We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
14
EDITING THE PICTURE
General
. . . if I am in the middle of a scene of action, I shall find my attention and with it my glance, attracted now in this direction and now in that. I may suddenly turn a street corner to find a small urchin, thinking himself unobserved, carefully aiming a fragment of rubble at a particularly tempting window. As he throws it, my eyes instinctively and instantly turn to the window to see if he hits it. Immediately after they turn back to the boy again to see what he does next. Perhaps he has just caught sight of me and grins derisively ; then, he looks past me, his expression changes, and he bolts off as fast as his short legs will carry him. / look behind me to discover that a policeman has just turned the corner . . .
The fundamental psychological justification of editing as a method of representing the physical world around us lies in the fact that it reproduces this mental process described above in which one visual image follows another as our attention is drawn to this point and to that in our surroundings. In so far as the film is photographic and reproduces movement, it can give us a life-like semblance of what we see. ; in so far as it employs editing, it can exactly reproduce the manner in which we normally see it.1
In this passage, Ernest Lindgren suggests a theoretical justification for editing. He shows that cutting a film is not only the most convenient but also the psychologically correct method of transferring attention from one image to another. The mind is, as it were, continually " cutting " from one picture to the next, and therefore accepts a filmic representation of reality through abrupt changes of view as a proper rendering of observed experience.
This theoretical argument must, however, be applied with caution. In the incident quoted, all the images seen by the observer are viewed from a roughly stationary position : the image is changed in each case by the observer altering the direction of his view without appreciably changing his position in the street. In assembling a film, an editor is often called upon to make cuts which are not strictly comparable to these conditions. He may have to cut from a shot of an object to a closer or more distant shot of the same object — i.e., to cut from a mid-shot to a close-up
1 The Art of the Film by Ernest Lindgren. Allen & Unwin, 1948 1 p. 54. My italics.
213