Notes on Montage and Classic Continuity

Thrown together by David Tamés, last revised on December 12, 2025¹

What Is Editing?

Editing is the process of assembling sequences of shots to create a cohesive film or video. The editing process is unique to cinema. Other elements of cinematic language originated in a different medium (photography, lighting, art direction, writing, sound), however, editing, a.k.a., montage (meaning “assembly” in French), springs from cinema. The grammar of video borrows from traditional cinema and expands on it. The editor assembles the moving image work using shot selection, rhythm, pace, sequencing, and effects to craft a compelling experience. Editing may be accomplished in wide range of styles and while traditionally editing has been focused primarily in the temporal domain, it also involves the spatial domain using multiple images, composites, or superimposition.

Through the study and practice of editing, we strive to answer questions like: 

• How do we tell a story through images and sound?  
• How do we elicit emotional reactions and audience engagement? 
• How do we structure and evoking an emotional response? 
• How do we structure and communicate an intellectual response? 
• How do we (expand, compress, rearrange) time? 
• How do we create and/or violate continuity appropriately? 
• How do we layer ambient sounds, dialogue, and sound effects to enhance visual storytelling?

The editor works like a magician drawing attention away from one thing and towards another.  Doing a good job of drawing the viewer’s attention will hide many of the action mismatches that are inevitable in both narrative and documentary works. For example, when someone is talking, the viewers attention is focused on the speaking person’s face, and therefore the viewer will probably not notice other elements in the shot. Often we are using cutaways to draw the viewers attention away from what otherwise would be a bunch of  jump cuts. But it can be so much more than that: the process of structuring a sequence of shots helps you tell a story cinematically. Establishing shots provide context, medium shots and close-ups provide the dramatic energy in dramatic productions, the right close up can provide a sense of access and intimacy, while medium shots work well in lighter documentaries. The juxtaposition of shots creates new meanings, sequences evoke so much more than the sum of their shorts.

When we watch a video we usually experience a story. This is not always true, since video artists often defy convention to bring to the foreground the intrinsic qualities of the medium or use an alternative visual language to evoke an idea or state of mind. Irregardless of the structuring strategies at work, viewers don’t focus on the thousands of separate images that make up the video but instead try to find meaning, which in many cases is a story in some shape or form. We take for granted the constantly changing perspective of the camera that offers a multiplicity of perspectives that we would never be able to experience in real life. 

Video editing is more often than not an invisible art. Assuming classical cutting continuity is our ultimate goal (however, it need not be) the editor’s challenge is to make the editing invisible, and as such, we often only notice editing when it is, well, less than satisfactory. But how is this even possible? The whole thing is a bit mind-boggling, that these various shots could come together to form a sequence we read as a cohesive whole. Walter Murch writes, “The mysterious part of it is that the joining of those pieces… actually does seem to work, even though it represents a total and instantaneous displacement of one field of vision with another, a displacement that sometimes also entails a jump forward or backward in time as well as space.”²

It would seem as though nothing in our day-to-day life has prepared us for the rapid barrage of imagery that we experience watching contemporary videos. So why do we see multiple shots from multiple angles as seamless?

Historical Perspectives

Before attempting to understand what makes editing work, it’s valuable to look at the history of the technique to gain some perspective on how it has evolved to its current state. Walter Murch observes “Throughout the history of the motion picture industry the quality of its products has steadily improved”³ and with this the art of editing has improved as well. In fact, the earliest films weren’t edited at all.

When the Lumière brothers invented the Cinématographe in 1895, the camera was a one-stop-shop experience. It not only captured the footage, but it allowed you to process it as well as project it all from within the same device. So as you might imagine, early filmmakers had little interest in cutting up the expensive film that they had purchased for use with their new toy. Earnest Walter writes that instead, “the motion picture camera was loaded to capacity with film stock, and cranked away on the scene being played until the film in the camera ran out. At this point, the proceedings would be halted for the re-loading and then the film would continue as before.”⁴

Much of this arose from the traditions of which the movie industry was born. Because people equated this new medium and its storytelling abilities with the theatre, it was never questioned that scenes should be completed in one take (or performance, in theatre terms). If an actor messed up their motions the whole reel was scrapped as if a thespian has flubbed their lines and needed to start over from the beginning. This led to a lot of wasted time, not to mention wasted film. Ralph Rosenblum wrote “What the filmmaker saw is what the audience saw. It was a continuous unbroken piece of action, shot from a single camera angle, the perspective the all-encompassing, straight-on, eye-level view inherited from the theater.”⁵

The movies’ other parent, photography, wasn’t much help in progressing the medium toward editing either: the photographic tradition at that time called for stiff, rigid poses taken from a straight-on perspective due to the long exposure times required by early photography emulsions.

