Editing is where the art of film takes form. Think of it in the way that grammar makes a book. The stops, the pauses, the paragraph, the joins and the emphasis all work together to to make the film a masterpiece. Editing requires a great attention to detail and an idea of what you want your final piece to look like.

Vertical Cinema

Maya Deren is most well regarded for the avant garde films she made in the 1940s and 1950s. Her films were well known for having a strong sense of movement, often in a silent film experience. Maya was also a film theorist.

“The distinction of poetry is its construction (what I mean by “a poetic structure”), and the poetic construct arises from the fact, if you will, that it is a “vertical” investigation of a situation, in that it probes the ramifications of the moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth, so that you have poetry concerned in a sense not with what is occuring, but with what it feels like or what it means.” – Maya Deren

Maya’s vertical film theory was a big breakthrough for cinema at that time. Horizontal time is a normal forward movement in a film, working chronologically and following a set story with events happening one after the other. In working vertically, Maya showed that every scene of a film doesn’t have to be chronological. Using cuts and joins and repitition a section of film can be watched vertically, repeating the same scene over again from a different angle and delving into one moment of time from multiple perspectives. Film can move forward and upward at the same time with layers of information on top of each other. Don’t make a film in ‘then‘ time, make it in ‘and‘ time (and this happened, and this happened, and this happened- all at the same time).

At Land was one of Maya’s silent experimental films and it used this idea of vertical and horizontal time. At Land manipulates the narrative to create abstract meaning and incoherence in scenes. Maya’s film uses the continuity editing technique of point-of-view shots for more abstract ends than commercial narrative cinema. Acting in the film, Maya steals a chess piece from two women on a beach. This is followed by a shot of Maya standing behind the women and looking in a different direction. Following this shot is she running with the chess piece, which is from the POV of the women.  Next shot, she picking up rocks. Followed by a shot of Maya running, which is the POV of the other her picking up rocks.  Then Maya is seen crouching on a rock formation. Another POV of her running follows this shot.  This sequence of alternating shots and only her point-of-view unifies a single time and space while multiplying a single character.  For the spectator there is more than one Maya on the beach, but for Maya it is only her.

In many of Maya Deren’s films, continuity editing brings together separate, often opposite times, spaces, and character personas into one film reality.