Undergraduate Courses (list)

“Editing: History and Theory.” Editing—the juxtaposition of images and sounds—has been widely understood to be the compositional foundation for a film’s construction. It is the means by which a narrative is sequence and arranged as well as a method for generating a host of perceptual effects in the mind’s eye of the spectator. This course will examine the history, theory, and multiple styles of editing that have informed cinematic practice from the medium's dawn at the end of the 19th century through the present. Moments in the history of editing to be studied will be so-called primitive cinema, Classical Hollywood continuity editing, the Soviet avant-garde, European art cinema, political modernist film, documentary film, various avant-garde movements, and the development of postproduction workflows in contemporary digital cinema. Readings will be rich and varied. Drawing extensively on film theory by Sergei Eisenstein, André Bazin, Gilles Deleuze, Annette Michelson, and others, we will extend the significance of editing beyond the splicing together of shots in order to highlight its constructive, analytical, affective, and ideological dimensions.