Since we did some editing in the tutorials this week, I thought that a bit of research on editing, more specifically continuity editing might be a good topic to write about this week.

After the first ever public screening of the Lumiere films in 1895, stage magician Georges Melies attempted to buy the Lumiere camera from them but he was refused as they seen him as potential competitor. Not to be discouraged, he bought an English made projector and using his mechanical background he created his own camera. In 1896 after making a few of his own films, he was shooting his new picture when suddenly the camera jammed as it was filming a bus. By the time the camera started operating again the bus was replaced by a hearse. When Melies developed the film he discovered that the bus he was filming suddenly turned into the hearse and unintentionally creating the first jump cut. He took full advantage of this new found technique as he used jump cuts in his film to make people appear and disappear, astounding audiences. He also developed other editing techniques such as the fade in and fade out, overlapping dissolves and stop motion photography.

Edwin S. Porter was another influential figure in the birth of modern editing, as his film The Great Train Robbery was the first film to cut straight between the scenes without the use of fades or dissolves as well as without letting the scene reaches its logical end. This was an important step as it showed that filmmakers were begging to see editing as a tool to compress time. This changed the vocabulary in cinema as well as instead of a being simply called a scene, thanks to Porter cinema moved further away from its theatrical roots with the word “shot” as now filmmakers started to see a film a series of shots edited together. However Porter only took editing so far so another pioneer needed to innovate even further.

This pioneer was none other than D.W. Griffiths as he took the cinema into the multi shot medium we now know today. One of his first inventions was the “cut in” used in The Greaser’s Gauntlet in 1908 as he cut from a medium long shot of a tree to a wide shot in the middle of the scene, to highlight the emotional exchange between two actors. Griffiths continued to experiment as he set up multiple camera set ups to play with various shot types. This in turn, created the term “continuity editing”, a cutting style that maintains a sense of continuous space and time. Through his multi camera set up he also discovered the “180 degree rule” which by keeping the camera on one side of the axis of action can eliminate any continuity problems of confusing geography when cutting from one angle to another. Yet another intention by Griffiths was the “cross-cutting” which allowed parallel cutting of two different scenes. With so many inventions, as controversial a figure as he may be, D.W. Griffiths was instrumental in the modern day editing techniques that we grew up with.

Bordwell, David, Kristin Thompson, and Jeremy Ashton. Film art: An introduction. Vol. 7. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.