p.o.v. number 6 December 1998
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Institut for Informations- og Medievidenskab,
Aarhus Universitet
Niels Juelsgade 84
DK-8200 Aarhus N
750 eksemplarer
Trykkeriet i Hovedbygningen
(Annette Hoffbeck)
Aarhus Universitet
1396-1160
Richard Raskin
All articles and interviews © 1998 the authors
The publication of p.o.v. is made possible by a grant
from the Aarhus University Research Foundation.
All correspondence should be addressed to:
Richard Raskin
Institut for Informations- og Medievidenskab
Niels Juelsgade 84
8200 Aarhus N
e-mail: raskin@imv.aau.dk
fax: (45) 89 42 1952
telefon: (45) 89 42 1973
This, as well as all previous issues of p.o.v. can be found on the Internet at:
http://www.imv.aau.dk/publikationer/pov/POV.html
This journal is included in the Film Literature Index.
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
The principal purpose of p.o.v. is to provide a framework for collaborative publication
for those of us who study and teach film at the Department of Information and Media
Science at the University of Aarhus. We will also invite contributions from colleagues
at other departments and at other universities. Our emphasis is on collaborative pro-
jects, enabling us to combine our efforts, each bringing his or her own point of view to
bear on a given film or genre or theoretical problem. Consequently, the reader will find
in each issue of p.o.v. a variety of approaches to the film or question at hand
approaches which complete rather than compete with one another. A Danish Journal of Film Studies 3
p . o . v .
Number 6, December 1998
The Art of Film Editing
Mark Le Fanu. On editing.
Vinca Wiedemann. Film editing a hidden art?
Søren Kolstrup. The notion of editing.
Sidsel Mundal. Notes of an editing teacher.
Edvin Kau. Separation or combination of fragments? Reflections on
editing.
Lars Bo Kimersgaard. Editing in the depth of the surface. Some basic
principles of graphic editing.
Martin Weinreich. The urban inferno. On the æsthetics of Martin
Scorsese's Taxi Driver.
Scott MacKenzie. Closing arias: Operatic montage in the closing
sequences of the trilogies of Coppola and Leone.
Claus Christensen. A vast edifice of memories: the cyclical cinema of
Terence Davies.
Richard Raskin. Five explanations for the jump cuts in Godard's Breathless.
Alan Alda on Storytelling
An Alan Alda filmography.
Richard Raskin. An interview with Alan Alda
on storytelling in film.
The Fourth International Short Film Symposium.
On the next issue of p.o.v.
The contributors.
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4 p.o.v. number 6 December 1998 A Danish Journal of Film Studies 5
On Editing
Mark Le Fanu
Cinema has two beginnings: the first, when the photograph
originally budged, the limbs uncoiled, the human being walked, the
single spool of film flickered into life - on whatever occasion we
choose to date this (whether in 1893 or 1895).
Yet the second, in a way equally momentous, beginning of cinema
could be said to follow some time later - if we want to date it, let us
say in the years immediately prior to 1900 - when two strips of film
were first spliced together to form: what? Another mode of
narrative? Or maybe narrative itself - film narrative - for the first
time? Stories may indeed be told without editing - a little one-
minute gem like the Lumière Brothers' L'Arroseur Arrosé tells its
story perfectly - but in an important way the beginning of editing is
the beginning of cinema itself.
Still, we have to ask ourselves, what is so momentous about this
joining or splicing that impels us to pause on it and puzzle out its
meaning? After all, in the theatre we are used to the division of the
play into acts which operate through a principle of ellipsis. Thus, at
the end of a given scene, the lights go down, the set is invisibly
whisked away and, when the lights go up again, we are in a
different place (surely by magic), while time has moved on,
sometimes by decades (this too is magic).
