The Technique of Film and Video Editing, 5th Edition

 

 

CHAPTER 20

Editing for Aesthetics

 

 

There is editing for a purpose—narrative clarity, dramatic emphasis, a cut that reveals alternate meaning, subtext—and then there is editing simply for the pleasure of the shot, scene, or sequence.

That is not to say that an edit does not often serve both purpose and pleasure. I’m thinking of the transition from Cairo, Lawrence putting out a match, to Lawrence and his guide against the rising sun. The geographical change, the power of the desert, and a brilliant match cut all emanate from this edit in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. So does the match cut from a bone being tossed into the air by a man-ape to a spaceship traversing space in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 : A Space Odyssey. Here, centuries of time ...