Creating the world's highest quality solutionsfor feature film production post production andtelevision broadcast industries. Hi - John Hess from Filmmaker IQ.com and todaywe'll look at the birth of Film Editing the origins of the cinematic language andthe beginning of continuity editing.
The Birth of Cinema and Continuity Editing
It's hard for modern audiences who are grewup with video to imagine the spectacle of the first film screeningin the basement of the Grand Cafe in Paris in 1895 by the Lumiere Brothers. This film - Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory- as un-extraordinary as it looks today, marvelled audiences as something completelyunseen before. In the year of film's infancy, the dancingshadows and the machines behind them were the main attraction.
The content of the film was not so important,they were essentially animated photographs. But one audience member in the Grand Cafescreening saw much more potential: a professional magician by the name of GeorgesMelies who owned and operated the Theatre Robert-Houdin. He attempted to buy a Cinematographe machinefor ten thousand Francs. But the Lumieres saw him as potential competitionand refused. Unphased, Melies, who had also been a mechanic,bought a English made projector called the Animatograph for 1,000 Francs,reversed the mechanics and created his own camera. Within a few months of the Grand Cafe screening,Melies was making and showing his own films as part of his stage show. In the fall 1896, Melies was in Paris shootinga bus coming out of a tunnel when his camera jammed in the middle of thetake.
When he got the camera working again, the bus was gone and replaced by a hearse. When Melies developed the film, he discovereda startling and magical thing - the bus turned into the hearse right thereon the screen - something we would call the Jump Cut. Melies put this discovery to work right away- using jump cuts in his films to create disappearing and reappearing effects. Through his still photography and magic lanternexperience Melies also introduced editing devices like fade-in and fade-out, overlapping dissolves,and stop motion photography. Through these techniques and showmanship Miliesbegan to push the medium of film from mundane single action shotsinto a narrative story telling vehicle. But Milies was very much grounded in the theatermode of thinking. His narratives were comprised of tableaus- detailed scenes all shot from the same angle - like a viewer who had the perfect theaterseat. In the 500 or so films he created, Meliesnever once moved the camera - even going so far as to mount the set andmoon on elaborate dollies for this famous shot from The Voyage to the Moon instead of moving the camera - which wouldhave been much more practical.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, another key figurewas getting his start in the infant filmmaking industry: Edwin S. Porter. Porter started off as a Vitascope Projectionist,setting up the first Edison projection in Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York Cityin April of 1896. For a few years he operated his own equipmentuntil 1900 when he joined Edison Manufacturing company and became head of production for Edison'sSkylight studio in 1901. For the next five years he served as Edison'sgo to director and cameraman. Porter's projectionist background gave himsome unique insight into film.
Greatly influenced by the work of Milies especially1902's A Trip To the Moon - often duplicating it for distribution for Edison albeit illegally Porter decided to try his hand at a narrativefilm with 1903's "Life of an American Fireman". Firemen were common subject matter for earlyfilms but what Porter did was rather unique. He took stock footage from the large EdisonLibrary and spliced them together with staged scenes to create a fictional narrative. Porter was still stuck in the Tableaux mentality- constructing each shot as a complete scene. Temporal overlaps, where action is duplicatedfrom one shot to the other, were common - as in this opening shot where the firemenall rush down the pole followed by a shot from the bottom of the pole beforethe firemen land... to our modern sensibilities would be likea mini flashback. Porter does this again in the fire rescue- first showing the drama from the inside of the building then movingoutside and showing the same rescue from the perspective of the firemen. This editing looks long and clunky to ourmodern sensibilities but the overlap was acceptable to contemporary audiences who were still amazedby these flicker machines and looking for animated photographs. But the novelty would wear off and Porterhimself would push the narrative envelope a bit further by the end of 1903 with hislandmark film: The Great Train Robbery.
Here Porter is more decisive with his cutting.Although each scene is still one master take, he cuts straight between scenes without usingfades or dissolves and, most importantly, without letting the scenereach it's logical end. For example - Porter cuts out of this shotbefore the train has cleared the frame. This departure shows how filmmakers were beginningto see editing's ability to compress time in favor of impact over reality. Porter was beginning to forge a new cinematiclanguage.
Through his work we start to see that themost basic unit of cinema was NOT the scene as Milies and his contemporaries thought,but the shot. Meaning came not only in the spatial arrangementof objects and actors in a frame like in theater and in still photography - but in the way that shots are arranged intime. But like Georges Milies before him, Porterwould only take editing so far. Cinema would require another artist to buildon their work and expand the editing vocabulary And in one of those serendipitous momentsof history, Porter would inspire just that artist. In 1908, just before leaving Edison to starthis own production company, Portered hired a young starving actor to fillthe lead part in "Rescued from an Eagle's Nest" This would end up being the first break ofa 40-year-career of one David Wark Griffith. The seventh child of a Confederate Army Colonelfrom a rural district of Kentucky, David Wark Griffith tried everything - from hop picking, selling encyclopediasdoor-to-door to acting.