Much of editing evolved through trial and error. People eventually figured out they could make things more interesting by cutting up the film. Early movies lasted only a few minutes at most because this is all that would fit on a single film reel. At first, however, this was only employed as a way of combining separate scenes. Ralph Rosenblum explains “If a picture was composed of more than one scene (a rarity), no attempt was made to link the last action of one scene with the first action of the next. Each transition was a total break.”⁶

 This was a big step forward for the evolution of editing but it wasn’t until 1902 that Edwin S. Porter discovered that these scenes could be made to correlate to one another with The Life of an American Fireman video (YouTube). Porter realized that by placing scenes back to back they could be made to seem as though they were happening simultaneously. These were still whole scenes, though, that played from start to finish without a cut, and were then tied together by a larger narrative. 

In this short Porter also discovered that he could use footage recorded previously and in a different location as his main plot-line and that the audience would understand that it was meant to take place at the same time. This was pretty fundamental stuff: that associations could be made between otherwise unrelated material, and it paved the way for the revelations brought about by D. W. Griffith.

Griffith is considered today, and during his own day, a film virtuoso, albeit a controversial⁷ one; he made significant contributions to the development of continuity cutting techniques. Some historians credit him with the first effective continuity cut in For Love of Gold, when a scene cuts “in the middle of the action to a full shot of one of the characters. No scene had ever been divided into more than one shot, and this simple innovation would soon cause a minor revolution.”⁸

Griffith soon found that he could create whole scenes composed of a series of different angles rather than just static ones and began playing with greater variations in distance. Walter Murch explains, “Unlike the stage play with its constant flow of action and dialogue from the same viewing position, this deliberate breaking down of sequences into punctuated camera angles created a new dimension of pictorial interpretation.” ⁹ Griffith realized that emotions could be elicited not only through the use of camera angles and literal content, but also through the pace of editing. This served to make the cinema very real. This enabled Griffith to create a cinema world that reflected his own ideology.

Griffith’s work stood in sharp contrast to the work of Sergei Eisenstein, a Soviet director who was raised on Griffith’s films and learned much of his editing technique by watching faded prints of Griffith’s Intolerance hundreds of times. By watching the films he was able to grasp not only how Griffith used editing to create drama, but he began to separate the various techniques and formed theories revolving around  them. These various “montage” theories (the word literally means “editing”) covered the various ways to edit a scene, or rather concepts around which a scene should be edited. For example, metric montage is based entirely on a steady pace of cuts, entirely independent of the content within the frame. 

Eisenstein considered this the most elementary of the theories. This is compared with rhythmic montage, which has a focus on pace but considers the elements within the frame, and tonal montage, which is cutting based on the similarity of the light and dark elements within the frame. Good examples of all of these techniques are found in Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potemkin. The Odessa steps sequence (YouTube) in this film is a staple in film analysis courses and has been paid homage to in numerous moving image works. One homage is Zbig Rybczynski’s 1987 experimental video Steps, in which we are taken on a tour of the Odessa steps under the guidance of a tour guide, video (excerpts, YouTube). Another example is the stairway shootout scene (YouTube). in Brian De Palma’s 1987 film The Untouchables, which pays direct homage to the sequence, baby carriage and all.

The highest form of montage, according to Eisenstein, was Intellectual Montage. Eisenstein developed this concept based on the idea that two images, when presented in juxtaposition, created a third and entirely new idea. Ralph Rosenblum writes, “He illustrated his point with Oriental hieroglyphic writing, in which two symbols were joined to make an entirely new idea. Such was the case, for instance, when the symbols for eye and water were combined to yield ‘crying.’” ¹⁰

