Film editing

Film editing is the craft of selecting, arranging, and joining images and sounds into a motion picture. It shapes continuity, pacing, structure, and meaning.

Continuity editing: A style of editing that maintains clear spatial and temporal relationships across shots. It makes shot joins feel like a coherent, continuous scene.
Shot (filmmaking): A continuous stretch of moving images recorded by a camera between edits. Editing selects and orders these basic units.
D. W. Griffith: An American film director whose early feature films helped establish influential narrative editing techniques. His films popularized cross-cutting and other methods of parallel action.
Odessa Steps sequence: A sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin depicting a massacre on a monumental staircase. Its fragmented action and rhythmic cuts became a landmark of montage.
Long take: A sustained shot that lasts substantially longer than conventional shots in a scene. It can preserve performance and space where frequent cuts would fragment them.
Montage: The arrangement of separate images to create meaning through their sequence and interaction. Its meaning often arises from juxtaposition rather than continuous action.
Scene (film): A unit of a film's narrative action, usually occurring in one time and place. Scenes are larger structural units that editing shapes from shots.
Sergei Eisenstein: A Soviet film director and theorist who treated montage as a source of cinematic meaning. His theories made the collision between shots a deliberate expressive method.
Lawrence of Arabia match cut: A transition in Lawrence of Arabia that cuts from a blown-out match to a desert sunrise. It compresses time and links a small flame to an expansive landscape.
Soviet montage theory: A theory of filmmaking in which the collision of shots generates ideas and emotion. It contrasts with continuity editing's effort to make cuts unobtrusive.

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