Cut from a wide shot of a crowd to a close-up of one raised hand and you have quietly assigned that hand a causal role in whatever the crowd does next, whether or not any such connection existed on the day of filming. Editing does not merely compress time; it redistributes causality among the elements it chooses to juxtapose, manufacturing implied cause-and-effect relationships that the pro-filmic event never actually contained. This is among the most powerful and least discussed forms of authorship available to a filmmaker, precisely because audiences experience the resulting causal chain as discovered rather than constructed. SyntacticEdge names the cut itself as the operative unit of meaning-production — a syntactic joint, in the linguistic sense, where meaning is made at the seam between two images rather than within either image alone. A shot list tells you what was filmed; only the edit tells you what the film argues actually caused what.
Cage, J. (1961) Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Campt, T. (2017) Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press.
Deren, M. (2005) Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film. Kingston, NY: Documentext.
Farocki, H. (2004) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines. Edited by T. Elsaesser. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Eisenstein, S. (1949) Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. New York: Harcourt.