The foundation of Intellectual Montage comes from what film scholars and historians refer to as the “Kuleshov Effect,” named for Lev Kuleshov, who ran a school that Eisenstein attended. The mythology is that Kuleshov conducted a famous experiment in which he took footage of actor Ivan Mozhukin making a neutral face and cut it together with various other images. For example, the clip opened with the actor making a neutral face, cut to a baby crying, and then cut back to the actor. When audiences were asked about the actor’s performance, they raved that he had shown such subtle emotion—that you could see the feeling in his face. A separate audience was shown the same clip, only with the baby replaced by a bowl of soup, and the audience claimed that the actor was clearly hungry.¹¹

Karen Pearlman argues that the “Kuleshov Effect” should be renamed the “Editor’s Effect.” She observes that Lev Kuleshov did not invent it but merely observed and described a technique already widely used, especially by pioneering women editors like Esfir Shub. Her significant contributions to this fundamental editing concept was historically erased and overshadowed by crediting one man. Editors, particularly women in early cinema, were already using juxtaposition to create meaning before Kuleshov’s experiments. ¹² The point of the Editor’s Effect is that the juxtaposition of the two ideas could influence the meaning of both. Eisenstein took this idea and ran with it. He regarded montage as a dialectical means of creating meaning and the foundation of film art.

Stephen Prince and Wayne Hensley have questioned the Kuleshov effect and claim that “nothing of this kind has really been proven in the usual scientific sense. As Normal Hollyn (a well known editor) and others have noted, the experiment has ‘passed into the mythology of film.”¹³ They conclude, after reproducing the experiment the best they could and observing far less dramatic results, “with little written record about the Mozhukin experiment and with the actual footage lost, the experiment lingers in a realm of legend as well as history […] it is passed along as part of the folklore of the cinema. It appears in empirical garb, but like all myths its real functions are symbolic and cultural […] myth ought to be recognized as myth and not mis-identified as fact. Kuleshov’s effect-understood in terms of shot juxtapositions rather than associational cues may tell us little about film or visual communication, but its lingering power tells us a lot about the symbolic uses of the past.”¹⁴ Nonetheless, filmmakers continue to employ the effect to their ends, and calling it the Editor’s Effect makes more sense now that we have a more inclusive perspective on cinema history.

Eisenstein thought of the shot as a montage cell and montage as the collision of two pieces in conflict from which arises a totally new, third concept. A good example of this can be found in Eisenstein’s October, in which Eisenstein juxtaposes Christian symbols with pagan idols in order to criticize the church. Eisenstein suggested that montage was the “explosion” which drives the film forward. In his writings, he used language like “film must plough the psyche of the viewer” and believed that artists were “the engineers of the soul.” This idea of the combination of ideas is absolutely essential to editing as we know it today. Filmmakers are using more and more tight shots of objects and characters that require our minds to link together and create a meaning between the various shots.

Classic Continuity Editing

Jump forward about a hundred years to present day. Given all the history between the creation of film editing and the present day, editors have found a number of rules that allow them to maintain visual continuity and narrative clarity despite using an ever-increasing number of cuts. The ultimate goal of these rules is to make the actions in the scene remain clear and offer clues to the audience as to the spatial orientation of the scene. 

Ken Dancyger observes, “Narrative clarity is achieved when a film does not confuse viewers. It requires matching action from shot to shot and maintaining a clear sense of direction between shots. It means providing a visual explanation if a new idea or a cutaway is introduced. To provide narrative clarity, visual cues are necessary, and here the editor’s skill is the crucial factor.”¹⁵ When crafting a narrative video, we will typically, but not always, establish four Ws within each video sequence: Who are the characters? What is the situation? Where does it take place? Why is this relevant to the story? Interest in “what happens next?” keeps the audience interested. Each sequence of events should be followed by a moment of reflection before the next sequence begins to allow the audience to take it in and to think about their interpretation of the scene. 

Each edit is essentially a transition between two shots (typically a cut, sometimes a dissolve, fade, or some other effect). According to Roy Thompson, there are six elements¹⁶ of the edit:

• Motivation (there should be a reason, or motivation, for the edit, it may be either emotional, visual, aural, or any combination of the three),
• Information (each new shot provides the the viewer with new information),
• Composition (when there’s a choice, select the shots with the best composition),
• Sound (is more abstract that image, you need not hear what you see or see what you hear, it’s an additional layer, sound is tied to emotion, it creates atmosphere, mood, tension, etc.),
• Camera Angle (the camera should change angle from one shot to the next),
• Continuity (the movement or action should be both evident and similar between the two shots), the should be continuity of: Content, Movement, Position, and Sound.

