History of Editing

Recently, we looked more in to the history of editing and how different styles of editing and shots came to be. To gain more knowledge on this topic, we watched a video on the Birth of Cinema and Continuity Editing by Filmmaker IQ on YouTube.

Primitive Cinema

The first film screening was in the basement of a grand cafe in Paris on December 28, 1895 by the Lumiere brothers, of workers leaving the Lumiere factory, Among the audience of the first ever screening, was a professional magician, George Melies. Melies became inspired by this screening and as a result, bought an Animatograph to then reverse the mechanics to create his own camera. Whilst shooting a bus emerging from a tunnel in Paris 1896, Melies' camera broke in the middle of a take. When the camera began working again, the bus has been replaced by a hearse and when editing, Melies realised the faulty in the camera had invented a Jump Cut, where the bus appeared to turn into a Hearse.

Melies also discovered:

• Fade in and Fade out
• Overlapping dissolves
• Stop Motion Photography

Using these shots, he merged them all together to create a narrative story instead of a mundane single shot. However, he had a reoccurring problem throughout all his movies- they were all shot from the same angle as he failed to move the camera during shooting.

Birth of the Edit

Edwin S. Porter, a director and camera man, used his unique insight into film to take footage from 'Life of an American Fireman' and combine it with stage scenes to create a fictional narrative. However, there was still the problem of a Tableau mentality and there were many Temporal Overlaps among Porter's film productions.

D.W. Griffith (Lawrence Griffith) stepped in to resolve this problem. He managed to create a film where a medium shot, smoothly changed to a full shot of two characters in an emotional dialogue to engage the audience in the story. This became known as a continuity shot.

Continuity shot - Cutting style that maintains a sense of continuous space and time

Along with the Continuity shot, came the 180 degree rule. The 180 degree rule means to keep the camera on one side of the Axis of action to avoid continuity problems of cutting.

Griffith also discovered inter-cutting.

Inter-cutting shot - Cutting between shots in different scenes in a parallel action

Inter-cutting was haled as a masterpiece and the long, medium and close up shot became known as the classic Hollywood continuity shot.

Following this, he also discovered:

• Establishing shot
• Revers shots
• Matching Eye Lines
• Cutting on Action

Griffith then progressed to releasing his own independent film in 1914, 'The Birth of a Nation'. This film was cinema's most expensive film to make, and was the world's most famous Blockbuster. It contained a combination of all of Griffith's editing and cinematic techniques. However, the film was condemned as racist, of which Griffith took personally. The criticism taken personally provoked Griffith to release 'The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America' where he defended himself and claimed the film was intolerance. 

To further defend himself, Griffith later released a film called 'Intolerance' which although did not go down well, was the apparent key to a new theory of editing called montage. 

Lawrence Griffith invented the conventions of editing that established the continuity style of editing.

Filmmakers constantly took inspiration from each other's ideas to eventually create a consistent way of editing to ensure every production had a sense of continuity, of which is still used today.