Film and Video Editing Theory

Preface

Why did cinema become the twentieth century’s dominant art form? One reason is its unmatched ability to narrate using a system for representing space-time that mimics our experience, the ordinary, human experience of four-dimensional space-time as length, width, height and past-future. Stephen Heath has summarized this idea brilliantly.

From the very first, as though of right, human figures enter film, spilling out of the train, leaving the factory for the photographic congress, moving – this is the movies, these are moving pictures. The figures move in the frame, they come and go, and there is then need to change the frame, reframing with a camera movement or moving to another shot. The transitions thus effected pose acutely the problem ...