An ideal cut should contain all six elements, but typically will not. Most cuts are seamless, when they are not, they are called jump cuts. Jump cuts can be very effective when used properly, but start with smooth cuts. Classical continuity editing achieves seamlessness primarily by following a number of “rules” described below. These are just the most basic and important ones for cutting within a scene. Many of these rules are not rules that must be followed by the editor so much as the production team, but that does not make them any less necessary to facilitate continuity editing. The continuity editing style  depends as much on “shooting for the edit” as much as it does on “editing by the rules.”

1. Maintaining Continuity Between Cuts

Finding continuity errors in mainstream movies is almost like a sport: there are entire websites dedicated to noticing if there are any changes across edits in films. On a motion picture the script supervisor ¹⁷ helps to maintain continuty. For every take objects remain in the same positions, actors deliver lines on the same beats, and even that an actor’s hair falls in the same place. Essentially the script supervisor is the editor’s representative on the set. This is crucial role because continuity editing is based on the idea that when we cut from one angle to another, the basic information between the two shots will remain constant and thus we will focus on what is happening rather than that the angle has changed. 

Because motion pictures are often shot with just one camera at a time (in order to provide the director with more possible camera angles while allowing the cinematographer to optimize the lighting for each setup) this further complicates the problem, as over the course of the several hours that it takes to shoot a single scene many things might normally change. Thus, keeping all factors constant is the first challenge of continuity editing. This includes light and color, as Ken Dancyger explains, “variations in light and color from shot to shot can break continuity. These elements are under the cameraperson’s control, but when variations do exist between shots, they can particularly problematic for the editor.”¹⁸

2. The 180º Rule and Line of Action

When the three-dimensional space of our existence is captured onto film or video it is flattened into two-dimensional space and part of the challenge of working in film is to establish this 3D space on a 2D plane. When a scene is shot, an inherent left-to-right relationship is built automatically from the objects within the frame and it is important, if the goal is to make the editing transparent, that this relationship be kept intact. In order to accomplish this Roger  Crittenden suggests that “convention dictates that all subsequent camera positions should be restricted to the 180 degree arc established by the first shot. Avoiding crossing the line seems to give inexperienced film-makers their biggest problems, and it is extremely frustrating in the cutting room to be presented with shots which, although valid in themselves, cannot be intercut with the rest of the shot for that sequence.”¹⁹

The camera can literally be placed anywhere on the side of the plane established by the master (or “first”) shot.²⁰ Camera height does not matter—it can be above or below the characters or even directly on top of them—so long as their left to right relationship remains constant within the frame. The figure above provides a visual explanation of this concept (a shot-reverse shot configuration between camera positions 2 and 3).

This rule  is important because we naturally expect the relationships of the things presented to us to remain constant. If the camera breaks the line of action (that is, the imaginary line that restricts the camera) and cuts to the other side of the line, it will appear as though the characters have switched places. In most situations this is considered bad form, although it is admissible if the cut is so blatant that we can understand that the position of the characters has remained constant. 

For example, if two characters were standing against a nondescript black background and then we cut to an angle on the opposite side of the line of action against a similar black background (e.g. camera position 4 in the diagram above), the audience would be confused. It would appear that the characters have swapped places. If, however, there are strong visual cues as to where the characters are, then a cut across the line of action becomes admissible. We are able to place the characters within the space and understands that they were not meant to change places. Even when visual cues are weak we are often able to understand a cut across the line of action, but these cuts are jarring enough that they can take us out of the “reality” of the film and remind us that we are, in fact, watching a movie. 

Sometimes breaking this rule is used to creative advantage, you can find examples of it in the television series Breaking Bad in which crossing the line is used to evoke the feeling and symbolize a change in the balance of power in a conversation.

Actors and moving cameras are not bound by these limitations: it is possible and quite acceptable to establish a new line at any time during a scene. This can be done simply by either using a camera move that crosses the line to establish a new one or by characters moving to create a new orientation.

3. Screen Direction

An extension of the 180º rule is the concept of screen direction. When a character is moving left to right in one shot, we expect them to continue to move left to right in the next shot because this is how we perceive day-to-day life. In fact, all action should be matched between shots in order to be more convincing and to provide the editor with the greatest flexibility in cutting. 

