Digital Editing: Beyond the Edit - Text 6
Furthermore, non-linear storytelling has always been possible with linear editing technology, so there is no obvious or necessary correlation between specific editing and filmmaking technology and the kind of stories that can be told on film. Perhaps given that both linear and non-linear narrative have long existed, the sheer fact of non-linear modes of editing may mean that filmmakers and editors begin taking more creative risks, and experiment with narrative forms.
This, though, is not guaranteed strictly by technical development, as non-linearity is both “a technological fact,” manifested in new digital editing systems, and “a philosophical and aesthetic attitude,”[10] alive or not as a possibility in the minds of filmmakers and audiences – a possibility which Dancyger urges filmmakers to take advantage and explore: “Linearity served its purpose. It will not disappear, but nonlinearity will now assert itself more aggressively. The digital age demands more narrative styles for the new but fragmented audience of the age.[11]“
Yet there is a tempered quality to his and other accounts of the effects of digital editing technology, which are usually quite careful to distinguish between technological change and formal and aesthetic choices. Most are willing to imagine the possibilities revealed by technological developments, but insist that those that emerge will do so as a result of the creative efforts of filmmakers themselves – who will not be made more or less creative by a particular technology, or see creative possibilities opened up or foreclosed by it. On the whole, most seem to welcome the change, and are eager to see what might be done with it, without assuming that the technological change itself will have any direct or immediate effect on film style, or on the nature of the cinema as a creative endeavor.
