Fine Cuts: The Art of European Film Editing

Foreword: The Transformation of Chance into Destiny

Film is the only art whose birthday is known to us.

Béla Balázs

The motion picture was born in Edison’s New Jersey laboratory in 1889 and spent an innocent childhood at fairground sideshows around the world, amusing and astonishing audiences with its one trick – single-shot representations of events like The Sneeze, The Kiss, Train Arriving at the Station, Workers Leaving the Factory. Then around 1903, at age fourteen, it unexpectedly discovered the intoxicating and almost sexual power of montage. What emerged out of this adolescence, as a butterfly out of its chrysalis, was cinema. The construction of a coherent and emotional story from discontinuous and sometimes conflicting images is the ...