The Healthy Edit

Chapter 5

Alternative Medicine

Nontraditional Treatments

To challenge the existing order is the mandate of youth, and the young filmmakers of the French New Wave, influenced by the popularity of French existentialism and American film noir, disrupted the traditional conceptions of cinema and, in so doing, altered the future of film editing.

Though the early Russian film school of Eisenstein, Vertov, Kuleshov, and others set down the basic principles of montage at the turn of the last century, it was not until the late 1950s that a cadre of film critics writing for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma decided to pick up portable Éclair cameras and mount an assault on the traditional concept of narrative cinema—a classical cinema that had ...