Betty Steinberg is credited as the editor of The Killing. Her work can be studied through the alternation of timelines, the repetition of the same interval, and the way the cuts shape what the viewer knows.
The Editing Credit and the Limits of Attribution
The Killing’s credits identify Betty Steinberg as responsible for the editing. This places her work in the postproduction process, but it does not justify attributing every observed choice to her alone. Stanley Kubrick directed the film, worked on the screenplay, and took part in the overall decisions about narrative construction; moreover, film editing is a collaborative process involving revisions. When studying a specific cut, it is useful to distinguish what appears onscreen from what can be established about its authorship.
The film adapts Lionel White’s novel Clean Break and establishes a distinctive relationship between the order of events and the order in which they are presented. It does not move steadily forward. It returns to shared moments to show what another participant was doing while an already familiar action was unfolding. Editing turns this procedure into an experience: sequences that seem to repeat time do not necessarily repeat information. A new entrance, a gesture off to the side, or a previously unnoticed preparation changes how what has already been shown is understood.
The effect is not to confuse the viewer indefinitely. The film uses time cues and narration to orient the audience. Precisely because this verbal support is in place, the editing can shift the viewer’s attention from one character to another without devoting many shots to reconstructing the transitions. Art Gilmore’s voice guides some of that orientation, while the arrangement of the shots determines what feels simultaneous, premature, or delayed. Technical analysis should consider both devices without conflating their functions.
Two Ways of Experiencing the Same Span of Time
At the racetrack, the episodes involving Maurice’s fight, Nikki’s shooting, and Johnny’s entry into the offices are understood as coordinated actions. The viewer learns certain consequences first, then gets another piece of the mechanism. Repeating the interval gives the horse races, hallways, and work areas a double temporality: they are settings that move forward in each sequence and reference earlier moments in the story.
How long an action seems to last depends on the shots around it. A brief preparation can take on weight once its consequence is known, while a dangerous maneuver unfolds so quickly that there is no time to stop and assess its risks. The editing alternates between moments of functional observation and sudden accelerations, especially when the operation stops being a sequence of controlled tasks. The sense of tension comes from these variations, not from a consistently high cutting rate.
Repeating an event across different narrative time frames also requires distinguishing between two kinds of duration. The first is the time that passes between one action and another within the story. The second is the time the film spends showing them. A brief interval can fill several scenes if each one offers a new perspective; a long journey can disappear in a cut. The editing uses this difference to keep the operation from seeming like a mere list of instructions. Attention shifts to each participant’s effort and to what they do not know while carrying out their task. The viewer does not need to verify the exact timing of every event to appreciate the result. It is enough to notice that the images create relationships of simultaneity that do not always come from showing two actions in parallel. A succession of fragments can reconstruct the same moment with a precision that a linear presentation would not provide.
A second useful comparison is between the assembly of the heist and the gang’s final meeting. During the heist, the editing organizes separate tasks that seem to coincide; in the apartment, it suddenly brings together characters with incompatible interests. Narrative time becomes less dependent on explanation and hurtles toward simultaneous violence. The Meeting episode offers a way to examine this dramatic difference, while this article focuses on the experience of duration, continuity, and rupture.
Cuts That Reveal—and Withhold—Information
A cut can provide new information without showing more details of an action already seen. Ellipsis skips movement between locations and requires the viewer to piece the connections together. At other moments, the film holds on a reaction long enough for the viewer to perceive the gap between a character who is still waiting and another who already knows about the disaster. The editing conveys more than facts about the plan: it shapes the viewer’s emotional relationship with the participants.
Continuity within an interior and breaks between spaces serve different purposes. A camera move through rooms can maintain a visible relationship between people; a cut to another setting breaks that proximity and selects a line of action. That is why it is useful to compare the editing with the camera movements between rooms. They are complementary techniques, but not interchangeable. The precision of the whole comes from deciding when to show the spatial connection and when to leave it to the imagination.
Attributing the fragmented structure solely to one person’s talent would simplify the history of filmmaking. What can be documented is Steinberg’s credit and the visible result: a film that repeats intervals with different information and turns the order of the narrative into a source of tension. Studying these effects allows us to recognize the importance of editing without inventing cutting-room conversations, specific decisions, or instructions that have not been documented.