EDITINGThe History and Development

The Birth of Editing

The earliest films had no editing. The camera was placed in a single position and the footage was not altered. It was not long however before filmmakers started to experiment. They began to link multiple shots together in order to tell a story. They experimented with special effects and used close-ups to direct the audience’s attention.

Robert W. Paul’s Come Along, Do (1898) was one of the first films to contain more than one shot.

Edwin S. Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1903) was the first American film with a storyline. It showed two events happening simultaneously.

Narrative

A Trip to the Moon (1902) directed by George Méliès features different scenes in different times and locations connected by a fade-out. Here we see a rocket crashing into the face of the moon.

Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901) was the first film to use a technique called reverse cranking. The footage could be exposed several times to create a multiple exposure. It was use to create the effect of a ghost.

Special Effects

Role of the Editor

Film editing is the only art unique to cinema. The editor’s job is to compile the various shots created for a film and piece it together, removing superfluous footage, to create the finished film. Nowadays it is also common for editors to be responsible for areas of sound, music and special effects. In some respects it is one of the most powerful roles in the making of a film, deciding what gets used and what ends up on the cutting room floor.

Editing Technology

In the early years film was physically cut and glued together to create a movie. Nowadays technology has advanced and most films are shot and edited digitally using computers. This gives filmmakers greater flexibility allowing them to cut a film multiple times without having to create a new print each time.

Then and nowOn the left is a picture of a moviola the first editing machine. On the right we see a film being edited digitally by computer.

Classical Cutting

Classical cutting is a style heavily associated with director D.W. Griffith. Cutting is not used simply for moving the story along but for dramatic reasons as well. Close-ups are used for emotional impact and Actors are able to give far subtler performances. In The Birth of a Nation (1915), Griffith used multiple cameras simultaneously during the battle scene to give him multiple angles to choose from in the edit.

Montage and FormalismThe Soviet filmmakers wanted to convey abstract ideas not just simply tell stories. Their new theory was called montage from the French word monter (to assemble).

Example of montage from Battleship Potemkin (1925).

Pudovkin was a Russian filmmaker who wrote an important treaty on the theory of editing. He greatly admired D.W. Griffith but felt that the medium could be pushed further. He believed that each shot should make a new point and that meaning was created by juxtaposing different shots together.

Filmmaker Lev Kuleshov made a film in which an expressionless shot of film star Ivan Mosjoukine was juxtoposed with three different images. The shot of the actor was exactly the same each time but audiences read different meaning in his expression depending on the image it was placed next to. When placed next to an image of a dead girl they thought he looked sad, when placed next to a bowl of soup, he appeared hungry and when placed next to an attractive woman they thought he looked lustful.

Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein believed that constant change was the essence of existence. Unlike Pudovkin he felt that the transition between shots should be sharp not smooth. New meaning was created by the conflict of two different images. His theory of montage was divided into five different types -

1. Metric: shots are put together based on their length.

2. Rhythmic: like metric but the length of the shot is determined by it’s content.

3. Tonal: the emotional meaning of the shot is key.4. Overtonal: a combination of metric, rhythmic and

tonal.5. Intellectual: the conflict of intellectual ideas is key.

The Impact of Sound

The advent of sound had a huge impact on the aesthetics of film. Early sound recording equipment meant that audio and visuals had to be synchronous (recorded at the same time).Actors had to stay near microphones and editing became restricted. Meaning was now conveyed primarily through dialogue and cutting to continuity became much more important. Eisenstein bemoaned that sound would bring with it a raft of “highly cultured dramas” and to some extent he was right.

However people began to experiment. René Clair used dialogue to create continuity whilst using images that were not synchronous. This dubbing technique is still in use. As much as 30% of dialogue in modern movies is dubbed.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is set during the advent of sound. In this scene various methods of hiding the microphone are attempted. The actors are no longer able to move as freely as they once were in silent pictures.