The following is an EXCERPT (with slight revisions) from: Marc Furstenau, The Aesthetics of Digital Montage: Film Editing and Technological Change (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024).

If the effects of “digitization” in the cinema are often thought to be manifested most specifically, and most acutely, in the change to the technical apparatus for editing, this is largely because editing had for so long been thought of as perhaps the most consequential technique in the cinema. Despite its essentially invisible nature, its intangibility, allowing, as Valerie Orpen notes, for the kind of seamlessness that is characteristic of so much editing, the technique has long been thought to define the cinema as an art. Despite the considerable and well-attested difficulties of studying editing, there is a longstanding and widely held assumption that it is an especially significant technique, perhaps the most significant, the essential, determining technique that is the specific source of the cinema’s aesthetic identity. While Orpen, like others, acknowledges the challenge that editing presents as an object of analysis, she insists that, as a distinct technique, it is indeed the basis of film art, the source, she argues, of its very power of expression—indeed, the “art of the expressive.” The implication, of course, is that an understanding of the cinema will thus depend upon an understanding of editing, just as the defining technique. This is the basic premise of the first and perhaps the most famous, certainly the most influential, theories of editing, which emerged in the politically and aesthetically charged context of the early Soviet Union, as Orpen notes. The first Soviet filmmakers, she says, “such as Vsevolod Pudovkin, Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov, considered editing to be the creative force of film and the foundation of film art.”[1]

Editing is arguably unique to the cinema, perhaps even specific to it. Berys Gaut, for example, has made such a claim—but he importantly lists several other aspects or techniques that are also unique or specific to film art, none of them, though, presented as either foundational or essential. “Cinema,” says Gaut, “is the medium of the moving image; so moving images are unique to it; and certain of its devices are also distinctive, and indeed unique to it. Editing (in the sense of the editing together of motion shots) and camera movement occur only in the cinema, for instance.”[2] Gaut is certainly ready to admit that editing is a unique and especially powerful technique, but importantly insists that it is not an indispensable or essential aspect of film art. It is a particularly significant formal component of film as an art form, similar, though, and no more or less important than the arguably more basic fact of motion itself, and no more or less significant than an equally unique and alternative technique like camera movement.[3] Editing, as Gaut notes, offers filmmakers a broad range of formal and expressive possibilities, as a particular “mode” of presentation. The decision to edit a scene, that is, leads to further and more specific artistic choices, the results of which are, we may say, distinctively cinematic, as Gaut notes. “A scene can be edited,” he says, “in different ways—the editing mode of presentation of a scene can be varied—so that artistic properties can be achieved that are distinctive to the medium. For instance, by accelerating the editing rhythm one can generate increasing emotional tension and excitement.”[4] While “distinctive,” though, this does not mean that editing is necessary or essential, or that it should be understood as the singular or most suitable technique capable of creating such cinematic effects, given that other choices, with comparable effects, generating a range of other subsequent choices, are also available, with equally distinctive results, as Gaut observes. He notes that a scene can be constructed with editing, or, as he says, “a scene can be shot with different camera movements (or none), so varying the mode of presentation in a way distinctive to the medium. For instance, camera movements can be used to pick out one part of a scene as important; or movements can be created to suggest a personality or a presence; or the camera may be held stationary for long periods so as to suggest a sense of being entrapped.”[5]

The point, of course, is that a film is no more or less cinematic depending on which techniques are used, that it is still a work of film art even if it entirely eschews editing, using only camera movements; or even if it eschews both! The design, for example, of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1963), a single, unedited, eight-hour static shot of the Empire State Building at night, reveals how a film (which I will insist this is) may achieve a distinctively cinematic effect by merely keeping a camera stationary and by not cutting at all. Such total eschewal is rare, though. As Gaut says, without claiming any hierarchical relation between the two, without claiming one or the other to be foundational or essential, “in general visual styles in cinema are partly constituted by particular choices about editing and camera movement.”[6] One may, of course, as Gaut implies, and as Warhol did, choose neither to edit nor to move the camera. Such a choice, though, makes artistic sense, we could say, insofar as editing and camera movement are noticeable (and notable) by their absence, given their ubiquity in the history of film. Most films (the vast majority) use either editing or camera movement, and typically both in some combination, making Warhol’s example an obviously anomalous one (not surprising, given that it is Warhol). While literally exceptional, though, the film is no less cinematic for its choice to neither edit nor move the camera, for its explicit eschewal of the most distinctively or historically familiar cinematic techniques. As techniques distinctive of, or unique to, the cinema, specific to the medium, editing and camera movement nevertheless establish, as one artistic possibility among many, the choice not to use either of them.

