfellas because of its frantic energy. But those 15 minutes were a tempo that was built up to by the preceding 120 minutes, which explored various other tempos.
On the other hand, a film like Barry Lyndon or 2001 is criticized for its excruciating pace. Yet, they both have a very deliberate and steady pace. No editor could criticize those films for being badly paced because they're not. They work in slower movements like perhaps Chopin's Adagio. One film explores a pace that would be customary in 19th century England and the other reflects a pace that might be found in the boundlessness of the galaxy.
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