If a scene is shot with the 180º rule in mind and continuity is maintained then this should automatically happen when a character remains within the frame. But what happens when a character exits the frame? Because we understand that viewers expect screen direction to be maintained, if a character exits the right of the frame, we expect them to enter the left of the frame in the next shot. Roger Crittenden reminds us that “this remains the case whether they are going across the screen, towards camera or away. If we ignore this rule it will appear that the person has changed direction on the cut.”²¹  Just as with the 180º rule, though, this can be changed if a character changes direction while within the frame.

4. Cutting on Action

A huge rule in terms of cutting within a scene, cutting on the action allows editing to blend into the action occurring on the screen. Ken Dancyger writes, “Suppose that a character is crossing the room in one shot and is seated in the next. These two shots do not match because we haven’t seen the character sit down. If we saw her sit down in the first shot and then saw her seated in the second, the two shots would be continuous. The critical factor here is using shots that match the action from one shot to the next.”²² It is the actual action within the shot that not only connects the two cuts but also distracts our eye from the fact that we are cutting to another angle. Because the screen direction has been maintained, our eye is able to track the motion continuously so we don’t focus on the new surroundings but instead we follow the action. You can’t, however, just cut on any action: “It is critical that the movement in a shot be distinct enough or important enough so that the cut can be unobtrusive. If the move is too subtle or faint, the cut can backfire. A cut is a promise of more information or more dramatic insight to come. If the second shot is not important, viewers realize that the editor and director have misled them.”²³

5. 30º Rule

Not to be confused with the 180º rule, the 30º rule dictates that when cutting between shots (especially of a single subject), the difference in angle between the two shots should be equal or greater than 30 degrees in order for the cut to be effective. A cut that combines shots that are too similar will disrupt the sequence. 

Water Murch observes, “What we do seem to have difficulty accepting are the kind of displacements that are neither subtle nor total … [such as if] the new shot … is different enough to signal that something has changed, but not different enough to make us re-evaluate its context. The displacement of the image is neither motion nor the change of context, and the collision of these two ideas produces a mental jarring —a jump—that is comparatively disturbing.”²⁴ This problem can often be solved through the use of a cutaway to a reaction shot or a close-up of something else and then returning to the second shot. This, however, is not considered strict continuity editing.

6. Eye-Line Matching

Eye-line matching refers to editing shots that are aligned in manner to suggest that two characters  in separate shots are looking at each other, and also applies to a character looking at an off-screen object. This is accomplished by matching the gaze vector (trajectory of a character’s gaze). While not really a distinct rule (it’s a logical extension of maintaining continuity between shots, the 180˚ rule, and screen direction) but it’s so important we’ll consider it as a distinct rule. Juxtaposing a shot of a character with a shot of what they are looking at will not cut smoothly unless the angle at which they’re looking at the character or object matches the shot of the object or character itself. When a character looks off screen, the expectation of the audience is to see what the character is looking at. Eye-line match is important for shots within a scene in which characters are looking at each other.

The height/distance relationship between character and camera position/lens comes into play. The simplest case is shooting matching close-ups between two characters in a conversation. You match the shots by using the same lens and camera position relative to each of the actors, especially in terms of matching heights along their gaze vectors. So if one character is taller than the other, you would account for this in camera placement. Often the best match is not about exact geometry, but balancing between geometry and what the shots look like when cut together, which comes from experience and the specific needs of the story. Consider how the eye-line matching is handled in the “An Example of Classic Continuity Editing” section below and in the “Pass the Asparagus” scene in American Beauty,(Sam Mendes, 1999) video (excerpt, YouTube). This scene also provides an example of cutting on movement (note how the cut is made when the plate of asparagus is thrown against the wall).

Putting the Rules in Context

The rules of classic continuity editing are just a starting point, editing requires a willingness to experiment and explore the material. Emotion and story are your primary guides. What is a good edit or bad edit? This is highly subjective and contextual. Just as how poetry can break grammatical structure or even create new words, editing and media making is not a formulaic process by which you just check off a list and have a completed film. Far from it: there are always situations in filmmaking which require breaking from the rules in order to convey the story. In fact, the story is only one thing that is more important than the editing. Walter Murch offers a list of priorities to which an ideal cut should conform, “An ideal cut (for me) is one that satisfies all the following six criteria at once (emphasis added): 

• it is true to the emotion of the moment; 
• it advances the story;
• it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and ‘right’;
• it acknowledges what you might call ‘eye-trace’—the concern with the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame;
• it respects ‘planarity’—the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography to two (the question of stage-line, etc.); and
• it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where people are in the room and in relation to one another).” ²⁵

Murch places three-dimensional continuity at the bottom of his list. The demands of story, pace, and emotion are much more important than strict adherence to what literally happened on the set. In fact, this is one of the fundamental elements of editing: what shows up in the final product is hardly ever what “actually” happened, and the art of “cheating it” is one of the basic principles of motion image making.

