VI

		throughout the film, Beresford cuts from the trial to flash backs of the original event, in this case the shooting of the Boers. More precisely, Beresford cuts on the words themselves, on Rule 3 0 3, with soldiers aiming their guns, fingers pulling a trigger, etc. By doing so, the words in the court room are visually echoed by actions in the field. The cuts, one must admit, are truly compelling. It is "good editing" because the action is suddenly heightened by the sharp vivacissimo of the images. Yet, this is also a gimmick, the kind of cheap effect that generally incensed Bazin. For the sharp cutting does not add anything to our knowledge of what took place, it does not tell us anything new about the characters, it is there only because it is damn effective at getting a rise from everyone who sees it (from the editor and the director all the way to the audience). In other words, the film passage lures us not through its content but its percussive flamboyance, its external theatrics. This is but legerdemain for Bazin who warns us to make "no concession to dramatic tension" and to reject ''the imperatives of the spectacular" when these are imported from outside the scene itself. 53 The intensity of a film should originate from its internal content only. Motion picture techniques are acceptable only insofar as they help "magnify the effectiveness of the elements of reality that the camera captures."54 All in all, the French critic radicalized the notion of editing by suggesting that it be subordinated to the larger concerns of an aesthetic based on reality.55

		VIII

		Having made clear what he rejected, Bazin needed to offer alternative ways of organizing narratives. The main one he offered turned around the possibility of deep focus, when the entire field of view is sharp, a technique that could make unnecessary the fragmentation of a scene into multiple shots. In the most famous example of the technique, in Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles initiates a shot with the little protagonist playing in the snow. He then pulls back from the window inside the cabin, preceding the three adults all the way to a second room where the papers are to be signed. As they go about the signing, we still see in the middle of the frame, through the window, the boy playing, totally unaware that his fate is being sealed at that very moment. In other words, we see all of it at once. We face it as we would confront any moment of life. It is up to us to grab this or that aspect at any time. Here nobody "choos[es] for