So this afternoon I watched the second documentary, called The Cutting Edge, and this one was about the art of montage (cutting and editing film). This too covered the history of montage in western cinema, with emphasis on Edwin S. Porter, D.W. Griffith, Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Leni Riefenstahl, ... continuing almost up to the present time (whereas yesterday's documentary on cinematography stopped at approx. 1990).
Prominent omission: It ignores anything east of Europe. Yesterday's documentary did the same, but I think it's a more serious omission if you're discussing cutting, because, in Japanese aesthetics, cutting is a highly developed concept that has been studied for centuries and has been applied across all art. You'd expect a documentary on montage to at least mention the name of Yasujiro Ozu :)
As long as we're discussing omissions, I should like to add that I wondered what yesterday's documentary, had it not ended around 1990, would have said about Lars von Trier's Dogme 95 :)
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