Technique of Film Editing, Reissue of 2nd Edition, 2nd Edition

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“ T he skill of the artist . . . [i.e., the director] . . . lies in the treatment of the story, guidance of the actors in

speech and gesture, composition of the separate scenes within the picture-frame, movements of the cameras

and the suitability of the settings; in all of which he is assisted by dialogue writers, cameramen, art-directors,

make-up experts, sound-recordists and the actors themselves, while the fi nished scenes are assembled in their

right order by the editing department. ”

1

This is how Paul Rotha has summarised the nature of the creative

work which goes into the production of the normal story-fi lm. It is perhaps an over-simplifi cation: the “ treat-

ment of the story ” is a phrase which embraces many functions; and the continuity of shots which the director

has planned on the fl oor and which the editor interprets in the cutting room, may — and often does — entail a

more positive attitude to editing than Rotha implies. But on the whole the picture is fair.

The maker of documentaries is concerned with a different set of values. His attitude to fi lm-making “ pro-

ceeds from the belief that nothing photographed, or recorded on to celluloid, has meaning until it comes to

the cutting-bench; that the primary task of fi lm creation lies in the physical and mental stimuli which can be

produced by the factor of editing. The way in which the camera is used, its many movements and angles of

vision in relation to the objects being photographed, the speed with which it reproduces actions and the very

appearance of persons and things before it, are governed by the manner in which the editing is fulfi lled. ”

2

Here , then, one is dealing with an entirely different method of production, a method in which editing is the

fi lm. It is important to realise that this difference of approach is not simply due to the caprice of one school

of fi lm-makers as opposed to another, but arises out of a fundamental difference of aims. A story-fi lm — and

this will have to serve as a working distinction between documentary and story-fi lms — is concerned with the

development of a plot ; the documentary fi lm is concerned with the exposition of a theme . It is out of this fun-

damental difference of aims that the different production methods arise.

This distinction is necessarily rather vague. It is of course true that many fi lms, quite distinctly “ documentary ”

in fl avour, have used a plot, and that many commercial story-fi lms show a marked documentary infl uence.

The distinction is one of total emphasis rather than of subject-matter alone. Thus Nanook of the North can be

considered a documentary because its “ plot ” is merely a dramatised rendering of the fi lm’s theme, namely, the

life of an Eskimo. On the other hand, a fi lm like Scott of the Antarctic is a story-fi lm: it is the adventure story of

a set of characters with the setting in the Antarctic, not an essay in Antarctic exploration.

Chapter 7

Documentary Reportage

1

Documentary Film by Paul Rotha. Faber, 1936, p. 76 .

2

Ibid. , p. 77 .