When Editing Becomes Arty By Accident

Since I wasn’t able to watch it live when it aired on the ABC last night, I’ve just been watching a recording of “The Shadow in the North”—the second of the BBC adaptations of Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockheart Mysteries—when things suddenly went very strange.

(And, at this point, a warning: I can’t discuss the strange sense of dissonance that this created without referring explicitly to specific plot events. So, if you haven’t read the book or seen the adaptation and plan to do either of those things, don’t read any further.)

As far as we can tell, the video file was corrupted but the audio file was left intact, which threw me for a good two minutes. We have had this problem with recordings before, especially during the last World Cup, where I got one game with audio but no video and one with video but no audio—both of which were frustrating to watch.

Because the problem with this was that, at first, the conjunction of the two made sense.

I’d actually lost quite a bit of the programme, as far as I could tell. It’s difficult to judge, since the adaptation is not word-for-word, but the video broke off where Sally was comforting Isabel Sullivan about her betrayal of McKinnon and came back with the death of Chaka in the alleyway; in the book, nearly fifty pages of material comes between those two events.

I thought that was odd, to begin with; the death of Chaka in the book is devastating—brilliant but phenomenally difficult to read (I’ve always disliked reading about the deaths of companion animals, anyway, which is why I don’t own a copy of Black Beauty)—and I thought it strange that it would, to all intents and purposes, be skipped over in the adaptation.

But what really threw me was the fact that it just seemed to be an arty editing choice, for the first minute or two.

To begin with, we had Sally and Isabel talking in Sally’s office, immediately after Frederick had suggested that he and Sally should cease all communication. All very neat and straightforward.

Then, with what seemed to be a break in Isabel’s voice but was actually the break in the recording, we had Isabel fretting over her betrayal, asking Sally if she’d ever loved a man to such an extent—while Sally wept over Chaka’s body.

And it made sense, at first. Because Chaka was in many ways emblematic of Sally’s fierce independence, the independence that would keep her apart from Frederick rather than allowing her to see whether they could work as equal partners. In the book, moreover, Chaka was a physical barrier between the two of them, since he didn’t care overly much for Frederick.

So the weeping over Chaka with a voiceover about betrayal and love was a plausible scene, although I did feel a little cheated that the dog, so to speak, hadn’t had his day.

Then the audio shifted to Sally’s voice, wondering if it was worse to betray the man you loved out of pride rather than fear, while the video shifted to her weeping on Frederick’s shoulder for the loss of Chaka.

And it still made sense; the voiceover still worked plausibly with the images to show Sally’s burgeoning sense that independence didn’t have to mean solitude.

But when I watched for thirty seconds more, it became apparent that this wasn’t arty direction, but rather a big disjunction between audio and video.

Still, I’m going to keep the broken file, if I can.

There’s something to be said for the beauty of a technological malfunction that actually seduces you into thinking, however briefly, that it’s art.