The reservations of the editor: the routine work of showing and knowing the film in the edit suite

Abstract

The editing suite is one of the hidden spaces of film – a place where complex forms of embodied collaboration around screens take place. In this paper we present video-recorded data of an editor and director assembling a short documentary. From it we begin to describe editing work in terms of being aware of what media there are, assessing those materials and making them visible. We move on to consider the joint task of assessing clips once they are visible and making proposals about possible sequences. These actions are spatially arranged in a side-by-side format in front of multiple screens with asymmetric access to the controls. The editor's reservations are the areas of film-making for which they are accountable – their characteristic role of caution around the quality of media and intelligibility of a film for its audience. Much of the work on media and interaction assumes that the media are pre-formed and that these interactions are at a distance. Here we study the place where media are still in the process of being made, and while the work of editing is intimately dependent on video it is nevertheless accomplished in the local orders of the editing suite.

Keywords:

• video editing
• media
• space
• interaction
• visual
• assessments
• conversation analysis

Notes

1. There a number of professional editing situations where editing happens much faster. Most obviously live editing, but also a number of other television formats such as news packages, sports highlights, and so forth.

2. Although, of course, reading a text outside the editing setting gives birth to huge academic enterprises as well as other more practice-based studies (Gallacher 2010; Livingston 1995; McHoul 1982).

3. See for instance Stephen Mirrione's commentaries on the special editions of Go DVD (dir. Doug Liman, UCA, 2004) and Traffic DVD (dir. Steven Soderbergh, Criterion Edition, 2002). Also the late stages of editing of Cold Mountain (Koppelman 2005).

4. There are yet more solutions for documentary editing such as library footage, stock footage as well as sending the camera crew out to record the missing sections. These can leave a documentary's temporal factuality open to defeat under conditions of opposition when this asynchronous collection is discovered. The controversy over the editing of “Chavez – The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” provides a perspicuous case (Stoneman 2008).

5. It is hard to resist seeing a certain sound shape in these adjectives that can provide a resource in hearing an editor's negative assessment with economy.