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

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T wo of the themes with which this book has been chiefl y concerned have been the pleasure we derive from

moving images, and the conscious control which we can exercise over their type, length and sequence. It will

seem perhaps something of an irony that the later section of this book has largely devoted itself to describ-

ing the circumstances in which, on the one hand, this control has been gradually relinquished, while, on the

other, the images themselves have frozen into immobility.

Since we have all along argued that idiosyncratic unconventionality has been the most striking mark of the

cinema’s style in the sixties, it may be unwise to make further generalisations. However. . ..

Cin é ma-v é rit é perhaps has shown us as much as it is capable of with the machinery available. It won’t cease

to be a useful device, but it may be that the cinema’s next metamorphosis will be the Cinema of Immobility,

a contradiction if ever there was one. Despite its greater age the still photograph exercises an increasing hold

over our imaginations. We don’t seem yet to have shaken ourselves free of the spell cast by its curious mute

eloquence. In an age preoccupied by problems of time/space, memory and identity and ambivalence of all

kinds and in a medium passing through a period of intense self-consciousness perhaps the still image offers a

new angle of approach or at least a temporary escape from the cataract of unclassifi able information released

by the moving image.

Once more it is hard to resist citing Marker as an example. His fi lm La Jet é e (1963) tells a space-age story of

time-sequences upset, memory and imagination mixed, a future foreseen, fought off but inescapable. It is a

story in which the philosophical themes of free-will and predestination are treated not as matters of specula-

tion, but as observable scientifi c facts. The whole fi lm is composed of stills.

The Lumi è re brothers were rightly fascinated to see factory workers walking, and trees waving in the wind.

If the cinema does move in this new direction the wheel will have come more than full circle. Whatever

happens, the editing process will continue to be not only the key to the work’s meaning, as it is intimately in

La Jet é e , but also, in the best fi lms, a refl ection of the major artistic and philosophical currents of the times.

Conclusion

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