Mike Jones Digital Basin
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Editing Insight - I make therefore i think

Filmmakers can be a conservative bunch... It has often been said that cinema is the slowest and most lethargic of all arts to react and respond to change. Cinema progresses only into fields already well trodden by Literature, Music, Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Cinema may be the most profound, the most engaging, most influential medium the world has ever seen but its too often the least forward or open thinking.

Of it self this may or may not be a problem. What does however bother me some, a mind-set tied to the innate conservatism of cinema as a medium, is the all too often prevailing anti-intellectualism of cinema practitioners.  Academic scholars on one hand, Practitioners on the other with seemingly an unspoken veil between. Scholars aren't to engage with practice and production and, worse still, Practitioners are not to apply critical thinking and bigger a picture conceptualization to their practice.

Now of course I am being verbose (and possibly unfair to many academics and professionals alike) but the fact that everytime I stumble upon a credible professional practitioner who has taken the time to think and consider the ideas behind their practice, I am overtly surprised and pleased.

So it was when I stumbled across this little ditty entitled The Phenomenon of Editing byBill Russo who was Head of Editing at the Australian Film TV and Radio School. What Bill elegantly touches on is the connection of Editing and Montage not just to the process of making cinema, telling stories and creating cinematic engagement but the editing that we perform for ourselves in our everyday lives simply to make sense of the world. In making such a broad connection Bill hints at something intrinsically and innately Human in the cinema construct. Perhaps our engagement with moving image cut from one shot to  another is wired into our DNA?

Posted at 11:29AM Dec 14, 2009 by Mike Jones in video  |  Comments[1]