Does a cut make an argument? Notes from an edit suite in Tehran
I cut documentaries and the occasional feature. My working day is spent deciding which shot follows which, and I've started to wonder what exactly I'm doing to the audience when I do it.
The classic story is the Kuleshov experiment in early Soviet cinema. As it's usually told, an actor's neutral face was intercut with a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, a woman on a sofa, and audiences praised his subtle expressions of hunger, grief and desire. The face never changed. The cut supplied the meaning.
Eisenstein built a theory on that. For him meaning is generated by collision: shot A plus shot B produces a third thing that's in neither. In Strike, the massacre of workers is intercut with the slaughter of a bull. No caption says ‘the state treats workers like cattle’. The juxtaposition says it, and arguably says it harder than a sentence could.
And yet. When I cut an interview so that a politician's pause lands next to an image of a burning building, have I made an argument, or have I committed a fallacy? An image can't state a premise or mark an inference. It can only make you feel that one thing follows another.
I'd like to hear from people who make things, or watch closely. Is montage a form of reasoning, a form of rhetoric, or something we lack a word for? And where's the line between an editor's argument and an editor's manipulation?