The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

126 p.o.v. number 13 March 2002
The editing phase
Basically, the editing principles of fiction and documentary are the
same. However, there are more possibilities when editing a documentary,
as you are not bound by causality in the same way and
thus do not need to tell your story in a certain way, which gives you
a high degree of freedom; you should therefore consider alternative
ways of piecing the material together. Try to maintain a certain
sensitivity towards the raw material in order to avoid forcing it in
the wrong direction because you are too focused on the story you
had planned to tell.
Rather than throwing the good story or the good feeling overboard,
it might be better to give up on style, aesthetics or beautiful pictures.
In his book In the Blink of an Eye. A Perspective on Film Editing (1995),
Walter Murch says (in relation to the fiction film) that in order for a
film to be fundamentally interesting, the main thing to strive for in
the editing room is the evoking of emotion. Then, secondarily,
comes the story. This principle of priority could be applied to the
documentary as well (although from time to time it can be necessary
to deviate from even the best of principles).
In the above-mentioned book Walter Murch gives a piece of advice
that is not only useful when editing a fiction film:
...one way of looking at the process of making a film is to think
of it as a search to identify what – for the particular film you
are working on – is a uniquely 'bad bit' (Murch, 1995, p. 11).