The Editing Room Floor

There's a lot more to editing your motion picture than just lining up your shots. Take a look at a little taste of Film Theory to see how deep the art of editing really goes.

Soviet Montage Theory

Montage Theory, in its rudimentary form, asserts that a series of connected images allows for complex ideas to be extracted from a sequence and, when strung together, constitute the entirety of a film’s ideological and intellectual power. In other words, the editing of shots rather than the content of the shot alone constitutes the force of a film. Many directors still believe that montage is what defines cinema against other specific media. Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin, for example, claimed that words were themeatically inadequate, despite silent cinema's use of intertitles to make narrative connections between shots.[2] Steve Odin traces montage back to Charles Dickens use of the concept to track parallel action across a narrative.[3]

 Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Esfir Shub and Vsevolod Pudovkin led the charge in ...

How Far We've Come

Non-Linear Editing with Adobe Premiere