Abstract
This chapter proposes that editing documentary film involves expert cognitive actions of watching, sorting, remembering, selecting and composing structure and rhythm from a mass of unscripted material. It argues that, in this process, editors, directors and the raw, uncut filmed material are all contributors to the generation of ideas. Shaping raw material into a coherent documentary film is not accomplished solely in the brain; rather, it is the work of an “extended mind” (Clark and Chalmers, The Philosopher’s Annual, XXI, pp. 59–74, 1998; Clark, Supersizing the Mind, 2008) and requires the complementary activation of brain, body and the “film objects” (Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 1984) themselves.
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Notes
- 1.
Directors often propose quite open ideas about how the material’s structures and rhythms may be formed using outlines, paper edits or even drawings. Ideas for how things may come together also often originate, as will be discussed here, in the material itself. There are many analogies for the editor’s work in finding the best flow of shots for the particular film they are constructing, but perhaps the most apt in this context is that “editing documentary is akin to someone handing you a bag of sentences and asking you to write a book” (Swartz, cited in Bayne 2014).
- 2.
Acceptance of this premise amongst cognitive scholars varies, with one objection being that, as a thesis, it seems to be unbounded, potentially encompassing all action and interaction. This may be the case, but this chapter looks at documentary editing as an intricate and specific instance of interaction with machines, materials and collaborators that demonstrates the distributed cognition model’s utility as an explanatory framework for a process that is pervasive in contemporary life, but is otherwise untheorized.
- 3.
It should also be noted that in addition to the shots themselves, the use of actively external cuing systems such as file cards or screen shots pinned to a corkboard, are often important to documentary editing. These are ways of chunking down the salient content of shots or scenes into key words or phrases, and moving them around as chunks to determine an order that is then tested on the shots themselves. As documentary filmmaker Catalin Brylla noted, in private correspondence with the author in 2017, “I have used paper edits with post-it notes on a pin board to build narrative sequences, and in some cases of very plot-driven narratives, I deliberately adhered to the narrative flow of these paper edits, trying not to be ‘distracted’, by affective responses to individual shots.”
- 4.
In fiction filmmaking, the script is often referred to as a map or blueprint for production and editing. In documentary, detailed scripts are usually not written prior to filming, but even if they are, these scripts are generally abandoned as real life takes control of unfolding events.
- 5.
Sorting systems, and the software in which they reside in contemporary editing practice, have varying degrees of opacity for directors. For some, once the material has been digitized into the editing software, it is as though the editor has a tray of Scrabble letters that is hidden from the director. For other directors, the “letters” are visible but cannot be moved around on the tray—only the editor can move them. Thus, the process of shifting the knowledge from the director’s realm of expertise to the editor’s can vary from being a source of great relief to directors to a source of great frustration, depending on the dynamic between the two and the individual proclivities of each.
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Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the input and advice of John Sutton, Kathryn Millard, Alan Berliner and the editors of this volume in responding to drafts and ideas proposed in this chapter.
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Pearlman, K. (2018). Documentary Editing and Distributed Cognition. In: Brylla, C., Kramer, M. (eds) Cognitive Theory and Documentary Film. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90332-3_17
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