Abstract
Going back to history of film editing we can see quite a number of systematic attempts to classify the editing types. Bela Balazs, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Semen Timoshenko, Sergei Eisenstein, Raymond Spottiswoode were doing their the best at the time of 1920s-1930s to construct the classification of film editing types. Being at that time at the edge of the “film practice”, nowadays these attempts become aware of the lack of conjunction in “film practice” and “film science” that have been developed up to now. Moreover, the mentioned attempts were accented mainly on emotional component of audience perception. The real functionality of the cut, at this very moment, just at this very frame happened to be out of the look. In addition, all classifications were built on linear principle – i.e. the simple list of types. It is clear now that the simple listing cannot cover all the variety of existing editing types, and that it is not possible to mix the editing types and editing techniques in one simple listing.The scope of the article is within the multi-level hierarchical classification that is based on the motivation principle of the cut. That means the functional causes for film director or film editor to cut at a frame to achieve the desired impact on audiovisual perception. This makes it easy to construct the conjunction of editing types and editing techniques, the latter being the consequently subordinated to functions of editing.There are three main functions of editing in terms of primitive audiovisual perception of shot sequences that apply on content perception. These are:continuity (or continuity editing), meaning just to tell the story without the redundant details (i.e. shots);intellectual (or intellectual comparison of the shots), meaning the effect of any one shot differs sharply from that of its precursor and successor, resulting in an impact of the sensation and concept deriving from contiguous shots; and from this impact may arise a third concept different from that of either of the components which produced it;disjunctive (or provocative editing), meaning the effect of combining the shots together that are against the editing rules, with the deliberate aim to attract the audience attention, sometimes even to shock (the best samples could be found with the almost every music video, however, it happened to be the distinctive practice for many feature films, as well).
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