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makes it appear as if we were discovering just another wonderful thing in the forest — much in the same way as we discovered an alligator or a bird, earlier on. Had the boy been introduced for the first time by a cut, his presence would have been felt as something extraneous to the forest, and would have broken the emotional pattern which has been built up so far. (This is not to imply that correct timing and smoothness are unimportant. They are necessary in the same way as it is necessary to a painter to be a good draughtsman. Timing and smoothness form an essential pre-requisite of a creative editing construction without in themselves being a primary aesthetic factor.)
Questions of timing and smoothness having been relegated to a position of relatively subsidiary importance, we are left with two main creative processes in the editing of imaginative passages of this kind.
Firstly, there is the task of selecting the material. From the practical side, this is a job requiring a lot of hard work and a good memory ; it is, moreover, the prime creative process and as such requires a high degree of experience, ability to assess the fine shades of meaning inherent in a shot, and the judgment of an artist. In general, all that is worth noting here is that the various shots selected which will convey a certain shade of feeling when edited, do not necessarily reflect that particular feeling individually. The whole complex atmosphere of the opening sequence of Louisiana Story is conveyed by such emotionally varied images as the still close-ups of flowers and birds, calm yet menacing shots of the alligator, and swift electrifying glimpses of a water snake. Individually, these shots convey at best only a minute fraction of the overall feeling ; in juxtaposition they convey the whole aweinspiring, magic-yet-real atmosphere of the forest.
Further than this, there is little that can profitably be said. Here, one is discussing factors which are so closely dependent on the individual aesthetic judgment of the artist as to make any hard-and-fast theoretical discussion useless and indeed meaningless.
The second task, which is of the profoundest importance once the preliminary selection has been made, is the organisation of the shots into a series of expressive shot juxtapositions. A bird, a glistening drop of water and a glimpse of sunlight can be used to convey a particular atmosphere, but in what order, and in what relationship to each other ? A series of images all reinforcing each others' mood (as in the first half dozen shots quoted) may be ideal in one place ; a sharply contrasting juxtaposition (as in
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