The Technological Transformations of Editing - Text 1
One might argue that the transition to digital editing has meant that a once simple task, perhaps the simplest of all the tasks involved in filmmaking, just cutting and pasting, has become as complex as any other – or perhaps even more so. Before the advent of non-linear digital systems, editing was one of the most technologically straightforward aspects of filmmaking: its technical simplicity has long been emphasized as its most distinguishing feature, and the source of its formative power, allowing the editor to focus on the creative tasks rather than mastering complex technology.
British filmmaker and editor Karel Reisz, in his handbook The Technique of Film Editing, originally published in 1953, emphasized the basic nature of the task: “The mechanical operations performed in the cutting room are relatively simple. Unlike the cameraman and sound recordist, the editor does not require a great deal of specialised technical knowledge. [...] All his tools are simple and perform purely mechanical functions.”[1] The book is an extended essay on the formal and aesthetic complexities of film editing, with a brief appendix describing its technological simplicity in four pages. The procedure of editing is thus described as a primarily formal and aesthetic undertaking, and its technical aspects are offered practically as an afterthought.
Reisz’s handbook was re-printed many times, and was eventually updated and expanded to reflect the new editing and filmmaking styles that had emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, in light of some significant technological changes, manifested in new movements such as cinéma-vérité and the Nouvelle Vague, and in the “personal cinemas” of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni, all described in a new section by Gavin Millar, added to the 1975 edition.
The most significant technological change that is addressed was not to the apparatus of editing, but rather the advent of new widescreen processes, which were imposing new formal and aesthetic demands on the editor. As editors, Reisz and Millar acknowledge the new creative opportunities that the development of widescreen technologies could offer, even if it meant there might be less editing. They saw the new possibilities for creating some of the familiar effects of editing in the large-scale compositions of the widescreen – in what we may call an exhibitive style. They also insisted, though, that editing was not necessarily a competing value to widescreen composition, which was no better or worse as a technique than the creation of cinematic sequences with editing. The new, large, and more rectangular shape of the screen allowed for considerably more detail, and new compositional arrangements with more visual elements, “particularly suited to diagonal or horizontal compositions”,[2] as opposed to the more compact composition of the more or less square frame of the traditional film image, on the basis of which standard editing patterns were established.
