Perceiving an Emerging Practice in the United States - Text 3
Thus, in Moving Picture World, Motion Picture News and other trade journals like Motography and Pictures and the Picturegoer – as well as in manuals typically for aspiring scriptwriters like The Photodrama (H.A. Phillips 1914) and Technique of the Photoplay (E.W. Sargent 1916) – the prohibitions and advisories issued by critics alert to the use of editing paint a portrait of an industry learning how to reconcile itself to the new fact of editing’s ascendancy, and how to chart its own course in having a say about the ways editing should be used and understood.
But when trade press writers mentioned what we now call editing, what did they call it? As we might expect, they employed the terms “cutting,” “pruning,” “assembling” and, of course, “editing.” Further complicating editing’s conceptualization, all of these terms were derived from practices established in numerous other media and institutions: “pruning” relates to theatrical practice (specifically, as often used in Variety, to describe the excising of elements of the music hall act or program); “assembling” points to industrial production; and “editing” derives from print periodicals and journalism.
In fact, the confusion between scenario editing and editing in the realm of post-production derives from the idea that “editing” involved the shaping and reworking of material in a process akin to what journalistic editors executed. The migration of the term such that it covered the work of different kinds of “cutters” may have been abetted by the fact that the journalistic analogy applied readily to non-fiction filmmaking – like magazine-style short subjects and newsreels, for which fragmented film clips had to be transformed into coherent news stories and then groups of stories.