"Why is editing so important?
In fact, we can make a big impact with a continuous shot (look at the beginning of “The Player” for instance). We turn on the camera and record something with a single shot, post it on YouTube and get millions of likes!
What's interesting is that none of this is new! This is exactly how movies started: with single-shot movies.
The idea of being able to edit films didn't occur to the Lumière brothers, or even to Edison. In a way, the early years of cinema are very similar to most of the things we see on YouTube today.
For cinema - from a purely practical perspective - the invention of editing means that we are no longer limited by what we can achieve with a single shot, but we now have the possibility of telling any story by aggregating shots into a set of combinations that are limitless.
But there is another aspect to editing that is strange and even miraculous. When two shots are juxtaposed, it is the viewer who makes the connection between them. The result of this connection can be a completely new idea that doesn't exist in either of the two shots when seen separately.
When you multiply that by tens, hundreds or thousands of cuts and juxtapositions, you get a fantastic interaction between what's happening on the screen and what's in the audience's mind."
MURCH, Walter, Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, 2008
- Teacher: Nelson Tondela