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In our final case study four philosophers confirm our claim that in the actual process of wrenching significant form from disparate shots, editing is never “merely technical” (Hatch 2013, 2). It is “expertly technical, and it is creative” (Pearlman and Heftberger 2018).

In October 2018, as part of a Macquarie University Research Seeding Grant, we staged a workshop in which we paired four editors with four film philosophers.¹³ The workshop offered the philosophers the chance to experience the process of editing and working with an editor. Our intention was to give them firsthand experience of the kinds of decisions made in continuity editing processes: how many choices there are about which shot to use, where, and for how long, and how substantially editing shapes performance, structure, order, tone, mood, emphasis, and meaning. We were curious about whether the philosophers would come away thinking of editors as co-creators of a film.

For the exercise, we gave each team the filmed material of a very short (30 second) drama scene between two people. The materials included plenty of coverage of the whole scene—wide shots, mid-shots, over the shoulder shots, and close ups. The material was from a studio shoot, so the lighting was consistent throughout. The actors and crew were professionals. Everything was in focus, and no one crossed the line. In other words, if anyone had thought that editing was just “cutting out the bad bits” they would have been disappointed. There were no “bad bits,” and there were potentially thousands of options for how they might tell the story.

The teams watched the rushes all together, taking notes on shots they liked or might want to use. They were given some prompts as to what they might think about, e.g., “decide whose story you want it to be, his or hers, and use that decision to guide shot choices.” These prompts were pretty much universally ignored by the philosophers—three of the four seemed intent on disrupting the material in some way. So, while we were disappointed in their learning about how straight continuity editing can change storytelling, we were richly rewarded with the revelations they had about the creative potential of editing and the creative agency of editors.

Each team had their own edit suite and one hour to cut the 30 second scene. All of the philosophers were surprised to find that one hour was barely enough time—and three of the four (the same three intent on disrupting the scene’s design rather than shaping its nuances) requested “a few more minutes!” This was the first indication that we had been successful in conveying the cognitive complexity of editing. Once in the suite, the options, creative opportunities, and decisions to be made, even with this straightforward material, left them with insufficient time to fully explore.

After their time working in the suites, each philosopher did a short interview with Pearlman about the process without their editing partners present. They responded to open ended questions such as “tell us about your experience or process.”

Philosopher #1 describes a number of instances of ideas arising from material in a back and forth conversation between the filmed material and the people working with it. She speaks about her own experience with painting and compares the editor to the painter’s own hands, describing how, in the process of editing, she and the editor were inextricably creative together: “we ended up with something that really, he, or we, the editors…created.” It is worth noting that, as someone who was in the edit suite for the first time, Philosopher #1 conflates her work of directing the edit with the work of the editor and refers to herself as an editor. This points not only to the entanglement of cognitive resources in the creative process, but to the actual, practical, blurriness of boundaries in defining who generates ideas in editing.

Philosopher #2 was surprised to realize that although he would have expected to want lots of shots to work with, in fact he struggled with his memory of the ones they had and wished for fewer, or a shooting process over which they had more control. He notes about the editor they worked with, that “she had a better memory for some of the things than I had. And I kind of realized, okay, it’s not my strong suit, it’s hers. So, leave it to her.” Philosopher #2 also notes that the process was very physical. Ideas for juxtaposition and timing did not arise in their heads and then get translated in to edits. Rather, the editing itself, the moving of shots into various configurations, was where ideas arose. It was ultimately necessary to try things to find “lucky moments” and concepts to be formed in relation to the material, not independently of it. He notes, “before you see it, it’s not there.”

Philosopher #3 also describes the creative process as a continual back-and-forth. He says the editor “and I sat down and I ran a few ideas past her and she thought some of them were good…We both came up with ideas and then tried to find ways of implementing them.”

Philosopher #4’s interview points most explicitly to the distributed cognition when he talks about the images having some agency in how they would tell the story: “it was a matter of, you know, working with the images and seeing what came out. And how, starting to put the images together. It’s like the story unfolded as we started cutting and assembling the shots. So, that was fascinating.” About working with the editor, Philosopher #4 simply says: “It was collaborative thinking.”

While there are no great surprises for us from these philosophers’ comments, it is worth noting that they, like most of us, have in their writing and conversations before this workshop generally referred to films by the surname of the film’s directors, not the director et al. The question arising from the workshop then is: given that they are now all cognisant of the distributed creativity of editing, would it be possible to extend this into thinking about filmmaking creativity more generally?