This is particularly important to note given that one of the (perhaps ironic) consequences of the advent of digital editing is that one need not any longer edit at all. It has become possible (or, more precisely, much easier) to create ever longer shots or even whole films consisting of a single shot. Indeed, this has become so common, so familiar an aesthetic tendency, that is has been made the very subject of a recent film, Coupez! (2022), by the French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius. It is a self-conscious film about filmmaking, designed with the familiar structure of a film within a film, telling the story of the making of a low-budget zombie movie. It opens with a long, single shot, of about thirty-seven minutes, which is exceedingly poorly executed—but which is revealed to be the risky artistic choice of the fictional filmmaker. He is trying to outdo other filmmakers who have recently been constructing ever longer single shots, often with complex movements and elaborate mobile stagings—a formal cinematic gesture that has increasingly become a mark of a certain kind of artistic bravery (or bravado), a deliberate and conscious refusal to edit, even when editing has become arguably much easier and more efficient as a craft with new digital software and systems. The rise in the number of long takes—of long, single-shot, moving camera sequences—a tendency that Hazanavicius is satirizing in his film, is arguably one of the most obvious stylistic effects of the new digital technologies, which include both digital cameras that are not limited by the amount of film that fits in a magazine, and digital editing systems, which can be used either to process and potentially add other kinds of effects to the long takes, or to make several takes appear to be one long take, a single shot, by effectively obscuring the cuts, rendering them actually invisible. The fact of editing, and of editing in the digital age, is a central theme of Hazanavicius’ film. The title, Coupez!, may be literally translated as “cut!,” in the imperative form of the verb, and brings to mind the command made by the film director, to cease shooting at the completion of a scene, but also the acts that will follow, during post-production, when the film is edited, when it is cut.[7] There is also a comic suggestion in the title, though, which is that the fictional filmmaker, having fatefully decided to make the very long opening sequence of his zombie movie a single, uninterrupted shot, should, perhaps, and more wisely, have “cut!” Yet the choice of camera movement rather than editing—to only use camera movement and to entirely eschew editing—is a perfectly legitimate one. The question, ultimately, is only whether one has the artistic ability to follow through successfully with whatever choice one makes as a filmmaker. The importance, but not the indispensability, of cutting is emphasized, in this knowing comic film, as we are presented with the dire results of a choice to forego editing, a refusal to cut—which is presented, though, as a legitimate artistic choice, even if the success of the choice is not guaranteed, even if the results are so comically bad, given the difficulty, the challenge, that any artistic choice imposes.

Even if the choice of our fictional filmmaker had been, in the simple infinitive form, couper, “to cut,” if, that is, the choice had been to construct the opening sequence with editing rather than through camera movement, the artistic challenge would have been just as great, the risks just as considerable. In this sense, the title of the film is a kind of challenge, a dare—coupez!, “cut if you can!” It is certainly among the most fateful decisions made by a filmmaker, leading to the many further decisions. That is, having chosen to edit, to construct a sequence with editing, the questions are then when and how to cut, and even when not to cut. With the transition to digital editing, the technological context within which such artistic decisions are made now has indeed changed dramatically, with a consequent increase of the range of choices that follow from those initial decisions. The transition is almost complete. Hardly any filmmaker today actually “cuts” film. Editing no longer involves scissors and glue, blades and sticky tape. Directors no longer huddle with their editors over one of the original dedicated devices for editing, the Moviola or the Steenbeck, winding film on spools, peering through a viewfinder, holding the very material of the film itself in their hands, perhaps, and, in this respect, feeling the fatefulness of the decision to cut, or not, even more acutely. With the latest technological changes, the nature of film editing, as a craft, and as a technique, an artistic decision, has undeniably changed, and considerably so. Indeed, the very names of these earlier editing devices have a distinctly antiquated ring, bringing to mind, for those who remember, whirring gears, spinning reels, the “chunk” of the blade being brought down, the satisfying pressure of the splicing handle. Now, though, virtually all “film” editing is done on a computer, with all of the actions performed by pressing keys on a keyboard or clicking a mouse or trackpad. To cut, “couper,” is now entirely conceptual, no longer based in the actual physical act of cutting. Of course, it has always been conceptual. A kind of decoupling has taken place, though, so that the technique of editing, of cutting, has been separated, cut off, we could even say, from its original material source. Coupez!, the command, as Hazanavicius seems to understand, has a significantly different sense now for editors and filmmakers, with potential consequences for editing style, for editing as a technique, and for the cinema as an art.