Let There Be Meaning
The Early Development of Film Editing

THE ADVENT OF THE MOTION PICTURE in the late nineteenth century did much to revolutionize the way humans look at the world. For the first time, events, both staged and unstaged, could be captured in full motion, reproduced, and exhibited to mass audiences nearly everywhere. Film was a medium with great artistic possibilities, but the development of editing was the advance that unlocked that potential and helped transform the moving image from a mere technological fascination into the dominant visual medium that it is today.

In the earliest days of the cinema, filmmakers primarily concerned themselves with capturing single-shot actions on film and distributing the results. The most popular films were the so-called "actualities" produced by the Lumières and others. Although they consisted of only one shot, editing was present in the form of shot selection - deciding what to shoot and when to start shooting it. As early as 1897, British filmmaker Cecil Hepworth used an assistant timekeeper to ensure there was sufficient film in the camera to capture the action he was shooting (Bottomore 104). Also, if an action did not happen as planned, the shot would be discarded and shot again (Rosenblum 35). Because staged scenes were shot in the same fashion, fictional shooting would have to restart from the beginning of the scene if an actor made a mistake, with no possibility of an edited-in "pick-up" of the kind used today.

Part of the reason that editing was not used before the early 1900s was technical. Prior to the invention of the Latham loop, projectors were unable to show films that had been spliced together without a risk of tearing (Bottomore 104). Although this precluded film producers from putting shots together in a series, exhibitors were able to show the separately produced and ordered one-shot films in a sequence, often along with "magic lantern" slides, music and sometimes lectures. Some theaters planned topical film presentations, such as the presentation of films about the Spanish-American War in 1897 by the Eden Musée in New York, and an epic 1900 presentation entitled "Soldiers of the Cross" in Australia (although the 135-minute program consisted of only thirteen film clips to 200 magic lantern slides, all with music and commentary) (Bottomore 105).

Film producers were initially reluctant to produce longer films, but public acceptance of exhibitors' lengthier programs led to the initial step of distributors bundling related shorts together, such as a package of four fire-related Lumière films in 1896 and a similar offering from the British Warwick Trading Company in 1897 (Bottomore 106). This marked the first instance of producers and distributors taking creative control over what offerings were shown together. The next step was multiple-scene films, and in the early 1900s some actuality producers experimented with them (North 214). Running from six to twelve times as long as the fifty-foot, one-shot shorts that preceded them, they were most likely collections of related shots of events like horse races and public processions (North 214; Bottomore 106). Some of these showed a primitive form of contiguity editing as camera operators stopped the camera and restarted it in a different position to get a different angle (Bottomore 107).

Meanwhile, a different sort of in-camera editing was being pioneered by Georges Méliès. As the story goes, Méliès happened upon the phenomenon of stop-action shooting by accident when his camera jammed and restarted while shooting a traffic scene. When he projected the film, a bus on the street appeared to turn into a hearse (North 201). This prompted Méliès to experiment further with the technique, and he used it to great effect in films like A Trip to the Moon, in which hostile lunar inhabitants appear to disappear in a puff of smoke when touched by the heroes' umbrellas.

Still, the manifestation of editing found in Méliès films was little more than an extension of the film-as-technological-wonder notion. Méliès proved less innovative when it came to using editing as a narrative and structural device.
Even after others had begun experimenting with continuity-style editing, Méliès held to the belief that each scene should unfold within the space of one shot.
Although he employed some close-ups as early as 1896, he did not realize their expressive potential and instead stuck with the medium shot; in fact, in his 1901 film Bluebeard, he had the villain's wife hold up a foot-long bloody key to draw attention to it rather than move in for a tighter shot of a more reasonably sized prop (North 202; Macgowan 103). Even after others had begun experimenting with continuity-style editing, Méliès held to the belief that each scene should unfold within the space of one shot: it was a "non-continuous" style where the junctions between scenes were emphasized over the action across cuts (Bottomore 105). This emphasis on scene transitions rather than continuity is further underscored by another accidental invention used extensively by Méliès, the dissolve between scenes (North 203). Indeed, even as editing advances were being made worldwide, Méliès and much of the rest of the French film industry remained stuck in the film-as-recorded-theater paradigm (Macgowan 107).

While Méliès and his ilk were exploiting the gimmicky side of cinema, developments elsewhere in the world paved the way for a meaningful, common language of editing. Although many accounts credit the American Edwin Porter with the earliest use of editing, there is evidence that several English filmmakers used the technique first. Some historians consider G. A. Smith as the first filmmaker to cut within a scene. In the 1900 film Grandma's Reading Glass, Smith uses a youngster playing with his grandmother's magnifying glass as a motivation for cutting to close-ups of the objects he investigates (Macgowan 105). In fellow Englishman James Williamson's film Attack on a China Mission, completed in January 1901, several fairly advanced editing concepts come into play, including acknowledgement of offscreen space, cutting between interior and exterior shots, and alternating shots between the distressed woman and her saviors to build tension (Macgowan 106). Williamson went on to create more films of the chase/suspense genre, such as 1901's Fire! and 1903's The Robbery of a Mail Coach, which some see as an inspiration for Porter's The Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery (Macgowan 111; 107). Cecil Hepworth displayed a strong sense of contiguity and consistent screen direction in Rescued by Rover, a 1905 film in which the entire round trip of our canine hero is shown in a series of shots that each begin with him entering the frame and end with him leaving it. Although contemporary prints of Rover omit them, Hepworth apparently originally edited about one second of black between successive shots under the theory that cutting directly from one shot to another was "visually disruptive" (Bottomore 105).

