NPR

The pioneering women behind the invisible art of film editing

Kathryn Bigelow accepts Best Director Oscar for <em>The Hurt Locker</em> in 2010.

When it comes to some of cinema's most iconic films, Steven Spielberg's Jaws is about as different from, say, The Wizard of Oz as that technicolor fantasy is from Quentin Tarantino's genre pastiche Pulp Fiction. But one crucial component links them: they were all edited by women.

If you think about it, you can trace other craft elements of filmmaking to previous mediums – cinematography derived from photography, production design coming out of the theater. But film editing could not have been invented without the invention of film itself. There would be no film without film editing. And yet, its practitioners don't often grace the cover of magazines.

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