ABSTRACT
Editing is a significant component of a film's style, a term that broadly includes how the individual filmmaker chooses to represent his or her material. Style is defined as a recognizable group of conventions used by filmmakers to add visual appeal, meaning, or depth to their work. Though the Institutional Mode of Representation (IMR) includes techniques like acting methods that encourage the psychological identification with characters, our focus here is on editing. Central to the IMR is the development of a standardized "language" of editing in film, a system aimed at maintaining comprehensible time and space relationships using smooth cuts between shots of differing scope and placement. Noel Burch identified the main characteristics of the IMR and went on to demonstrate that this style of filmmaking grew from the bourgeois desire to create a mode of representation that would complete and make total the illusionistic practices that had come before it, like perspective painting.
