“I went insect hunting
Lobotomised my sister’s new boyfriend
I became $10,000 in debt
I sold a mortar and pestle full of toenails to a geriatric Jew
I told my sister I loved her.”

The reading for this week, Blood in the Gutter – a really insightful comic by Scott McCloud that explores the human ability to synthesise fragmented elements of the world into cohesive wholes, was given more relevance with the discussion of editing in the lectorial today. While comic strips exist as a series of separated images, we are accustomed to stringing them together in a fluid narrative, which very much lends itself to the way in which we naturally accept editing in film and other forms of media.

Liam Ward described the process of editing not as fixing things but as deliberately breaking them – using the example that a sequence of two 30 second shots from a 24 hour reel of security footage would beg the question as to why those particular moments had been selected to be put together, which encourages the creation and discussion of meaning.

Ward also touched on the Kuleshov Effect, which I have now looked at in every class I have at uni so it really is pretty important. Originally Kuleshov pieced together various different snippets of footage with the same brief shot of a man somewhat neutrally facing the camera, and as people for the time (early 20th century) were unfamiliar with editing techniques, audiences insisted that the man was reacting differently to each image that preceded him. In this case, the act of editing itself is creating the performance, not the actor. Ward applied this effect in his presentation, cutting between an image of Game of Thrones’ Joffrey and Education Minister Christopher Pyne, where we can draw association in that both figures are generally quite unfavourably viewed.

The 5 line piece that I have included at the top of this post is the result of an exercise that allowed us to explore these ideas. Each line was separately written on different post-it notes, with no cohesion in mind, and the task was to simply rearrange these post-it notes into different orders and construct some sort of meaning. The result was a fairly disturbing narrative that, indeed, has me questioning the nature of my imagination.