But the splice, in cinema, has more dialectical properties. It serves
not merely as a pause or cæsura - something that separates or 6 p.o.v. number 6 December 1998
provides a brief breathing space - but on the contrary something
that joins: syntactic in the root sense of the word. And if we are
talking about magic, the magic of cinema is surely sensed to lie here:
in the strange alchemy arising out of the juxtaposition of images -
images that cut through, or rather dispense with, pages of theatrical
dialogue to achieve their effect instantaneously: a subliminal effect
in the best instances, too swift to be put into words, though when
we do take the trouble to find words for the experience we see
that what we are dealing with is the imagistic equivalent of a
metaphor. Such and such a thing, says the film, is like something
else - in ways that we might never have thought of; only once
there (placed there, by chance or by the genius of the editor)
understood as rich, suggestive, inevitable or (when it needs to be)
satirical.
The theorisation of these properties of filmic syntax is the legacy of
the Russians: Kuleshov for example (in the famous Kuleshov
effect)
1
and above all, of course, the great Eisenstein. These men
and their colleagues practised this sort of cinema (the cinema of
attractions, the cinema of shocks) and wrote about it extensive-
ly. Yet to mention such names at all, since they lived so long ago (in
the epoch, precisely, of the silent cinema) is to wonder if their
conclusions are still valid. Perhaps it was just because, for the first

1

Experiment arranged by the pioneer film-maker Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970)
whereby a closeup of the actor Mozhukhin was juxtaposed with three different
images - a bowl of soup, a dead woman in a coffin and a girl playing with a toy
bear. According to Pudovkin, who was present at the demonstration,
spectators imagined that the actor was registering hunger towards the soup,
sorrow towards the coffin and joy towards the girl. But the image was exactly
the same all three times. See Robert Sklar: Film: An International History of the
Medium (London, 1993), p. 151 A Danish Journal of Film Studies 7
30 years of its life, cinema had no spoken word that the
juxtaposition of images in the way we are describing was sensed to
be so fundamental. Our enquiry touches here upon something that
I will revert to below: the fear, that is, that the very special form of
editing patented by the Russians as montage is, or was, merely a
passing episode in the evolution of cinema, giving way in due
course to the coming of sound.
I am not sure how to answer this fully. An annual Oscar is offered
by Hollywood for Best Editing, and when one tries to pin down
the qualities of a really well-edited mainstream film - one of
Scorsese' s movies, for example, cut by Thelma Schoonmaker
(GoodFellas, maybe, or Casino) - one sees that the skill referred to is
not so much montage, in the Russian sense of the orchestration or
controlled dissonance of images, but rather the ability to handle pace
creatively; more simply put, to imbue the film in question with a fine
and vigorous rhythm.
Such skill where it exists doesn't rule out a more radical style of
ellipsis - something closer to the Russian model in density and
complexity of image placement. But it could be argued that the
home for editing in this richer sense - the sense referred to of
montage of attractions - is no longer (if it ever was) in main-
stream fiction. We may be more likely to find it in certain dense
personal meditations - half documentary, half film diary - of a few
privileged auteurs: Orson Welles for example (F for Fake surely one
of the most edited films of all time), or Godard, or Wim Wenders
(a diary film like Tokyo-ga rather than his regular feature films). And
we could add a few more names at this point: Johan van der 8 p.o.v. number 6 December 1998
Keuken from Holland, Chris Marker, Adam Curtis (from the BBC),
Frederick Wiseman, Dusan Makavejev (incomparable montage of
WR:Mysteries of the Organism), Agnès Varda, Alain Cavalier, Alain
Resnais...
A handful of examples, then, some of them very well-known,
others a little more obscure.
2
What binds such artists together is
that editing in their films seems to be used as an instrument of
thought, not merely as guarantee of rhythm. Maybe the distinction
sounds slippery - for all good art is thoughtful; and there is no
monopoly (how could there be?) on the artistic means used to
achieve depth and effectiveness. Yet it is one aspect of thought, at
least, to be alert; to cut through; to surprise; to forge connections;
just as it is the peculiar property of the work of the directors just
cited that we seem to see these connections being minted, as it
were, in front of our eyes.
An example would seem to be called for. But before I give one,
maybe it's apposite to recall that producing examples is not
always as easy as it looks. In film criticism, then, as opposed to the
literary variety, there is no such thing as a quote. The most the
critic can do is to précis: that is, to reproduce, or attempt to
reproduce in words the effect of the extract he is talking about. He
(I mean she of cours