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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Magic Lantern by Ingmar Bergman
That is to say, ninety-five “unseen” minutes for every minute that found its way into the finished product.
theaters, I sat down and figured out the total number of days that we (the editors) had worked, divided that number by the number of cuts that were in the finished product, and came up with the rate of cuts per editor per day—which
Since it takes under ten seconds to make one-anda-half splices,
is not so much a putting together as it is a discovery of a path,
The more film there is to work with, of course, the greater the number of pathways that can be considered,
something has changed, but not different enough to make us re-evaluate its context:
When Stanley Kubrick was directing The Shining, he wanted to shoot the film in continuity and to have all sets and actors available all the time. He took over almost the entire studio at Elstree (London), built all the sets simultaneously, and they sat there, pre-lit, for however long it took him to shoot the film. But The Shining remains a special exception to the general rule of discontinuity.
My point is that the information in the DNA can be seen as uncut film
Reversing the comparison, you can look at the human and the chimp as different films edited from the same set of dailies.
I would be wrong swinging from a branch in the middle of the jungle, and a chimpanzee would be wrong writing this book.
Don’t start making a chimpanzee and then decide to turn it into a human being instead.
Past a certain point, the more effort you put into wealth of detail, the more you encourage the audience to become spectators rather than participants.
Later on, when you look at that take, all you can remember was the hateful moment it was shot, and so you may be blind to the potentials it might have in a different context.
The editor, on the other hand, should try to see only what’s on the screen, as the audience will.
the audience knows nothing about any of this—and you are the ombudsman for the audience.
and he would have gotten the two different thought processes of shooting and editing irrevocably mixed up.
You “read” the photos from left to right and then down a row, left to right again, etc., just like reading text, and when you got to the bottom of one panel,
