Film and Video Editing Theory

1 Herbert Zettl, Approaches to Building Screen Space and Vectors

Approaches to Building Screen Space

Our first approach to understanding how editing creates meaning is to set aside the usual narrative functions of editing – the story the film is trying to tell, the notion of coverage, the need to shape dialogue scenes – and simply consider the film image as a two-dimensional screen space, a combination of interacting visual elements enclosed by a frame. With his background in gestalt psychology and art theory, Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007) laid the groundwork for this approach in the early period of classic film theory with his seminal text Film as art first published in 1933. There are few theorists more central to our understanding of how motion ...