TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

But concretely, how did the trade press show its awareness of an increasingly conscious practice of editing in the burgeoning film industry? For it is worth noting that the term “editing” could back then sometimes refer to “scenario editing” – or “scenario revision,” an operation resulting in a more concise and, ideally, more compelling “working scenario” we would now call “continuity script”, “shooting script,” or, in French, “découpage.” This semantic blending possesses its own pertinence, because what happens at the level of scriptwriting seems to dictate the idea of what editing entails as much as what occurs in post-production. So, given the interrelationship of editing as it occurred on the page and editing as it was enacted on the screen, one of the tasks of trade press writers was to disentangle these two forms of editing to render each distinct.

Yet, as it evoked the now more familiar meaning of post-production montage, entailing to varying degrees “finding” the film through editorial processes of selection, experimentation and refinement, the term “editing” began pulling cinematic practice and its commentators in two directions. On the one hand, we find a prescriptive codification of formal patterns that are to be chosen, arranged and properly denoted in the edit of the script. On the other hand, the expanded territory of film editing involved a loosening of obligations both to the pre-existent scenario map and to inscription of suggested film cutting codes in favour of a renewed stage of the editing paradigm and the possibility of creative revision.