clipped from: www.horschamp.qc.ca   

Tarkovsky explains that editing cannot be the dominant structural element of a film, as the protagonists of Soviet montage cinema (Kuleshov and Eisenstein) maintained in the 1920’s. The film image comes into being during shooting, and exists within the frame. As Donato Totaro explains, editing brings together shots which are already filled with time (1992, 24). The function of editing is to organize the time-images into a wave structure inherent to film, that is, the time-pressure wave. Tarkovsky’s concept of time-pressure is like a meteorological time-front that propagates from shot-to-shot and throughout the film, or a cardiopulmonary time-pulse that thrust against the arterial walls of the scenes, bringing temporal oxygenation to the shots and overall meaning to the film-form.