The Principles of editing

There are many different reasons for the choices of editing and why different directors use different techniques of editing in their work. Editing has been a tool that directors have used for around 100 years to make films have a certain feel or even to create a new meaning. These skills have been used over and over again in the film industry and have progressively changed as the years have progressed and different directors use different and new techniques to help their movie they have created meet their expectations. some may require braking the norm and coming up with new ideas which help portray what they are trying to get across.

A Russian director called Vsevolod Pudovkin who started making films in 1920. A few years later wrote a book called Film Technique and Film Acting: 

Pudovkin’s 5 principles of editing

Pudovkin’s techniques describe several ways editing can be used to enhance the viewer’s understanding of a story, and they’re all designed to create a specific reaction from the audience, something he calls relational editing.

01. Contrast: cutting between two different scenarios to highlight the contrast between them. As an example, Pudovkin suggests moving from scenes of poverty to someone really rich to make the difference more apparent.

.02 Parallelism: here you can connect two seemingly unrelated scenes by cutting between them and focusing on parallel features. For example if you were shooting a documentary about fish stocks in the Atlantic, you could cut from a trawler being tossed about in the ocean to a family chomping down on some  fish’n'chips – in both scenes drawing our attention to the fish: the object that connects them. It creates an association in the viewers’ mind.

.03 Symbolism: Again, more inter cutting, you move from your main scene to something which creates a symbolic connection for the audience. Pudovkin (living in Soviet Russia) suggested cutting between shots of striking workers being shot by Tsarist police and scenes of cows being slaughtered: in the audience’s mind, they associate the slaughter of the cattle with the slaughter of the workers.

.04 Simultaneity: This is used lots in Hollywood today: cutting between two simultaneous events as a way of driving up the suspense. If you’re making a film about a politician on election night, you might cut between shots of the vote being counted to shots of your main subject preparing to hear the result. This extending of time builds anticipation.

.05 Leit motif: This ‘reiteration of theme’ involves repeating a shot or sequence at key moments as a sort of code. Think how Spielberg uses a ‘point of view’ shot in Jaws showing the shark looking up at swimmers. The first time he does it creates a visual code for “the shark’s about to attack”. Every time we see that underwater POV we know an attack is imminent. He has allowed us to participate in the decoding.

Pudovkin

Here is a useful link too read more about Pudovkins work: Pudovkins five priciples of editing