As these developments happened in Britain, in 1902 back in the States, the Edison studio decided to experiment with longer films. Once firefighting was selected as a subject, Edwin Porter combed the stock footage archives for already-shot material of firefighters in action (North 216). Additional scenes were then staged, shot and edited together with the stock footage, creating The Life of an American Fireman. The film was notable for its interweaving of staged and unstaged film (a technique that would go on to serve many a science fiction B movie) and its breaking down of several scenes into separate shots (North 220). In 1903's The Great Train Robbery and The Kleptomaniac, Porter employed parallel editing to show events going on in different places at the same time, in addition to cutting from scene to scene rather than dissolving (North 226; Rosenblum 37). Editing was used to show contrast in The Ex-Convict, which portrayed the environmental inequalities between the title character and a rich man.

For the most part, audiences reacted positively to the innovations in editing.
The heightened suspense and anticipation allowed by the editing of films like The Life of an American Fireman led audiences to feel "unprecedented anxiety over the fate of the victims and unbridled rejoicing over their rescue."
By the time the advances began, most moviegoers had lost interest in the mere novelty of a moving image, and devices like editing, camera movement, and title cards provided a way to keep their interest (Goldman). The heightened suspense and anticipation allowed by the editing of films like The Life of an American Fireman led audiences to feel "unprecedented anxiety over the fate of the victims and unbridled rejoicing over their rescue" (Rosenblum 36). However, some audiences were confused by editing techniques, particularly in countries like Russia, where no precedent for time-based narratives (such as comic strips) existed, and audiences were more likely to focus attention on individual images than on the film as a whole (Tsivian 252). One Russian viewer described a cut from a medium shot to a close-up as the actor's face "suddenly growing vast" (Tsivian 253). As audiences grew more familiar with the new formal codes of filmmaking and "learned to read" the film as a narrative text, editing became less disruptive and more "invisibly" constructive (Goldman).

By 1908, the conventions of editing were mostly set in place. The most basic of these dealt with time: for example, prior to 1907-1908, action in successive shots often overlapped, but the new convention demanded that story time always move forward in a linear fashion as screen time progresses (Musser 269). Still, more nuanced uses of editing were yet to be developed, and the man to make great strides in the field was D.W. Griffith. Griffith was masterful in his use of analytical editing: using close-ups and other angles to show the emotion and psychology of his characters (Macgowan 144). In addition, he pioneered the practice of using editing to show the content of a character's thoughts, as he did in After Many Years when he cut from a close-up of the lead actress to the object of her thoughts, her husband stranded on a desert island (Rosenblum 38). He also expanded on his predecessor Williamson's use of suspense in the chase genre, manipulating time, space and rhythm to heighten dramatic impact (Rosenblum 39). Griffith also greatly refined the craft of continuity editing in the period from 1908 to 1909 with films like Betrayed by a Handprint and The Guerilla. By matching action between spaces, he defined the shot as subservient to the story, establishing the important maxim that "action moves across shots, not within them" (Musser 271).

By the time of the landmark feature Birth of a Nation in 1915, Griffith had become such a sophisticated craftsman in storytelling that the controversial film was powerful enough to incite race riots in cities nationwide (Rosenblum 40). Intolerance in 1916 had an even more refined style: aside from weaving together stories from four different historical epochs, Griffith pared the duration of each shot down to its essential action, heightening the impact even more (Rosenblum 40). Griffith's films had global reach as well: Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov was inspired to perform his famous experiment pairing shots of an expressionless man with various other shots after seeing Intolerance (Rosenblum 47). Kuleshov and his comrades would go on to further revolutionize the cinematic world with "scientific" editing and the style of montage.

As the cinema transformed from a technological curiosity to a full-fledged, richly expressive art form, editing was the catalyst that turned mere moving pictures into film. Whether knowingly or not, the early innovators in the field contributed practices and ideas to the language of film that remain with us today, and the evolution of the craft continues.


Works Cited

Bottomore, Stephen. ÒShots in the Dark - The Real Origins of Film Editing.Ó Early Cinema: Space - Frame - Narrative, Elsaesser, Thomas ed. London: British Film Institute. 1990.

Goldman, Melissa. ÒEntrapped Agency: An Exploration of the Links Between Cinema and Fascism.Ó Stanford University, 1996. http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-supp/text/goldman.html

Macgowan, Kenneth. Behind the Screen: The History and Techniques of the Motion Picture. New York: Delacorte Press. 1965.

Musser, Charles. ÒThe Nickelodeon Era Begins: Establishing the Framework for HollywoodÕs Mode of Representation.Ó Early Cinema: Space - Frame - Narrative, Elsaesser, Thomas ed. London: British Film Institute. 1990.

North, Joseph H. The Early Development of the Motion Picture, 1887-1909. New York: Arno Press. 1973.

Rosenblum, Ralph and Karen, Robert. When the Shooting Stops ... the Cutting Begins. New York: Viking Press. 1979.

Tsivian, Yuri. ÒSome Historical Footnotes to the Kuleshov Experiment.Ó Early Cinema: Space - Frame - Narrative, Elsaesser, Thomas ed. London: British Film Institute. 1990.