E-Mail This Article to a Friend Cuts above Anya at the MFA; The Cutting Edge on STARZ BY GERALD PEARY

To a Boston fertile with world-class personal-documentarians add Marian Marzynski, a Jewish-Polish émigré filmmaker who long resided in Chicago and now has moved his operations to Brookline. His 30-years-in-the making Anya in and out of Focus, which screens December 12, 15, 18, and 19 at the Museum of Fine Arts, is a tender, moody, frank, and totally engrossing celebration of his in-her-face relationship with his daughter, Anya.

The shooting starts with Anya’s pre-school childhood, where she’s as bossy and controlling as Peanuts’ Lucy, and proceeds, through her very bumpy adolescent years, to her still-shaky adulthood, where she tries on boyfriends and jobs and finally delves into a perhaps problematic interracial marriage. Three decades of Anya: charming, impetuous, swerving out of control, feuding often with her conventional architect mother and in and out of synch with her artsy, liberal-thinking dad, who loves his daughter with a consuming, crazy-for-you love.

Marzynski is as uninhibited and honest a presence before the camera as his daughter. There’s nothing to hide with these two, as, over the many years, they hug, they dance, they confide, they talk so intimately, and, of course, they quarrel. A typical altercation has Anya at 14 fleeing the camera in anger and embarrassment when her father asks her pointedly about her menstruation.

Anya in and out of Focus is not your typical static talking-head family portrait. Marzynski is a real old-fashioned filmmaker, and his work is a joy to watch for its intense cinematography and brilliantly conceived, leaping-through-time editing. Especially astonishing is the 16mm shooting of Anya’s childhood, when Marzynski gets down with the little kids. The MFA screenings are co-sponsored by the Boston Jewish Film Festival: Marzynski’s tragic childhood in a Poland under Hitler, including a miraculous escape from the Warsaw Ghetto, parallels that of fellow Jewish-Polish director Roman Polanski.

IT WAS MGM EXECUTIVE Irving Thalberg who in the 1930s came up with the title "editor" to describe that often-anonymous person who shaped a movie out of the footage handed over by the director. Before that, the editor was called a "cutter," and in silent-movie days, that "cutter" was more often than not a woman. That’s because editing seemed like crocheting or sewing, a lowly and unmanly sit-down craft. But with the advent of talking pictures, males marched in and claimed the profession, since sound editing involved knowledge of electricity and engineering. Guy stuff.

A few women survived in the editing room in the Hollywood 1930s. Only one had lots of power: Margaret Booth, a stormy and bullying presence at MGM. The editor-in-chief in charge of other studio editors, she oversaw all projects. When she looked at your edit and demanded a cut, you cut!

There are many lively, entertaining stories about the unsung editing profession in The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing, a feature documentary directed by Wendy Apple and co-produced by the BBC that encores this Sunday, December 12, at 8 p.m. on STARZ. Martin Scorsese talks passionately about the pioneer cross-cutting of Edwin S. Porter in the 1903 Life of an American Fireman. Steven Spielberg is unusually open and animated about his artistic disagreements with editor Verna Fields (affectionate nickname: "Mother Cutter") concerning the rhythm of Jaws. Spielberg concedes that Fields was right every time in arguing for fewer frames in the shots. Spielberg: "The shark would only look good at 36 frames, not 38 frames, the difference between something scary and a floating turd."

We know filmmakers like Scorsese, Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Paul Verhoeven, Quentin Tarantino. But The Cutting Edge also puts faces to articulate editors: Mark Goldblatt (Starship Troopers), Carol Littleton (E.T.), Dylan Tichenor (Boogie Nights, The Royal Tenenbaums), Dede Allen (Bonnie and Clyde). There’s a wee too much Walter Murch, who since The Godfather films has developed a formidable reputation as a quotable media philosopher. Here he’s a bit windy, especially when going on about his clever work on the mediocre Cold Mountain. It’s refreshing to switch over to Alexander Payne’s regular editor, the unheralded and unpretentious Kevin Tent. The editor of About Schmidt and Sideways sees his job as that of bolstering fatigued directors who after financing and shooting their films collapse in the editing suites, "shells of people they were."