Pioneers of Film Editing

Looking back through the history of film editing, there have been
important individuals who have taken film from raw beginnings towards
the recognisable films that we see today. In this documentary, we’ll see
how different editing techniques have changed cinema from the 19th
century to present day.

In the 19th century, the Lumiere Brothers,

Auguste and Louis, were the first to develop
and invent their own version of running a film
through the camera and projector with the use
of film perforations. They first recorded this in
1895 showing workers leaving the Lumiere
factory. They also followed it up in 1898 with
the train arriving at the station. (Show clip of
the train arriving at the station)

The brothers gave their first public screening

of the workers leaving their factory on the 28th
December 1895. (Show clip of workers leaving
factory)

In 1898, Georges Melies, who began his career as a magician, was one
of the first to use a camera, featuring reverse cranking, which allowed the
same film footage to be exposed many times and to create multiple
exposures, and he used this technique on his film ‘The Four
Troublesome Heads’. What came out of that film was using more than
one of the same person in the film sequence. (Show clip of four
troublesome heads) He also used stop editing which is cutting out the
bits of the film that you don’t want and taping them together to make it
look like magic. This is explained in the movie ‘Hugo’. (Show a bit of
the scene from Hugo)

He also used the dissolve method which ends one sequence of film
which then dissolves into another sequence of film. (Show a scene from
Trip to the Moon) This was shown in some of Georges’ classic films like
‘Trip to the Moon’ in 1902.

The American Edwin S Porter in 1897, who originally worked for the
Edison Company, invented the Beadnell film projector. He went on to
develop edit on film outside the camera by
splicing and cutting between shots. He also
used dissolves which transfer one image to
another. Cross cutting and parallel editing
were used on his notable film ‘The Great
Train Robbery’ in 1903 which was shown
more than 100 years ago. (Show clip from
GTR)

Parallel editing is the technique of going between two or more scenes

that happened together but in different locations. The first example of
this editing process was shown in ‘The Great Train Robbery’, and a
modern example is shown in modern movies like ‘The Godfather’.

Parallel editing is used in film to build dramatic tension and show the
relationship between characters in their own worlds. This is shot in the
present showing what happens to one person and other people in their
own lives at the same time. The technique adds another layer of suspense
or pacing to a scene (how quick it is). (Show definition on presentation)

Cross cutting can take the form of past, present and future shots to show
the relationship between the main character and their relationship with
the rest of the world. (show definition on presentation)

Before he started film direction in America, D. W. Griffith was also an

actor and writer. Then he started his film directorial career as a result as
having to take a movie over from a director who never showed up. In
1915, he directed his feature-length silent film ‘Birth of a Nation’ which
was about two families on two opposite sides of the American Civil War
and was considered racist. His next film was ‘Intolerance’ which sought
to rebalance this racist view.
The same thing as Edwin S Porter did, he used cross cutting in most of
his films to enhance the scene’s emotional and dramatic emphasis. He
also did lots of close ups (framing the actor’s head and shoulders) to give
them more intensity to the scene, and he used parallel editing as well to
create tension and emotion in the scene. From 1905 to 1931, he directed
518 films altogether and also was a co-founder of United Artists
Production Company with Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford
and Douglas Fairbanks.

Later on, Lev Kuleshov was a Russian

filmmaker and theorist, and founded the
Moscow Film Score, which developed a style
known as Soviet Montage which he edited and
cut to emotionally influence the audience and
also was propaganda for the Soviet state.

The Kuleshov Effect was a film showing a shot

of an actor into cut with other images of a bowl
of soup, a dead girl in a coffin, and a beautiful woman lying on a sofa.
This effect showed how the viewer would feel and interpret various
images, even though the face of the actor was the same shot.

Following on from Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein was also known for the
Soviet Montage, showing a series of unrelated shots shown one after
another. A good example of this is the Odessa Steps shown in the film
‘Battleship Potemkin’ in 1925. He became famous for his editing style,
which he used to create stories. He had five styles of editing. The first
was metric, which gives a sense of pace and emotional response by
changing the length of shot, the second was rhythmic, where the rhythm
of the conflict flowed together with the pace of the scene, the third was
tonal, where the basic concept was scenes with happy tones had lots of
quick cuts, and sad scenes would have longer shots with a slower rhythm,
the fourth was over-tonal, which is an edited compilation of metric, tonal
and rhythmic montages to draw an emotional response to the audience.
And finally, intellectual, which was a compilation of shots that showed
visual images that oppressed the people, as a propaganda exercise to
show the success of the new Soviet state. (Show definitions in
presentation)
La Nouvelle Vague (translated as The New Wave) of directors began as
critics for the film magazine ‘Cahiers du cinema’ (translated as
Notebooks of Cinema) which expressed that cinema should become a
means of expression similar to painting and the novel in which an artist
or director could express thoughts and obsessions, however abstract
within a new style of film editing.

These pioneers included Francois Truffant, Jean–Luc Godard, Eric

Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette.

The new style resisted against the traditional French cinema and the films
produced by this group were low budget and the directors were forced
to improvise with equipment.

The new wave featured different methods of film such as long tracking
shots, and jump cuts (cuts taken out of a long take).

The style of ‘new wave’, during the 1950s and 1960s, used an improved
style of dialogue and editing, which included rapid changes of scene and
shots that went over the accepted 180 degree access of camera
movement. The concept of the viewers, to show more a series of
disjointed shots, rather than a set narrative. (Show examples/videos of
their work in presentation)

In Godard’s French movie ‘Breathless’ in 1960, the film used editing

techniques like Jump Cuts, character asides (talk to the screen) and it
breaks eyeline match in continuity editing. (Show a clip from Breathless
in presentation)

The new wave style had a great influence on future directors such as
Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch. (Show pictures
of future directors)

I hope you’ve enjoyed my special video about the pioneers of film

editing, and I’m hoping to be inspired by the work that these people have
done over the past years and incorporate parts of this into my future
videos on my YouTube page.
I got these clips from YouTube and converted them in mp4 files.

Seb Sandford