In class, we were thinking about the Premiere Pro timeline as a spatial environment in which the emergence of audio-visual media occurs through the layering and (mis)alignment of distinct auditory and visual recordings/representations. For me, the fact that layering and aligning is the predominant form of media production (in music production, in the control rooms of news broadcasts, on TikTok, etc.) means that we are collectively engaged in a system of representation  way more complex than the “one-track” recording/distribution of live audio or video; the ability to appeal to the interaction between two senses creates a large, multi-dimensional environment in which representative exchanges can take place.

I think Turner claimed Kayapo editing to be a further extension of the representation inherent in video recording, which I think is one of the most interesting points of the piece when using it to generalize about culture.

I think it’s important to note that there is a range of intentionality when it comes to atomic edits, e.g. in film editing. We have a cultural dictionary of the editing tropes we expect to encounter in film, including the very simple decision to have the speaker’s voice match their mouth, or editing moves like J-cuts; we usually aren’t surprised or even attentive to these edits, because we’ve seen variants of them applied in audio-visual media for our whole lives. Some edits, however, may draw the audience’s gaze and reveal the position of the editor. Likewise on the other end of the process, I assume, film editing includes some edits that are entirely procedural, and some through which an editor makes conscious decisions to fulfill an abstract narrative.

The ethnographic questions of interpretation and of producing representation through film then become about the consciousness of editorial decisions, and, on another blink/wink level, the attentiveness of the audience to those edits.