Posted by nobody special on 01/11/57 11:56

Martin Heffels wrote:
> Really now. So what newspapers and book-publishers do is not, uhm editing?
>
> -m-
>

Interesting that you should ask that. It is a different sort of thing,
IMO. Newspapers primarily edit to correct factual errors of the
reporter's finished work, and to shorten or lengthen the article to fit
the demands of the page space. Newspaper editors also choose which
stories even get INTO the paper in the first place, so in that sense
their power would be more akin to the film equivalent of a producer,
IMO--

Film editors are more like co-reporters from a newspaper, sharing the
storytelling job. The film director and cameraman and actors create
elements of performance, based on the script. But the final form those
elements are given, and the way the selections shape the message and
how it is told... that's all the film editor's magic.

The way Europeans and Americans look at editing is interestingly
different. The following are generalizations but hold true generally.
In Europe, the editor is often called a "joiner", and editing the film
is called "joining" it. The film is "built-up" from bits joined or
spliced together. Like a sculptor that builds up a statue from little
lumps of clay until it is a whole statue.

American editors are called "cutters" and editing is called "cutting";
the main idea being to cut out all the meaningless or boring or
too-long bits from the pile of things the director shot and handed you.
Retaining the sculpting metaphor, the American style is to chip away at
a monolithic block until all that remains is the finished sulpture.

Of course, these are crude exaggerations; both types of editors do both
things, and the best ones first build-up like Europeans, then re-assess
the work and remove anything that is extraneous to the story, reducing
it back down to the purest, most effective message. There you have
perhaps the ultimate form of the concept of Montage: disparate elements
with one set of meanings, combined skillfully in certain orders with
certain timing, create an entirely distinct meaning, a "third meaning".
The project grows and shrinks in this way many times during the edit,
and non-linear technology has made a tremendous difference in how this
can be done effectively. What comes out is superior and "more than" to
what came in, even though it's usually shorter.

It is one of the things I enjoy best about this job.

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