Roland Schlimme

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Roland Schlimme is a Canadian film editor known in particular for his work with filmmakers Peter Mettler and Jennifer Baichwal. He's also worked on several projects with artists Phillip Barker and Laura Taler as well as filmmakers Alison Murray and Cliff Caines.

He began his film editing career working with Peter Mettler in an abandoned hotel outside Zurich on the feature documentary Gambling, Gods and LSD, tackling hundreds of hours of film and video to produce a fifty-two-hour assembly edit and a three-hour film.^[1] Of this period, Mettler would later remark, “I’ve never lived together with anybody as intensively as Roland. … He edited the day shift and I’d edit the night shift and we’d converse and show each other things in-between.”^[2]

Speaking of his contributions to Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, director Jennifer Baichwal said, “The quarry scene was interesting because it was Roland’s idea, our editor, to use the opera [Mozart’s Don Giovanni]. At first, I thought, ‘it’s drawing too much attention to itself,’ but then I grew to love it because there is something so epic about that environment.”^[3] (The segment sets activity at the cavernous Carrara marble quarries in Italy to the second act of the opera, in which a statue takes its revenge on an unrepentant Don Giovanni.)

He works predominantly but not exclusively on documentary films and describes his approach to film editing with analogies to writing and music composition, stressing the importance of early-stage assemblies. In an interview published in 2012, he elaborated, “Assembly is a crucial stage because it's an exploration of the material, a time to experiment a bit, but importantly a way of evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the material, what it might offer the film. The discussion about structure is based on the assemblies. … I work on a lot of unscripted material. This is the model of filmmaking wherein the activity in the editing room becomes something like the writing process, except that it's a process of juggling images, sounds, motions, words, music, etc. … it's important with these types of films to have the time to make it work.”^[4]

His film credits also include writing and music composition (Trouble in the Peace, Watermark, Manufactured Landscapes, and others). In addition to music for films, Schlimme produces music as Rewaver (along with Joseph Doane).

Schlimme mentors and lectures occasionally (including masterclasses at the Documentary Media MFA program at Toronto Metropolitan University) and in 2012 he inaugurated the “Creative Editing and Sound” undergraduate course at Toronto Metropolitan University.^[5]