While referring to the editing in a vague manner makes people think they’ll sound technically credible, vague references to direction are a way to garner artistic credibility in the minds of the people interested in that sort of thing. Using “direction” as a sweeping term is problematic because it ascribes to the theory that there is a single author of a movie, the figure of the director. While it’s true that one person often bears a great amount of responsibility for a movie’s eventual outcome, there are so many hands involved in the cinematography, music, editing, and performances that giving one person all the credit is simplistic. They’re an overseer, which isn’t to reduce their contribution to a movie but merely to focus it. So people are often completely unclear by what “direction” they mean. Sometimes they mean composition of shots, other times they really mean editing, or cinematography (another sweeping term), or mise-en-scene if they want to show they took a university film class. “Bad direction” is too general to have much meaning.
There’s also a tendency to appeal to the “rules” of filmmaking, as if there’s this checklist of quality that all directors must adhere to. It’s like grammar. People will be sticklers for “correct” grammar, when really, as long as people understand what your trying to say, or conceivably can understand and appreciate it (and when they don’t, this is where rules or expectations can be useful), you’ve done your job. Many confuse a failure to communicate with a lack of thought, or vice versa, which is, once again, too simple.
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