Editing I Will Not Hope

This article discusses I Will Not Hope, a Screendance made in 2013, which involved a group of people trying to catch falling leaves in autumn. It is the last in a trilogy of Screendance works, by the author, that explore the tension between predictability, stillness and death, and contingency, movement and life. The analysis focuses, on the significance of I Will Not Hope’s editing, specifically the tension, referred to by film theorist Doane, between the edit as the creator of narrative predictability, and the edit as the creator of stillness, the creator of endings. In it I suggest that I Will Not Hope offers a connection between the ontological status of film, with its combination of contingency and structure embodied in the edit, and the relationship of these elements within the experience of hope.