A Guide to Documentary Editing by Mary-Jo Kline and Susan Holbrook Perdue.
From the introduction:
Don’t be embarrassed if you aren’t quite sure what we mean by “documentary editing.” When the first edition of this Guide appeared in 1987, the author found that her local bookstore on the Upper West Side of Manhattan had shelved a copy in the “Movies and Film” section. When she pointed out the error and explained what the book was about, the store manager asked perplexedly, “Where the heck should we shelve it?”
Thus we offer no apologies for providing a brief introduction that explains what documentary editing is and how it came to be.
If this scholarly specialty had appeared overnight in the last decade, we could spare our readers the “history” as well as the definition of documentary editing. Unfortunately, this lively and productive area of scholarly endeavor evolved over more than a half century, and it would be difficult for a newcomer to understand many of the books and articles to which we’ll refer without some understanding of the intellectual debates and technological innovations that generated these discussions. We hope that our readers will find a brief account of these developments entertaining as well as instructive.
We also owe our readers a warning about a peculiar trait of documentary editors that creates a special challenge for students of the craft: practitioners have typically neglected to furnish the public with careful expositions of the principles and practices by which they pursue their goals. Indeed, it was editors’ failure to write about editing that made the first edition of this Guide necessary in the 1980s. It’s hard to overemphasize the impact of modern American scholarly editing in the third quarter of the twentieth century: volumes of novels, letters, diaries, statesmen’s papers, political pamphlets, and philosophical and scientific treatises were published in editions that claimed to be scholarly, with texts established and verified according to the standards of the academic community. Yet the field of scholarly editing grew so quickly that many of its principles were left implicit in the texts or annotation of the volumes themselves.
(…)
Even for materials under revision control, explicit principles of documentary editing will someday play a role in future editions of those texts. In part because texts do not stand alone, apart from social context.
Abbie Hoffman‘s introduction to Steal This Book:
We cannot survive without learning to fight and that is the lesson in the second section. FIGHT! separates revolutionaries from outlaws. The purpose of part two is not to fuck the system, but destroy it. The weapons are carefully chosen. They are “home-made,” in that they are designed for use in our unique electronic jungle. Here the uptown reviewer will find ample proof of our “violent” nature. But again, the dictionary of law fails us. Murder in a uniform is heroic, in a costume it is a crime. False advertisements win awards, forgers end up in jail. Inflated prices guarantee large profits while shoplifters are punished. Politicians conspire to create police riots and the victims are convicted in the courts. Students are gunned down and then indicted by suburban grand juries as the trouble-makers. A modern, highly mechanized army travels 9,000 miles to commit genocide against a small nation of great vision and then accuses its people of aggression. Slumlords allow rats to maim children and then complain of violence in the streets. Everything is topsy-turvy. If we internalize the language and imagery of the pigs, we will forever be fucked. Let me illustrate the point. Amerika was built on the slaughter of a people. That is its history. For years we watched movie after movie that demonstrated the white man’s benevolence. Jimmy Stewart, the epitome of fairness, puts his arm around Cochise and tells how the Indians and the whites can live in peace if only both sides will be reasonable, responsible and rational (the three R’s imperialists always teach the “natives”). “You will find good grazing land on the other side of the mountain,” drawls the public relations man. “Take your people and go in peace.” Cochise as well as millions of youngsters in the balcony of learning, were being dealt off the bottom of the deck. The Indians should have offed Jimmy Stewart in every picture and we should have cheered ourselves hoarse. Until we understand the nature of institutional violence and how it manipulates values and mores to maintain the power of the few, we will forever be imprisoned in the caves of ignorance. When we conclude that bank robbers rather than bankers should be the trustees of the universities, then we begin to think clearly. When we see the Army Mathematics Research and Development Center and the Bank of Amerika as cesspools of violence, filling the minds of our young with hatred, turning one against another, then we begin to think revolutionary.
Be clever using section two; clever as a snake. Dig the spirit of the struggle. Don’t get hung up on a sacrifice trip. Revolution is not about suicide, it is about life. With your fingers probe the holiness of your body and see that it was meant to live. Your body is just one in a mass of cuddly humanity. Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines, and in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free. That doesn’t allow for cop-outs. Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power. We are not interested in the greening of Amerika except for the grass that will cover its grave.
would require a lot of annotation to explain to an audience that meekly submits to public gropings in airport security lines, widespread government surveillance and wars that benefit only contractors.
Both the Guide to Documentary Editing and Steal This Book are highly recommended.