The Technique of Film and Video Editing, 5th Edition

 

 

CHAPTER 19

Editing for Subtextⁱ

 

 

Editing is all about telling the story with images and sounds, just as screenwriting is telling the story with words and directing is telling the story with performance and camera. Editing can have straightforward goals or less straightforward goals. Editing with a less straightforward goal or secondary goal is editing for subtext. To understand how such a goal is achieved, we need first to understand how more straightforward goals are achieved in editing.

The history of editing is the creation of a series of discoveries that first addressed technical problems—continuity through place and time shifts, how to achieve dramatic emphasis, how to introduce a new idea into a scene, how to create identification ...