Every movie you’ve ever seen in the modern era has had an editor attached to it. Often considered the ‘invisible art’ because of its ability to go unnoticed by the audience if done correctly, Editing can be a revision from others giving advice on how to make something better, or something as basic as tightening up a shot or cutting back on a long take in film. It plays a crucial role in the flow and pacing of a movie and is both a creative and technical aspect in the post-production work of making a movie.

Being a film editor means a lot more than just touching up certain scenes and removing frames and shots with errors or faults, it involves a lot of tampering with raw footage, as well as selecting and combining shots into a flowing sequence that produces a finalized complete motion picture. Online editor Joe Maurici describes that process of putting everything together. ‘’So, it’s all about a puzzle, you’ve got all the bits and you’ve just got to find the right sort of parts to make it work and please everyone at the same time’’. In the earliest stages of film, editing wasn’t a true requirement as merely showing moving pictures was enough to keep the audiences engaged. It wasn’t until the 1896 short, Come Along, Do! by British film pioneer Robert W. Paul where editing was properly used within a film. Others within the film industry at the time like Georges Méliès, Edwin S. Porter, and James Williamson further expanded the art and created famous techniques like cross-cutting and reverse angle. It was these films that demonstrated that movies didn’t need to show a human being from head to toe constantly, and that the film didn’t need to be filmed in chronological order; they could be shot in wildly different places and wildly different times and intervals, and still be stitched together to create a coherent narrative, therefore giving purpose to editing outside of a picture’s length. The responsibility of the film editor used to be more sectioned off before the introduction of digital editing, as pictures editors, sound/music editors and visual effects editors used to be separate roles for different people before digital became more streamlined. Despite how the role can be overlooked by casual film-goers, editing a film is one of the most important parts of the process, and an editor arguably works closest with the film’s director. Editing used to be an extremely difficult and time-consuming task. It was all done with a positive copy of the film negative called a film work-print and the job involved literally cutting and splicing together the pieces of film into the coherent finished product. Any mistake would halt production and cost more money. With the creation of the Moviola device (which was mostly used for editing TV) and the Flatbed editing machine (which was mostly used for BBC documentaries), the process was sped up and made to be more non-linear. Nowadays, editing is done digitally which negates the physical film work-print and allows the editor to experiment with the footage without the risk of damaging the original. In either physical or digital process, editing is a time-consuming task and can come with its own drawbacks. Editor Daniel de Filippo expressed what it’s like having the control over constantly combing over the various shots and deciding what gets to be kept in. ‘’ I think it’s getting like stuck in your own head or like seeing the same scenes over and over again. And he’s sort of like sitting there re-watching something and not being able to, it’s just like writers’ block. I think you kind of get a version of that in editing where you’re looking at the same thing. Like, how can I make this good?’’.

Despite how crucial the element is to film as a whole, Editing is an enigmatic task in the process that both should be and shouldn’t be noticed. An effective edit can work either by drawing attention to itself and showing that it was an effective cut (like a striking shift to a new location), or that it was effective because it was seamlessly handled without distracting people from what they’re watching (like when movies do a long take shot with invisible edits thrown in throughout). In one area where editing’s lack of strong presence led to something meaningful was in how many women it allowed into the creative industry. During the early stages of film, editing was considered more a technical job than a creative job as well as one that was considered incredibly tedious and didn’t require a large pay for its workers, and since women at the time weren’t usually able to become the more creative positions like director, cinematographers, or executives, editing became a position where women could assert their mark in the film-making process. Women have a strong impact in the editing business predominantly in the silent era with names like Viola Lawrence, Dorothy Arzner, and Elizaveta Svilova playing big parts in their respected movies of the time, some of the biggest films have been editing by women like Raging Bull (1980, Thelma Schoonmaker), Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Dede Allen), Lawrence of Arabia (1962, Anne V. Coates), Reservoir Dogs/ Inglourious Basterds (1992/2009, Sally Menke) and Jaws (1975, Verna Fields). Despite the change in Hollywood gendering many roles and removing a lot of women from said positions, editing was still a place where they could thrive, with names like Barbara McLean, Margaret Booth, Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte, Lyudmila Feiginova, Françoise Bonnot and Anne Bauchens (the first woman editor to win an Oscar) leaving their mark on some classic films. Certain editors are also known for their heavy collaboration with a director, as directors and editors typically work on editing the film together, which during the early years of Hollywood often meant that editors went un-credited due to the similarities in roles that they have with directors. This combination of work can be mitigated if the director did the editing themselves, something that auteur director, Akira Kurosawa, did with a lot of his biggest movies, but this system of collaboration is more common with large directors, like Francis Ford Coppola (Walter Murch), Brian de Palma (Anne Bauchens), Clint Eastwood (Joel Cox), Ron Howard (Daniel P. Hanley and Mike Hill), Martin Scorsese (Thelma Schoonmaker) and Steven Spielberg (Michael Kahn).

Much like how film has evolved and adopted different styles throughout the ages, editing, or at least the style and purpose of editing, has changed depending on which technique is utilised within the film-making process. Continuity film-making was part of the classical Hollywood style and was used by early European and American directors, specifically D.W. Griffith. It was a technique that relied on initially conceived continuity (what many would expect out of a traditional film) and non-traditional continuity (one that would be expected in an art-house or non-linear film) to create something unique. Early Russian filmmakers like Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein used a system that was unconcerned with classical Hollywood continuity known as Intellectual montage, a style that became commonplace in most documentaries. Alternate methods of editing were explored heavily by surrealist, Dada, French New Wave, and non-narrative filmmakers to create a process that kept the audience aware they were watching a film and didn’t hide the obvious jump-cuts and non-typical movie elements, with names like Luis Buñuel, Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte, Andy Warhol, Agnes Guillemot, and Cecile Decugis being responsible for this experimental shift. What all these options share is how the art of editing hasn’t necessarily changed, but rather the reaction the audience has to a picture can be influenced uniquely by the style of editing. Valerie Orpen observed how the editing of a certain movie for a certain genre (be it horror, comedy, etc) can express ideas and emotions beyond what appears on screen, where something like a series of ever-approaching point of view shots within a thriller or horror film can illicit tension or discomfort (Film Editing: The Art of the Expression, Valerie Orpen, 2003, pg.5). Editing also plays a factor in the creation of trailers, but not to the same level as what it is in film-making. The speed, energy, personality, and purpose of the product being teased needs to be delivered in a short format, and trailers for a movie, show, game, etc, need to capture the positives of what they’re trying to sell without giving anything away. The gaming industry relies on this especially, as they chop together sizzle reels, promos, and trailers for their recent games by compiling game-play footage, often done by working with other employees to capture the footage and help fit it to scripts and voice-overs. A trailer of any kind is edited differently from how a complete film, commercial or even music video would be delivered, as it features often times connecting footage that needs to act as its own narrative without the final results, and must get across a story, tone, and characters without spoiling anything.

Editing, much like other roles in the movie-making industry, evolved from a technical procedure to produce a flowing narrative, into a craft that requires its own form of creativity to make a movie and compile it into completion.