History of Editing

History of Editing                      29/09/15

Filmmaking IQ – History of Cutting - The Birth of Cinema and Continuity Editing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uahjH2cspk

Primitive Cinema – In December 28^th 1895, the first public cinema screening occurred in the basement of the Grand Café, by the Lumiere brothers.

Animatograph – George Melies, who saw the first screening of a film, and who was a professional magician, saw much more potential for films than them simply being animated photographs. Owned and operated a Theatre. He attempted to by a cinematographe form the Lumiere’s but they refused as they saw him as potential competition. Unfazed by this Melies, who had also been a mechanic, he bought an English made projector, called an animatograph, for less money. He reversed the mechanics on this projector and made a camera. Melies shot and showed his own films. Whilst filming one of his films in 1896, Melies accidentally invented the ‘jump cut’. Melies put this to work in his films – using the ‘jump cut’ to create disappearing and reappearing effects. Melies also invented the ‘Fade in and Fade Out’, ‘Overlapping Dissolves’, and ‘Stop Motion Photography’. Melies started to tell actual stories through his films. Melies made about 500 films.

Primitive cinema and Animatograph work are like tableaux - they are done all from the same angle/a-fixed-positon, as if you were watching a play.

Beyond the tableau to the birth of the edit…

Beyond the tableau – Edwin S. Porter set up the first Edison projector – (Edison as in Thomas Edison) – in Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, in April 1896. He became head of production for the Edison Skylight Studio, New York, in 1901. For the next five year’s he served as Edison’s go-to Director and Camera-man. Porter was inspired by Melies and tried his hand at a narrative story told through film – and in 1903 his film ‘Life of an American Fireman’ was produced. At this time temporal overlaps were very common. In 1903 Porter’s next film, ‘The Great Train Robbery’, sees Porter cut straight between scenes without using fades or dissolves, and without letting the scene reach it’s logical end – it only shows you what you need to see. Here Porter is very decisive in his cuts. This shows how Directors were seeing the ability to compress time in favour of impact over reality. Porter was beginning to form a new cinematic language. Through Porter’s pieces we begin to the see that the most basic unit of cinema was not the scene as Melies contemporaries thought, but the shot. Meaning not just how things are arranged not he screen but how the shots are arranged in time.

In 1908, just before leaving Edison to start his own production company, Porter hired a young actor fill the lead part in ‘Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest’. This would end up being the ‘first break’ of a forty year long career for David W. Griffith.

D. W. Griffith’s stage-name was Lawrence Griffith.  (One of Griffith’s inspirations was Charles Dickens). Griffith’s plays and poems that he wrote were not brilliant, however he started to write scenarios for films and became good at it. He sent one of his movie production scenarios to Porter, however it was rejected for having to man scenes, but Griffith did get hired for an acting job in ‘Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest’. Griffith then found a positon at ‘Biograph’, a production company struggling with debt but looking to find Directors. Under a contract for ‘Biograph’ Griffith made over 450 films for them between 1908 and 1911, pushing cinema out of the primitive tableau mentality and into the multi-shot-medium that we would now recognise.

One of Griffith’s first inventions was the ‘cut-in’. Griffith also used alternating shot lengths and multiple camera set-ups to create a scene through continuity editing.

Continuity Editing – Cutting style that maintains a continuous sense of space and time.

180° Rule – Griffith, as well as his contemporaries, discovered that if you kept the camera on one side of the axis of action, you can avoid continuity problems of confusing geography, when cutting from one angle to another.

Griffith’s next invention in editing was ‘Inter-cutting’, or ‘Cross-cutting’: which is basically cutting between shots in different scenes in parallel action. (Griffith first put this to use in ‘After Many years’, in 1908).

Griffith also began to build up the tempo of his cuts to get to his cinematic climaxes.

Many contemporary film makers copied Griffith’s style. However, Griffith’s and some other contemporary film makers, brought about; ‘the Establishing Shot’, ‘Reverse Shots’, ‘Matching Eye-lines’, and ‘Cutting on Action’.

By 1911, Griffith was ready to pursue bigger and more ambitious projects. He left ‘Biograph’ and became more adventurous with his filming. After a bit Griffith struck out on his own. In 1914/1915 Griffith made and showed an independent film that was cinema’s most expensive film to date, and the world’s first blockbuster: ‘The Birth of a Nation’. A major hit, but condemned as racist even during it’s time – because of the pro-views on the Klu Klux Klan. This film was a combination of all of Griffith’s cinematic techniques. Censorship boards requested alterations and many states actually banded the film, as riots broke out in places such as Boston. Griffith couldn’t understand his charges of racism and saw this as an attack on him personally; he responded by publishing a pamphlet, ‘The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America’. In this publication he defended his film and his right to make it, against what he though was intolerance. In 1916, he created another film called ‘Intolerance’ that intercut four separate narratives, and cost 2.5 million dollars to produce. This sunk most of the profit from ‘The Birth of a Nation’, which costed less to produce. Intolerance did not make enough at the box office. Griffith went on to Director 26 more features and died still in debt from ‘Intolerance’. Griffith was/is a controversial figure.

Soviet film makers studied and picked apart Griffith’s editing style and developed a new style of editing. This theory was the Montage theory.

Montage Theory – Using juxtaposing images by editing. During the 1920s, the pioneering Russian film directors and theorists Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov created, demonstrated and used this theory in their work.