The technique of film editing (1958)

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The first and third are general ; the second is drawn from a series of particular statements, each under the control of the appropriate expert or experts. The whole may therefore be regarded as a symposium, bound together by a prologue and an epilogue. Now a word about our use of the words film editing and editor. The responsibility for the editing of a film rests with a number of people — the writer, the director, the editor, the sound-editor and so on. No attempt has been made to differentiate between these functions. When the word editor is used, it is not necessarily to be taken as reference to the technician working in the cutting room. It simply refers to the person — whoever he may have been — who was responsible for the particular editing decision being discussed. The whole of this book is, in fact, not so much about the specific work of the editor as about the process of editing which is usually a far wider responsibility. I must emphasise that we have not tried to write a book of editing theory. With nine film-makers working by choice in different styles — some of whom did not in the first place recognise the value of a theoretical approach — this would surely have proved an impossible task. As I have indicated, we decided to make the best use of our panel by letting each expert supervise the chapter dealing with his own genre. The bulk of the book — contained in Section II — is therefore devoted to practical examples which are analysed by their directors or editors. The generalisations which can be drawn from these practical issues are gathered together and summarised in Section III. In dividing Section II into the chapters we chose, we were aware that the divisions must inevitably remain somewhat arbitrary. It is not possible to divide all the problems of film presentation into a series of self-contained compartments for specialists, and this has not been our aim. Our choice of chapter headings does not so much represent a division into self-contained genres as a grouping of related editing problems. For instance : a lucid exposition of the action being depicted on the screen is, of course, always desirable, but we have found it most convenient to consider this specific problem under the heading of Educational Films where lucid exposition is the first 8