I was once told by a professor that the editor should be thought of as “the keeper of genre, the master of human experience.” Using emotion and empathy as his/her guiding tool, an editor must make certain artistic choices to deliver a story that is- despite its degrees of originality and uniqueness- powerful enough to transcend time and space into something familiar and relevant to every audience member around the world…Is that not somewhat the goal of the ethnographer as well?
Since I don’t stop talking about film and film education, I wanted to think about how these skills are learned- particularly on a global scale: How are mediamakers taught to appeal to a “worldwide” audience? How is such a large mission distilled into the smallest, most technical choices, like where to cut, which shots to use, and how to use sound? How does one learn to be “the master of human experience”…and when do you know that you’ve become one? I guess I’m also wondering how this translates to ethnography (and ethnographic film). When we tell stories of distant worlds, how can we tell them in a way that is comprehensible to the widest audience possible?
Watching Prof. Himpele navigate his timeline with impressive ease as he explained to us his editing choices made me wonder where exactly this knowledge and this instinct comes from and if- as the mediamakers and anthropologists of our generation- there are concrete steps we can take to become “masters of human experience” and to thus make our work more accessible…or would that require us to change the “rules” of the discipline or to stray away from our “scientific” origins? Does “objective” = accessible or accurate?
Ailee – thanks for thinking about the cultural work of editing – another direction you could take your own thesis! There is an interesting balance within your post worth taking on openly:
That is, do the global mass media filmmakers (“masters of human experience”) identify authentic universal experiences and ways of storytelling and embed them in films to make in order to make them widely accessible (and profitable)? That idea surely seems it might rub against an ethnographer’s deep sense of context. What if, instead, the dominant forms of editing and storytelling are their own cultural forms that people around the world learn to use and see? Think of a religion or languages as parallels. A cultural anthropologist would be hard pressed to locate them in universals but would likely see them as cultural traits that are learned, forced, assimilated, copied, and transformed. Does Media Worlds demonstrate either the cultural or universalist views?