Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar — The Technique of Film Editing
Reisz and Millar, 1953: an editor's book, still the sharpest thing in the library on why a cut is there at all.
- book
- reel
- editing
Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar, The Technique of Film Editing (2nd edn).
Good for
A practitioner's manual from 1953 that reads as if written yesterday. Its rule is the one this site's Editing note is built on: "Every cut — this much we can insist on — should make a point" (tfe 185), with the corollary that "unless it makes a point a cut is often found to be unsmooth" (tfe 189). That reframes invisibility as a consequence of necessity rather than of matching, which no later textbook puts as well.
Also the source for sound used "in opposition to the visuals" (tfe 226), for the timing of intertitles (tfe 202), and for a sceptical account of Eisenstein's intellectual montage in practice (tfe 23).
Reach for it whenever an editing question is really a "why" question.
In the library
Held in Reel, the local research library of scanned and indexed film books. 80 parts, 2,029 indexed passages. Page numbering is auto-checked.
Cite passages from this book as tfe <page> — for example tfe 214.
Strongest on
Measured, not guessed. Each figure is how much denser this book is on a concept than the library average — so common words don't crowd out real specialisms.
- Editing — 3.5× the library average (500 passages)
- Audio — 2.2× the library average (240 passages)
- Spoken language — 1.5× the library average (108 passages)