CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF EDITING

Notional Editing

Theoreticians of visual communication widely believe that images, in their inner nature, do not possess the ability to make notional statements and that the essence of images is to present events or states.

Contrary to that, many filmmakers strive to create notional structures in visual form, and do so with the help of the editing process that Paul Messaris calls ’notional editing’ in which two or more images are linked with the purpose of making a comment. This type of editing is often associated with Eizenstein’s films and his writings on editing. It was often used in silent movies, while today it has found a new setting in propagandist films and mass media.

On the example of a propagandist film used in Ronald Reagan’s presidential run and several advertising videos, Messaris shows that grounds for linkage of images in notional editing is rarely visual. In other words, image-subject is connected with the image-object mostly by notional, instead of visual similarity and contrast. The interpretation of notional editing is predicated by the spectator’s ability to discern the presence of notional relations between the objects and circumstances portrayed in a given sequence of images.

Paul Messaris