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Cutting Rhythms, 3rd Edition
book

Cutting Rhythms, 3rd Edition

by Karen Pearlman
June 2025
Intermediate to advanced
278 pages
6h 48m
English
Routledge
Content preview from Cutting Rhythms, 3rd Edition

Preface

THE BACKSTORY ON THIS BOOK

Rhythm in film editing is time, energy, and movement shaped by timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing for the purpose of shaping cycles of tension and release.

This book unpacks that dense, 26-word sentence to give filmmakers and students an entry point into what rhythm is made of, how it is shaped, and what it is for.

In this new edition I have put that sentence at the very front, because, although it is repeated, in bold, more than once on subsequent pages, I have found, over the 15 years elapsed since publication of the first edition, that it is the sentence most often missed.

Readers will often, in fact, quote the book as arguing that the design of rhythm is “intuitive.” Of course, editing is intuitive, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781040351369