History Principles & Development of Editing
In this essay, I am going to analyse continuity editing and how it has grown in the past century. Continuity editing is all about creating action whilst hiding the edits from the audience and making all of the footage flow smoothly. Continuity editing can also be known as Transparency editing as the audience won’t see the edits. Because of this, the audience find it easy to understand and just follow the dialogue. In the context of development of editing principles, I will be examining the work of Georges Melies, Edwin S. Porter, and D.W. Griffiths. I will be comparing all three of their film making successes. Furthermore, in order to demonstrate the advances of continuity editing, I will be comparing the original films and the present films today.
George Melies is a French film maker or the first 'cinemagician' to be around the 18 & 1900's. George is not only a filmmaker, but one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. In the fall of 1896, Melies was in Paris shooting a bus coming out of a tunnel when his camera jammed in the middle of the take. When he got the camera working again, a small car took over the spot of the bus. After reviewing the footage, he discovered that the effect of the bus leaving, then the small car appearing on the screen was a start of a new filming technique. This is known as a Jump Cut. Melies went straight to work with his discovery, creating films where the actors disappear, then shortly reappearing couple of seconds later. Through his still photography and magic lantern experience, Melies also introduced editing devices such as the fade in and out shots, overlapping dissolves and stop motion photography.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, another key figure to get a start in the filming industry was Edwin S. Porter. Porter started off as a projectionist, setting up the first ever Edison projector in Koster & Bial's music hall in New York city in April. For a few years, he'd operate his own equipment until 1900 when he joined Edison manufacturing company and became head of production in Sky Light Studio in 1901. The next 5 years he served Edison as his director and cameraman.
Porter's projectionist background gave him some unique insight into film, greatly influenced by George Melies, especially 1902 'A Trip To The Moon' which he often duplicated for distribution, for Edison.. illegally. Porter decided to try his hand at narrative film with the 1903 'Life Of An American Fireman'. Now firemen are common subject matters for early films. What Porter did was rather unique, he took stock footage from the Edison library and spliced it together with stage scenes to create a fictional narrative. Porter was stuck in his tabloid mentality, constructing each shot as a complete scene. A Temporal Overlaps is where action is duplicated from one end of the shot to the other. For example, in the 'Life Of An American Fireman' in the opening shot where the firemen are rushed down to the pole, followed by a shot of the bottom of the pole before the firemen land.
Porter was beginning to forge a new cinematic language, through his work we start to see that the most basic unit of cinema was not the scene as Melies and his contemporaries thought, but the shot. Meaning came not only in the spatial arrangement of objects and actors in a frame like in a theater, also in still photography, but in the way that shots are arranged in time. However like George Melies before him, Porter would only take editing so far. Cinema would require another artist to build on their work and expand the editing vocabulary.
In 1908, just before leaving Edison to start his own production company, Porter hired a young starving actor to fill the lead part in ‘Rescued From An Eagle’s Nest’. This would end up being the first break of a 40-year-career of one David Wark Griffith (D.W. Griffith).
The seventh child of a Confederate Army Colonel from a rural of Kentucky, D.W. Griffith tried everything from hop picking, selling encyclopedias, door-to-door to acting. His lifelong ambition was to be a writer falling in love with Victorian style of literature, especially that of Charles Dickens. However his poems and plays were unremarkable so he tried his hand writing scenarios for movie companies. Working under the stage name of Lawrence Griffith, he submitted an adapted play to none other than Edwin S. Porter. Porter rejected it for having too many scenes but he hired Griffith to star in one of his films. After a while, Griffith found a position at Biograph, a production company struggling in debt and looking for directors. Under a $45.00 per week contract, Griffith would make over 450 films from 1908 to 1911, pushing cinema out of the primitive tableau mentality and into a multi shot medium that we would now recognize.
One of Griffith’s first inventions was the ‘Cut-In’ first used in ‘The Greaser’s Gauntlet’ in 1908, just four months after his first film for Biograph. Griffith cut from a medium long shot of a hanging tree to a full shot in the middle of the scene to emphasize the emotional impact of an exchange between two actors. A brand new concept. Griffith continued to experiment with alternating shot lengths using multiple camera setups to create a scene through what’s called continuity editing.
Continuity editing is cutting between shots with the purpose of maintaining smooth sense of continuous space and time. With multiple camera setups being used, the 180 degree rule evolved out of practise. Griffith as well as his contemporaries discovered that if you kept the camera on one side of the axis of action, thats the imaginary line where movements and eye-lines occur, you can avoid continuity editing problems of confusing geography when cutting from one angle to another.
Griffith’s next invention in editing was one that would become his favourite, intercutting or cross-cutting. Bouncing between two different scenes in a parallel action which he first put to use on ‘After Many Years’ in 1908. Through varying the spatial distance with long, medium and close up shots and the temporary length of shots, Griffith began to establish the tenets of classic Hollywood continuity editing. Through practical solving and experimentation, he and contemporary filmmakers who often copied the style, brought about concepts like the Establishing Shots, Reverse Shots, Matching Eyelines, and Cutting on Action, everything we think about in terms of continuity editing.
Griffith released an independent in 1914 that would be cinema’s most expensive movie ever made. That film was called ‘The Birth of a Nation’. This film was a culmination of all Griffiths editing and cinematic techniques. D.W Griffiths remains a controversial figure of history but he almost singlehandedly invented the conventions of editing that would establish the continuity style of cutting that is still very much with us today.
Last but not least, I done some quantitative research and found out some interesting information. I asked 2 questions around college, the questions were;
Question 1 - "What are your thoughts about CGI Movies?"
- "Watching CGI Movies are great, it feels like I'm watching a fake but real movie at the same time."
- "CGI movies are intense, it gets me fired up."
- "Don't really enjoy watching them, just prefer all natural."
Question 2 - "When you see a movie that's been remastered, what changes do you expect?"
- "Better performance in technology for sure."
- "More realistic scenes, perhaps better storyline."
- "Having the feeling that the remastered version is way better"
Even in the birth of cinema, the first 20 years of film-making, the history of editing has been the story of film-makers learning from each other and adding their own voice into the mix. Cinema was becoming a language, and editing is the syntax.
In conclusion, for my part I believe that editing is a very important element when trying to create a great film. Without editing, movies or any type of clips would be tedious to watch. In order to engage the audience to the fullest, you must have editing in films. Comparing to the oldest movie to date, you can clearly see that film-making has come a long way. For years to come, more and more unimaginable technology are soon to be created and it's only the beginning of the future.