So Then, Why Does Editing Work?

Over the last one hundred years moving image makers have been evolving advanced rules from trial and error, but why do these work? Why is it that we can understand the jumps in space created by editing two clips together? First and foremost, our cognitive processing is well-adapted to following motion despite interruptions in information. But what about information across a true edit, something that was recorded at a different time and maybe even in a different location? Why is it that we can piece together these disparate images? Walter Murch points out “Nothing in our day-to-day experience seems to prepare us for such a thing. Instead, from the moment we get up in the morning until we close our eyes at night, the visual reality we perceive is a continuous stream of linked images.” ²⁶

But this isn’t quite true. When we look around ourselves we do not make continuous motion with our eyes, but instead our eyes stick even if our head continues to move. Thus, the fact that movies are made up mostly of a series of static images that are related in context through light, color, and content makes sense to us. This is also why dolly and crane shots appear so “cinematic” to our eyes. It’s a perspective that we would never be able to reproduce with our human eyes because we are constantly focusing on objects and locking our viewpoint. It is only when we can fix our eyes steadily on a flattened screen that we can truly appreciate a smooth movement that is so foreign to our human experience.

Essentially editing is built around an understanding of human vision and perception and the notion that an experience should be broken down into multiple sections in order for us to better understand it. By maintaining elements constant on the shooting location, we imitate life as we experience it in real-time, such that there are no great changes from moment to moment. We also take in whole rooms and then begin to break them down piece by piece, just as in a change from a wide shot to a closer shot establishes the space and then moves in for detail. And by distracting the eye with movement by cutting on the action we are similarly mimicking the eye, in that the motion between two separate images (for the eye, the motion is subliminally recorded but mentally ignored between two saccades) helps us to combine the two of them. In essence, all of this is to say that editing works because it functions the same way that we do. So the next time that you’re watching a movie or video that tells some sort of story, try to see if you can spot all of the cuts and the rules being used in order to better understand why editing works.

An Example of Classic Continuity Editing

In “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” episode of Mad Men there’s an intimate conversation between Don Draper and Dr. Faye Miller in which they discus Draper’s divorce and his child starting therapy:

1. In this establishing shot the context of the scene is established. The 180˚ rule is maintained even though Don Draper crosses the line, which is OK, the problem is when the cut crosses the line, if the camera moves or the actor moves across the line, that’s OK.
2. In a medium shot the dialog between the two characters is established and begins to get more intimate.
3. The most intimate portion of the conversation is covered in tighter medium close-ups in which the other character dirties the frame to create a more intimate perspective. Note how the eye-line matching is handled in this and the reverse cut. The camera does not follow exactly the vector formed between the two character’s gaze vector, however, the camera tilts up in the next shot but is in a relatively lower position in this shot.
4. The scene continues with a shot-reverse shot structure. At all times the 180˚ rule and eye-line matches are maintained.

Recommended Resources

Videos

Why Does an Edit Feel Right? (According to Science) (Sven Pape, This Guy Edits, YouTube) presents three cognitive concepts beyond classic continuity.

Top 5 Most Common Problems with Student Films (Sven Pape, This Guy Edits, YouTube)

The Science Behind Film Editing (Sven Pape, This Guy Edits, YouTube) 

5 Things Film Editors Literally Do - According To Science (Sven Pape, This Guy Edits, YouTube) 

Books and Articles

Walter Murch. In The Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, revised edition, Silman-James Press, 2001.

Walter Murch. “Sound Design: The Dancing Shadow.” in Projections 4, edited by John Boorman et al., Faber and Faber, 1995.

Karen Pearlman. Cutting Rhythms: Intuitive Film Editing, 2nd ed., Focal Press, 2016, by far, the best book on editing available at the moment, takes a approach to explaining how editing works consistent with contemporary neuroscience.

