ABSTRACT

Given that cinema is a movement-based art form, this article proposes that a director’s work is more analogous to that of a choreographer than that of an author. From there, it considers others involved in choreographing a film’s movement and focusses on the film editor. The case study for revealing how directing and editing shape cinematic movement is The Cool World (1963), a radical and insufficiently recognised film directed and edited by Shirley Clarke. My analysis looks closely at a specific passage in the film to identify how its movement-phrases, as shaped in editing, convey or create experiences of community, space, and subtext – experiences that cannot be created on paper or even in shots until the shots are edited. Through this case study of a director-editor, I demonstrate that editing is a process of authoring the movement-phrases that move the spectator. Having considered editing as an intrinsic part of Clarke’s directorial agency, I conclude with brief consideration of the question: if we understand a film to be at least in part ‘authored’ in editing when the director and editor are one person, what happens when they are not?

摘要

鉴于电影是一种基于运动的艺术形式，本文提出导演的作品更类似于编舞而不是作者的作品。从那里，它考虑其他参与编排电影动作的人，并专注于电影剪辑师。揭示导演和编辑如何塑造电影运动的案例研究是The Cool World（1963 年），一部由雪莉·克拉克 (Shirley Clarke) 导演和剪辑的激进且未被充分认可的电影。我的分析密切关注电影中的一个特定段落，以确定它的运动短语如何在编辑、传达或创造社区、空间和潜台词的体验中形成——这些体验在拍摄前无法在纸上甚至镜头中创造被编辑。通过这个导演兼剪辑师的案例研究，我证明剪辑是一个创作感动观众的动作短语的过程。考虑到剪辑是克拉克导演机构的一个内在部分，我最后简要考虑了这个问题：如果我们认为当导演和剪辑是一个人时，一部电影至少部分是“创作”的，那么当他们不是？