ABSTRACT
Editing is the essence of all storytelling. The ancient storyteller edited the story by selecting words, sentences, pauses, accents, images, and specific tricks of the trade, by deciding how to put them together to achieve the greatest impact. Writers and painters have been, in practice, doing the same thing— selecting elements and deciding on the ways they will be put together. However, in the twentieth century, with the emergence of a new form of artistic expression, with the birth of film, the assembling of basic storytelling items—individual shots in this case—became so important that it got a title and became one of the most important elements of the art of moviemaking. Editing—a “montage of attractions” as the famous Soviet film maker Sergei M. Eisenstein used to call it—was born practically at the same time as film. From day one it was necessary to arrange the assembled shots in a logical order and develop a coherent narrative structure out of that crude material. It took 15 years of research and experimentation to transform such a simple assembling of shots into a specific form of artistic expression. When television appeared in the mid-1930s, editing was already a highly developed form of expression, which the new medium, based also on moving images, had to adopt.
