Introduction - Text 1
Editing is most often seen as an operation consisting in conceiving and making a succession of shots in a film. During cinema’s so-called silent period, this placing in succession was generally predetermined by the “continuity” (known as the “découpage” in French), a document which described with relative precision (the shot scale, shot duration, organisation of the field of view, etc.) each of the tableaux (or “shots”) and their chronological order.
The continuity pertains both to the shooting, which is supposed to conform to it, and to the later phases of a film’s manufacturing, especially the editing, which completes its material construction. Nevertheless, certain choices must be made after the shooting (which camera take should be retained? How long should each tableau be? Which tableaux should be placed in relation to one another?). These choices necessitate cutting and joining and then viewing the result obtained by this assembly in order to evaluate its quality. This makes editing an essentially technical operation. The two fundamental actions, cutting and joining, appeared in kinematography before the question of placing tableaux in succession was even posed, in order to repair a torn strip of film, for example.