Editing

Editing is the selection of shots and the joining of them: cut, dissolve, fade, wipe, and the rhythm those joins build across a scene. It is the one technical code a well-made film hides from its audience. Nobody watching a conversation notices the forty cuts in it; the craft that hides them is Continuity. The interesting question is not what a cut is but why one is there at all. Three books answer that differently. The extreme case, where the join manufactures the meaning, is Montage.

Three answers to "why cut?"

Reisz and Millar, practitioners writing in 1953, give the working editor's rule. "Every cut — this much we can insist on — should make a point. There must be a reason for transferring the spectator's attention from one image to another." The corollary is the sharpest thing in the book: "unless it makes a point a cut is often found to be unsmooth". A cut is not invisible because it is well matched. It is invisible because it was needed.

Bordwell and Thompson decline to legislate. Editing is "the set of techniques that governs the relations among shots", and the relations come in four kinds: graphic, rhythmic, spatial, temporal. Asked why Hitchcock cuts the bird attack rather than panning to it, they say only that "it's a matter of timing and heightened impact". What a cut does depends on the film around it.

Giannetti is the least cautious. "Editing is an art as well as a craft", and classical cutting is "editing for dramatic intensity and emotional emphasis rather than for purely physical reasons". He borrows Truffaut's remark that films in which people lie need more shots than films in which people tell the truth, because the cut delivers what the characters will not.

Reisz tells you when a cut is wrong. Bordwell tells you what a cut changed. Giannetti tells you what a cut is for.

On the bench

Psycho — the shower scene satisfies all three. Each cut makes a point in Reisz's sense, since no single shot could show what the sequence implies; The shower scene is built from 78 setups records that none shows the knife enter flesh. In Bordwell's terms it is rhythmic and spatial editing at the limit; in Giannetti's it is narration by cut, the audience supplying the violence.

Alice — the prologue holds the most economical cut on the site: one splice, 27 years, and a whole aesthetic gone. You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople shows that the cut is audible before it is visible. The Craft — light as a feather is the gentler shower: cutting locked to the chant, no wide shot to prove the levitation, and the rise assembled from angles that each hold part of it.

What to look for

• Where does the cutting rate change, and what in the story changes with it?
• Pick one cut and ask Reisz's question: what point does it make that the previous shot could not?
• What does the sequence refuse to show in a single shot, and what does the audience supply instead?
• Does the transition comment (a dissolve, a smash cut, a sound carried over) or merely continue?

In the books

Every cut — this much we can insist on — should make a point. There must be a reason for transferring the spectator's attention from one image to another.

— Reisz & Millar, tfe 185

editing (1) In filmmaking, the task of selecting and joining camera takes. (2) In the finished film, the set of techniques that governs the relations among shots.

— Film Art, fa 496

Classical cutting involves editing for dramatic intensity and emotional emphasis rather than for purely physical reasons.

— Giannetti, um 141