Subjectification and the role of chance-seeking in film editing education

Many contemporary film editing students enter university with experience in editing software and conventional storytelling techniques, acquired through online tutorials and independent practice. Yet they continue to search for what might be called the art of editing, suggesting that editing involves forms of knowledge that extend beyond technique and transferable strategies. This article approaches editing education as a process of subject formation and argues that meaning-making can be accessed more directly by delaying interpretation and foregrounding perceptual engagement with audiovisual material. We propose an event-based pedagogy in which editing teachers curate conditions for meaningful encounters with audiovisual material, enabling students to undergo transformative realisations about their role as editors. A classroom case study builds on Barthes’ concept of punctum to explore chance-seeking as an editing practice in which new relations, meanings and subject-formations come into being. The emergence of a paradoxical metaphor in scene exercise feedback given by the class – often exceeding authors’ prior intention – is understood as a trace of world formation within the editing process. Based on four years of action research in longitudinal BA editing courses and short international workshops for master students, the study outlines a grounded framework for teaching editing through attention and responsiveness.