“Your film is given life on the cutting-bench, but you cannot create life unless the necessary raw stuff is to hand. Cutting is not confined to the cutting room alone. Cutting must be present all through the stages of production – script, photography and approach to natural material – finally to take concrete form as the sound is added,” said Paul Rotha in Documentary Film way back in 1936, during cinema’s first Golden Age of the documentary. Rotha’s call for a vision that precedes its material outcome is something we might do well to remember at a time when the economics of filmmaking allow an infinite number of choices.

With more filmmakers choosing to shoot first and think later, how is an editor to find one film out of an infinite series of possible films available in the material? Is the documentary film editor, like Tarkovsky’s director, a sculptor in time, chipping away at a block of material until the film’s form is revealed? Or does s/he allow the film a process of accretion, taking time over the creation of meaning?

In this month’s essay in Pratilipi’s ongoing series on the Indian documentary and short film, editor Jabeen Merchant talks about her early career when the Indian documentary seemed poised to take off in exciting new directions. She describes the process of working on some films – a process that stands at the intersection of theory and economics – and raises the question of authorship with regard to documentary films. It is a question that brings us right back to Paul Rotha, indicating that though technologies may have changed radically, perhaps theories of film editing have changed less since they were first articulated in the early decades of the 20th century.