takes radically different forms across historical periods, across genres, and across contexts. So, to demonstrate the analytic utility of the idea of distributed creativity, we move now to more specific, lower levels of analysis. Our distributed approach queries standard hierarchies, refusing to privilege one player in the complex cognitive ecology of filmmaking. But having flattened the rug, so to speak, we can then reintroduce differentiation and specificity in more precise analyses. Not all films, and not all cases of creativity in film, involve the same balance of resources, the same kinds of collaboration, the same spread of aesthetic decision making. Once we open up the field or flatten the rug, we can analyze multiple different roles, sites, forms, or locations of creativity in filmmaking, finding many different humps in the rug.6
So, in the next section, we pick out editing as an example of a second level at which to show distributed creativity at work. Our brief account of creativity in film editing is one of many possible mid-level analyses of particular roles, practices, or processes in filmmaking which can be better understood when we focus on the embodied and collaborative deployment of heterogeneous social, kinaesthetic, imaginative, emotional, technological, and cultural resources in specific distributed cognitive ecologies. Then, in the final full section of the chapter, we turn to two case studies of different modes and practices of editing in particular epochs or genres of film history and practice: our distributed framework drives interventions in existing, independently motivated debates about unique episodes.
Editing, Authorship, and Distributed Creativity
The two short case studies that follow both concern film editing. One reason for focusing on editing is that the creativity, cognitive complexity, and dynamics of collaboration in editing are perhaps the least understood of filmmaking disciplines. Even scholars arguing that collaborators are participants in creative authorship of films, sometimes reveal, in their examples, some misapprehension about how editors’ creativity is activated. For example, Gaut writes:
There are some film tasks such as when a director tells an editor to cut a shot after 240 frames, which can be specified exactly, and the collaborator can carry out the order with no room for discretion. But most film tasks are not at all like this, for the dimensions of variation possible in performing the job are immense. (1997, 159)
Asking for “240 frames” is not really how directors and editors interact. Even if it occasionally happened, there is still significant room for discretion. Which 240 frames? Place them where, in amongst the thousands of other frames that make up a film? Is it 240 frames continuously or in a number of interpolations? Is 240 the final number to be used or the first guess in a highly iterative process? An editor contends with an immense number of variables in exercising embodied and embedded expertise (Pearlman 2016). Similarly, Bacharach and Tollefsen misconstrue typical interactions between editor and director: “True, the director sanctions these idiosyncratic expressions…in the end, by allowing a certain line to remain in the film.” (Bacharach and Tollefsen 2010, 24). While directors do generally take final responsibility, they do not “allow” a shot to remain in, they collaborate on and are convinced by its inclusion in a composition.7
The two collaborators, the director and the editor, are working on the same thing. Colloquially, in film school, our teachers would say: “the editor doesn’t work for the director, they both work for the film.” Neither of them fully knows the material form the final film will take, so the director and the editor bounce rapidly and repeatedly from a “joint commitment” (Bacharach and Tollefsen 2010) to find something which they agree is the realization of the idea, to “shared intentions” (Livingston 2011) that inform their agreements on more specific decisions. They are both trying to make the film, for want of a better word “work.” To say the director “allows” a line to remain in implies that the director has one idea of what would work and the editor a different one. In fact, the editor and the director may jointly and individually have many different ideas of what will work, and they will try them all out until they, and their producers, and other sources of feedback, such as audiences, agree on one that works best.
Editors are trained in film schools to exercise diplomacy in these processes because they are, in fact, so much more in charge of editing processes and what will finally be “allowed” than directors. They can make something work, or not. They can make the director think it was their idea, or not. They often do, in fact, manipulate situations so that directors feel they are in charge because it makes the working process more efficient. However, perhaps that training in self-effacement to create procedural efficiencies should be challenged, because it is having wide reaching effect on public perception of process and contributes to the “invisibility” of editors and editing in evaluation of films.
The industry truism that “good editing is invisible”8 may also explain why editing is poorly understood. “Invisible editing” is shorthand for continuity style cutting, which will lead the viewer’s eye without effort from one onscreen action to the next (see Smith 2012). However, on closer inspection the idea that the editing (as opposed to the edits themselves) is invisible is readily refutable. Editing is a “choreographic” process (Pearlman 2016), through which we shape physical, emotional, and structural movement. All of these kinds of movement are visible onscreen.
True, you don’t see the edits, but you do see the editing. In fact, saying “editing is invisible” is like saying films or videos are invisible. So, what do you see? You see movement. Movement shaped by editing […] If the images fall into a compelling visual pattern, if the emotions engage, if the story makes sense and keeps moving, the editing has shaped these three kinds of movement. (Pearlman 2016, 93)
What is less visible, and rarely theorized, is the cognitive complexity of shaping movement, and of collaborating with directors, shots, tools, contexts, and conventions to create or realize ideas in editing. This decision making is often described using variations on the word “intuitive” (see Oldham 1992, 2012; Kerrigan and McIntyre 2019). One aspect of our work on editing, therefore, is to productively unpack the word “intuitive” to find out what the cognitive actions of editors actually are and to contribute these not only to discourses of creative practice, but to discussions of distributed skilled cognition (see Pearlman 2016, 2017; Pearlman, MacKay, and Sutton 2018).
Another reason for choosing editing for an in-depth discussion is this: editing was understood in early and silent cinema to be “women’s work” (see Hatch 2013; Meuel 2016). As Gaines and Vatsal note about film in Hollywood before 1925: “some departments became exclusively organized along gender lines, with editing or joining being the most visibly gendered work” (Gaines and Vatsal 2011, 2). Editing continues to be one of the only disciplines in filmmaking where women come close to parity in employment.9 The presence of women editors as effective agents in filmmaking since the beginning, and the absence of theory or recognition of the creative cognitions of editors provokes questions.
Were women eventually excluded from most jobs in filmmaking but able to work in editing departments because the creative decision making of editing was unrecognized? Or could it be that the creative decision making of editing was unrecognized because it was work done by women? (Pearlman and Heftberger 2018)
Distributed Creativity in Film History and Practice
Our approach to revising the narrative that effaces women is to look at the actual work that women were doing and reclassify it. Cumulatively, these case studies support the proposition that “good editing is not invisible, and neither are the women who do it” (Pearlman & Gaines 2019).
To illustrate this lower level of analysis at which distributed cognition and film history can be integrated for mutual benefit, we first show how editing can itself be understood as authorship, through the work of compilation filmmaker Esfir Shub. Finally, we draw some more experience-near evidence from a workshop exercise we did with four contemporary film philosophers and four editors, using the industry standard tools and
