The technique of film editing (1958)

INTRODUCTION Great Britain has no educational centre where would-be craftsmen can study the technique of the film. Neither is it within the scope or the resources of the British Film Academy to fulfil this need. The excellent book and film libraries attached to the British Film Institute provide the only reasonable stop-gap for those who are capable of guiding their own education. We, members of the B.F.A. Council, have examined the literature of the cinema, haphazard as it is, with the idea of helping to fill the gaps among those subjects which the existing text-books fail to cover. We have found that some crafts like sound recording, set design (or art direction), script writing, even film direction, have in fact been discussed in an articulate manner, but that the pivotal contribution of the film editor has never been analysed objectively. Film editing has only been dealt with in the personal theories of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and others, and only in relation to the styles of cinema of which they have had experience. To fill the gap, we approached those among our members who are practised in film editing and found nine volunteers willing to pool their joint experience of a wide range of film styles in shaping an objective introduction to their craft. To compile the book we chose, not a film editor who might be biased towards the style of film in which he is expert, but a layman with a scientific background and an analytical skill in sifting a maze of material, most of which has never been stated articulately before. Karel Reisz, over months of gruelling experiment, has patiently sifted the relevant technique from the personal reminiscence and has projected miles of film in search of the apt sequence, analysing on a hand projector the chosen sequences, noting every detail and measuring every foot. This collaboration of enthusiasts has resulted in a work which falls into three sections.