Documentary editing and distributed cognition

This chapter aims to reveal, from a cognitive perspective, what docu- mentary editing is and how it works as a creative action in filmmaking. It proposes that the editing of documentary film is a cognitive process of perceiving or imagining potential structure and rhythm in a mass of unscripted material and then shaping that material into a significant form.1 Further, in this process, editors, directors and the raw, uncut filmed material are all contributors to the generation of ideas. Shaping raw material into a coherent documentary film, this chapter will argue, is not work done solely in the brain; rather, it is the work of an “extended mind” (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2008) and requires a complementary activation of brain, body and the “film objects” (Vertov 1984) themselves.