Development Of Editing Techniques

Although the earliest films in cinema were done in one shot without any editing, cutting is so fundamental to the medium that it began to emerge relatively quickly. There was a basic disparity between the amount of film that a camera's magazine could hold and the evolving desire of filmmakers and audiences for longer and more elaborate story films. Only by editing shots together could longer narrative forms be achieved. A Trip to the Moon (1914), directed by Georges Méliès creates a narrative by assembling a series of scenes, with each scene filmed in a single shot. The edit points occur between the scenes, in order to link them together.

The 1903 film ‘The Great Train Robbery’, is one of the most iconic films of the early film years, simply because it was one of the first films to use more than one scene. This was the first narrative film that audiences could see going somewhere and was very successful amongst different audiences. It is not clear that he means for the parallel editing to establish that two lines of action are in fact happening simultaneously. In other respects, editing in The Great Train Robbery remains very primitive, with cuts used only to join scenes and with no intercutting inside a scene.

The film ‘Life of an American Fireman’ includes one of the most famous uses of crosscutting, and was a massive step in editing history. Edwin S. Porter, the Editor, was celebrated for his unusual but exciting style of editing. He wanted his audiences to feel worried for people in the film who were stuck in a burning house, unsure of whether the fireman would be able to rescue them; he wanted to build up tension in his audience, and did this by the use of crosscutting. Similar to Sergei Eisenstein, Porter used editing to try and get an emotional response from his audience.

Porter’s techniques were very different from those of D. W. Griffith. A man names Cecil Hepworth wanted to try and bridge the gap between the two styles of editing, and bring all the different styles together. He created a film known as ‘Rescued by Rover’ in 1905 and was a British silent film (A film with no voices). The film was the most advanced film seen at the time, due to its use of fantastic storytelling, production and editing.

In contrast with Porter, D. W. Griffith freed the camera from the conventions of stage perspective by breaking the action of scenes into many different shots and editing these according to the emotional and narrative rhythms of the action. 

Cutting from full-figure shots to a close-up accentuated the drama, and matching the action on a cut as a character walks from an exterior into a doorway and, in the next shot, enters an interior set enabled Griffith to join filming locations that were physically separated but adjacent in terms of the time and place of the story.

Griffith became famous for his use of crosscutting. In The Girl and Her Trust (1912), for example, Griffith cuts back and forth from a pair of robbers, who have abducted the heroine and are escaping on a railroad pump car, to the hero, who is attempting to overtake them by train. By intercutting these lines of action, Griffith creates suspense, and by shortening the lengths of the shots, he accelerates the pace. Crosscutting furnished a foundation for narrative in cinema, and there is little structural difference between what Griffith did here and what a later filmmaker such as Steven Spielberg does in Jaws (1975). 

Griffith extended his fluid use of continuity editing and crosscutting in his epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). The latter film is a supreme example of crosscutting, which is here used to tell four stories set in different time periods in simultaneous fashion.

Sergei Eisenstein is a wholly unique figure in cinema history. He was a filmmaker and a theoretician of cinema who made films and wrote voluminously about their structure and the nature of cinema. Both his filmmaking and his writing (which fills several volumes) have been tremendously influential.

Frustrated by the creative limitations of his work in the theater, Eisenstein turned to cinema and in 1925 completed his first feature, Stachka ( Strike ), which depicted the plight of oppressed workers. Eisenstein's next two films are the ones by which he remains best known, Bronenosets Potyomkin ( Battleship Potemkin , 1925) and Oktyabr (Ten Days That Shook the World and October , 1927), each depicting political rebellion against czarist rule.

Eisenstein believed that editing was the foundation of film art. For Eisenstein, meaning in cinema lay not in the individual shot but only in the relationships among shots established by editing. Translating a Marxist political perspective into the language of cinema, Eisenstein referred to his editing as "dialectical montage" because it aimed to expose the essential contradictions of existence and the political order. Because conflict was essential to the political praxis of Marxism, the idea of conflict furnished the logic of Eisenstein's shot changes, which gives his silent films a rough, jagged quality. His shots do not combine smoothly, as in the continuity editing of D. W. Griffith and Hollywood cinema, but clash and bang together. Thus, his montages were eminently suited to depictions of violence, as in Strike , Potemkin , and Ten Days . In his essays Eisenstein enumerated the numerous types of conflict that he found essential to cinema. These included conflicts among graphic elements in a composition and between shots, and conflict of time and space created in the editing process and by filming with different camera speeds.

Film Editing Techniques

Before the widespread use of non-linear editing systems, the initial editing of all films was done with a positive copy of the film negative called a film workprint by physically cutting and pasting together pieces of film. Strips of footage would be hand cut and attached together with tape and then later in time, glue. Editors were very precise; if they made a wrong cut or needed a fresh positive print, it cost them money for the lab to reprint the footage and push the editing process back farther. 

With the invention of a splicer and threading machine with a viewer such as a Moviola, or "flatbed" machine such as a K.-E.-M. or Steenbeck, the editing process sped up a little bit and cut came out cleaner and more precise.

Moviola - A Moviola is a device that allows a film editor to view film while editing. It was the first machine for motion picture editing when it was invented by Iwan Serrurier in 1924. 

Flat bed - Picture and sound rolls load onto separate motorized disks, called "plates." Each set of plates moves forward or backward separately, or locked together to maintain synchronization between picture and sound.

But the past 20 or so years has also seen the rise of "digital editing", which makes any kind of editing easier. The notion of editing film on video originated when films were transferred to video for television viewing. Then filmmakers used video to edit their work more quickly and less expensively than they could on film. The task of cleanly splicing together video clips was then taken over by computers using advanced graphics programs that could then also perform various special effects functions. Finally, computers convert digital images back into film or video. These digital cuts are a very far cry from Méliè's editing in the camera.

Most films are edited digitally (on systems such as Avid, Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro) and bypass the film positive workprint altogether. In the past, the use of a film positive allowed the editor to do as much experimenting as he or she wished, without the risk of damaging the original. With digital editing, editors can experiment just as much as before except with the footage completely transferred to a computer hard drive; losing the original footage is an only one computer crash away.