March 19, 2002

Steenbeckett

Last weekend I saw Atom Egoyan's Steenbeckett installation. It's partially a nostalgic homage to analogue filmmaking, using the legendary Steenbeck editing table. He comments that these days, with the ease of editing on Avid, or shooting entirely on digital, the director tends to make fewer decisions in preparation and while filming, and thus "overshoots". This has the result that the editor is swamped under the sheer volume of material. Meaning that the film-making responsibility is making a marked shift towards the editor.

This reminded me of something I've noticed before about reading and writing in the internet era: we are becoming editors. It used to be, when schoolchildren or students were given a research project, most of them had access to the same source material in one or two libraries, or half the effort went into finding sources in the first place. Questioning those sources was rare. Now, the Net provides you with a flood of information, of varying legitimacy. With this, the researcher (or reader) has to assume a far more critical – editorial – approach, making sense of a multitude of often contradictory information sources. And that's a Good Thing.

In fact, all websites that contain links to other sites are contributing to a vast independent editing effort, as our links effectively count as "votes" for interesting sources of information.

Egoyan's installation was also commenting on the decline of the physical manifestation of and interaction with film, as is also happening in other media like print and music. This often makes me sad too, but changes like these occur in human history all the time, and should not be seen as some kind of decline.

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