My Dissertation Overview

How to study an invisible art

Personal Note: Thanks to everyone who asked about reading my dissertation research. You’ve all been so kind. 😊 The high-level overview is below. I’m writing the updated, shorter version to post here soon. Subscribe to join the list and get updates. I’m heading to LA! Stay tuned!

Dissertation Overview:

Filmmaking is a collaborative art, but the director is still widely treated as the primary creative force behind a film’s success. Even within academia, film editing in Hollywood has received surprisingly little attention for several interconnected reasons.

First, classical Hollywood editing (an aesthetic developed in the early 1920s) is designed to go unnoticed. If it works well, the audience doesn’t notice the cut between shots, which means the editor’s contribution is largely invisible by design. (When was the last time you noticed a cut? Be honest.)

Second, it is difficult to determine exactly where or what an editor contributed during post-production on a major Hollywood film. To do this would require someone to sit in the room where it happens and eavesdrop on the director’s and the editor’s discussions. (This would be amazing, btw.) Plus, editing decisions are not always clearly documented or easily verified.*

And third, film editing has long been shaped by gendered assumptions about labor.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the majority of workers in Hollywood editing departments were women. This early association contributed to editing being perceived as a feminized practice within a commercial film industry that has otherwise been hierarchical and male-dominated. Cutting and splicing film was considered a non-technical, feminine task like sewing and, as a result, was devalued. In addition, editors worked in a private room (the private sphere), rather than in the open (the public sphere) like directors and cinematographers. It made/makes their artistic choices harder to spot (and credit) than the people who work on set.

This raises a practical problem: if the editor’s work is both invisible and historically marginalized, how can we identify their individual contributions to a film?

To explore this, I examined archival records from the films Bonnie and Clyde (1968), The Conversation (1974), Annie Hall (1977), and Raging Bull (1980)—films known for both their creative ambition and the close collaboration between directors and editors. (I specifically chose two male editors and two female editors as my case studies: Dede Allen, Walter Murch, Ralph Rosenblum, and Thelma Schoonmaker.**)

I compared the archival planning documents, such as scripts and storyboards, with the final versions of these films.*** These materials, a roadmap for the editors, outline how scenes were intended to be shot and assembled. When the finished films diverge from those plans, it often points to decisions made during the editing process.

I argue that these differences are not incidental. They are evidence of the editor’s artistic contributions to the films as a “co-author”* and of the creative collaboration between the director and editor during post-production.

More broadly, this approach shows how archival research can help us better understand where and how films are reshaped—and what role editing plays in that process.

*Fun Fact #1: One of the editors I studied claimed that he “authored” a particular moment in the editing room. However, based on the archival documents I found, it was written into the production script, and I refuted his claim.

**Fun Fact #2: The collaboration between Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese is one of the longest and most consistent director–editor partnerships in film history. She’s been instrumental to his success and her contributions to Raging Bull helped solidify her central role in his filmmaking process.

***Not So Fun Fact #3: To make these detailed comparisons, I studied certain scenes FRAME BY FRAME. (To put that into perspective, these directors were shooting 24 frames per second.) It was… a lot. 🤪