As a contribution to creative authorship in film, the role of the editor in composing a screen work is relatively unexplored. Screen scholars recognise that extant theories of authorship privilege the work of the (usually male) director and efface the creative contributions of key women filmmakers. Woman with an Editing Bench draws on historical, cognitive and creative research into the processes of film editing to ask: can the understanding of editing as the work of a “distributed cognitive system” (Sutton, 2014) challenge romantic notions of the ‘auteur’ in film and reveal some of the other experts and forms of expertise that are crucial to creative filmmaking?
Inspired by the biography and work of one of cinema’s most accomplished editors, Elizaveta Svilova (Man with A Movie Camera; 1929), Woman With An Editing Bench, synthesizes knowledge about filmmaking with research into history, creativity and cognition to create a positive portrait of a woman with agency and significant influence in extraordinary circumstances. This creative research output makes an argument that edits are not results of editors’ thinking, rather the edits are their thoughts. It re-positions Svilova, an editor whose contributions have been effaced by individualistic conceptions of creativity, and creates an image of her work as an essential part of the distributed cognitive process of ideas generation.
Woman with an Editing Bench (Pearlman, 2016) had its premiere at the CinefestOz Film Festival, one of Australia’s major competitive film festivals. It won the national Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) Award for Best Short Fiction and the Australian Screen Editors Guild Award for Best Editing in a Short Film. Prints of Woman with an Editing Bench have been collected for preservation and research scholar use by major cinema archives globally including: the Vertov Archive (Vienna filmmuseum), the British Film Institute (London), UCLA Film Archive (LosAngeles), Anthology Film Archive (New York City), Cinteca Nationale (Rome), Cinematheque de la Danse/Cinematheque Française (Paris), Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, and Yale University. Woman with an Editing Bench is distributed for use in educational contexts by Ronin Films (roninfilms.com.au) worldwide.