Jennifer Van Sijll. Cinematic Storytelling: The 100 Most Powerful Film Conventions Every Filmmaker Must Know, Michael Wiese Productions, 2005. 

Herbert Zettl. “Chapter 15: Continuity Editing” in Sight, Sound, Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics, 5th ed., Wadsworth Publishing, 2007, this book provides encyclopedic coverage of mainstream television and cinema aesthetics, newer editions are very expensive, however, older used copies (5th edition or later) provide an affordable reference.

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Image Credits

Norman McLaren works on the editing of the film A Chairy Tale, National Film Board, Canada

The cinématographe Lumière in projection mode, Louis Poyet (engraver), Archives Château Lumière, public domain (left); The cinématographe Lumière, Louis Poyet (engraver), Chapman University Digital Commons, public domain (right).

180° rule diagram by the author.

The cinématographe Lumière in projection mode, Archives Château Lumière, 1985, public domain.

Frame still from The Life of an American Fireman, Edison Films, 1903, public domain.

Ivan Mosjoukine, three juxtapositions, public domain.

Sergei Eisenstein in the editing room, public domain.

Frame stills from Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin, 1925), Ronald Grant Archive, public domain.

Frame stills from “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” Mad Men, season 4, episode 5 (August 22, 2010), © AMC Network Entertainment LLC, used under fair use guidelines for educational purposes.

Footnotes

1. A portion of this document is a derived from “Why Editing Works” by Brian Retchless, used with permission of the author. ↩

2. Walter Murch. In The Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, Silman-James Press, 1995, p. 5. ↩

3. Ibid, p. 19. ↩

4. Ernest Walter. The Technique of the Film Cutting Room, Hastings House Publications, 1973, p. 20. ↩

5. Ralph Rosenblum and Robert Karen. When the Shooting Stops: A Film Editor’s Story, The Viking Press, 1979, p. 35. ↩

6. Ibid, p. 35. ↩

7. D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is widely covered in film textbooks and often discussed in film classes. Its racist legacy cannot be brushed under the rug. Griffith’s personal history, ideology, and perspective are too ingrained in the film to be considered separately. For a good introduction to the issues see Cara Robbins, ”Meet the Problematic Foundation of Film: D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” Vindicator, February 11, 2022, web and for in-depth scholarly coverage see see Paul McEwan, Cinema’s Original Sin: D.W. Griffith, American Racism, and the Rise of Film Culture, University of Texas Press, 2022. ↩

8. Rosenblum, p. 38. ↩

9. Murch, p. 20. ↩

10. Rosenblum, p. 48. ↩

11. Michael Russell traces connections between Soviet montage cinema, the politique des auteurs of the French Nouvelle Vague and Barthes’ essay on “The Death of the Author,” in his article “The Kuleshov Effect and the Death of the Auteur,” Forum, University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, Issue 1, Autumn 2005, web. ↩

12. See Karen Pearlman, “After the Facts – These Edits Are My Thoughts,” The Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), web. ↩

13. Stephen Prince and Wayne E. Hensley, “The Kuleshov Effect: Recreating the Classic Experiment,” Cinema Journal 31.2 (Winter), 1992, p. 59, web. ↩

14. Ibid, pp. 73-74. ↩

15. Ken Dancyger. The Technique of Film and Video Editing: Theory and Practice, Focal Press, Boston, 1997, p. 296. ↩

16. Roy Thompson, Grammar of the Edit, Focal Press, 1993. ↩

17. For an enjoyable description of the script supervisors’s job, see Benedict Paxton-Crick, “Continuity 101 or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Scripty,” http://www.thatcontinuityguy.com/continuity101/ ↩

18. Dancyger, p. 303. ↩

19. Roger Crittenden. Film and Video Editing, Blueprint, 1981, p. 41. ↩

20. The master need not be shot first during production. Sometimes it’s shot last in order to not waste the actor’s energy on a wide shot that the editor is going to cut out from right away, using the medium and close-up coverage for most of the scene. Many directors use the medium shot for warming up, the close-ups when the actors are at their peak, and then finish with the master. ↩

21. Crittenden, p. 43. ↩

22.  Dancyger, p. 296. ↩

23. Dancyger, p. 297. ↩

24. Murch, p. 6. ↩

25. Murch, p. 18. ↩

26. Murch, pp. 5-6. ↩