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Visual Communication
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The promise of `makeability': digital editing software and the structuring of everyday cinematic life

Marc Furstenau

Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, marc_furstenau{at}carleton.ca

Adrian Mackenzie

Centre for Social and Economic Aspects of Genomics, Lancaster University, UK, a.mackenzie{at}lancaster.ac.uk

This article analyses amateur video editing software and considers its use within a broadly defined context of cultural practices, or `everyday cinematic life'. The authors argue that such software must be understood in relation to specific cinematic discourses and in the context of longstanding promises of popular participation in `movie-making'. They situate the historically sedimented nature of audiovisual experience in terms of a geneaology of non-commercial film editing and filmmaking, and analyse the phenomenological mixture of constraints and potentials embodied by individual amateur filmmakers and implemented in popular consumer-level editing software. The figure of the video editor (the software and the individual), the authors argue, incorporates a compromise inherent to cinematic life between the propensity to `make' by appropriating forms and materials from the cinema, and the material, economic and legal constraints on making that preserve the organization of entertainment industries.

Key Words: agency • amateur filmmaking • cinema • cinematic life • digital media • digital video editing • software

Visual Communication, Vol. 8, No. 1, 5-22 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1470357208096207
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