His life-long ambition was to be a writerfalling in love with Victorian style of literature especially that of Dickens but his poems and plays were unremarkable. Acting on advice from a friend, Griffith triedhis hand at 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 hired the young handsome Griffith to starin one of his films. That's when the Filmmaking bug bit... Griffithfound a position at Biograph, a production company struggling in debt and looking fordirectors. After directing "The Adventures of Dollie"which was shot in 2 days, Griffith was given a $45-a-week director's contract. Under contract ot Biograph, Griffith wouldmake over 450 films from 1908-1911, pushing cinema out of the primitive tableau mentalityand into a multi shot medium 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 afterhis first film for Biograph.
Griffith cut from a medium long shot of ahanging tree to a full shot in the middle of the scene to emphasize the emotional impact of an exchangebetween 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 calledcontinuity editing. Continuity editing is cutting between shotswith the purpose of maintaining smooth sense of continuous space and time. With multiple camera setups being used, the180 degree rule evolved out of practice. Griffith as well as his contemporaries discoveredthat if you kept the camera on one side of the axis of action(that's the imaginary line where movements, eyeline occurs), you can avoid continuity problems of confusinggeography when cutting from one angle to another. Griffith's next invention in editing wasone that would become his favorite - intercutting or crosscutting -bouncing between two different scenes in a parallel action which he first put to useon After Many Years based on the poem Enoch Ardenshowing a shipwrecked man and the woman he left at home. Now this is commonplace in today's cinemalanguage but wholly new at the time. Biograph's managers thought the experimentwas dangerous and would be confusing to the public, but Griffith stood firm, likening the technique to the writing styleof Dickens.
It paid off, as After Many Years was hailedas a masterpiece. Griffith upped the ante again in 1909 with"The Lonely Villa" intercutting between 3 parallel actions - a woman held up in a house, robbers tryingto break in, and a husband rushing home to rescue. Griffith amps up the tension by continouslybuilding up the tempo of the cuts faster and faster to an ultimate cinematic climax. Through varying the spatial distance withlong medium and close up shots and the temporary length of shots,Griffith began to establish the tenets of classic Hollywood continuity editing.
Through practical problem solving and experimentation,he and contemporary filmmakers who often copied the style, brought about concepts like the establishing shot, reverse shots, matchingeyelines - everything we think about in terms of continuity editing. By 1911 Griffith was ready to pursue biggerand more ambitious projects. More ambitious than the managers of Biograph could stomach. He left and after a stint with Mutual Pictures,Griffith stuck out on his own. In 1914, Griffith released an independentthat would be cinema's most expensive movie ever made at that time but also the first world wide blockbuster:"The Birth of a Nation" A major hit, but condemed as racist even duringit's time, The Birth of a Nation was the culmination of all of Griffith's editingand cinematic techniques. But the pro-Ku Klux Klan film didn't sitwell with many, Censorship boards requested alterations, somestates flat out banned the film as riots broke out at premieres in Boston, Atlanta and Chicago. A born and raised Confederate Kentucky Colonel'sson Griffith couldn't understand the charge of racism and saw all this as an attack on him personally - he responded by publishing a pamphlet: TheRise and Fall of Free Speech in America, vigorously defending his film against whathe thought was Intolerance.
In 1916 he set out to make a massive epicdecrying just that - Intolerance. Intercutting 4 separate narratives, Intolerancecost nearly 2.5 million dollars to produce, sinking most of the profits from Birth ofa Nation which only cost $115,000. The first cut ran 8 hours before Griffithcame to his senses and trimmed it to a tidy 3 and a half hours. But that wasn't enough - Intolerance bombedat the box office. Though Griffith would still go on to direct26 more features he would die still paying off the debt on Intolerance. D.W. Griffith remains a controversial figureof history but he almost singlehandedly invented the conventions of editing that would establish the continuity style of cutting that is stillvery much with us today. His greatest artistic and financial gamblefailed but Intolerance was not destined for obscurity. Instead - it would be key to the developmentof a new style of editing devised by Soviet Filmmakers who studied and picked apart Griffith'sediting style. A new theory of editing they called montagewhich we'll explore in the next lesson. Even in the birth of cinema, the first 20years of filmmaking, the history of editing has been the story offilmmakers learning from each other and adding their own voice into the mix. Cinema was becoming a language, and editingis the syntax. Learn it and use it - go make something great, I'm John Hess and I'll see you at FilmmakerIQ.com
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