Film and Video Editing Theory

4 David Bordwell, the Narrative Functions of Continuity Editing and Intensified Continuity

In Chapters 1–3, we looked at several schema for analyzing how editing works: Herbert Zettl’s notion of how screen vectors construct screen space, inductive versus deductive sequencing of images, Burch’s matrix describing 15 ways that a shot change can represent space and time changes, and the useful rules that Dmytryk and Murch offer about how eye movements and blinks can smooth the cutting across a shot. These are all basically “micro” conceptual approaches to understanding editing. They offer frameworks for understanding cutting at the level of the shot change.

David Bordwell takes a broader, “macro” approach that is useful for editors because it allows ...