HND Creative Media

James Quigley

Unit 33
Film Editing History and Technique

Early films mainly consisted of a presentation of shots in series which

would show some sort of action taking place, with the Lumiere Brothers
who operated a factory producing photographic equipment in Lyon,
making a film of its Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory, being noted
as their first film to gain a public audience in Paris 1895. Having invented
the Cinematographe machine based on their own version of existing
technology as manufactured by Leon Guilliame Bouly, their invention
would be able to operate as a camera, projector and film printer, with all
three functions incorporated in one device.
In comparison to other technology of the time such as the Edison
Kinetoscope which originally weighed 500 pounds, the Lumieres
Cinematographe was a more mobile machine and this manouverability
allowed them to be used in more varied situations for their series of films
they called actualities or documentary views. Similar to the Edison
Kinetoscope films which had been produced and labelled living
pictures , the Lumieres output followed a set structure operating from a
static camera position, with the resulting action running continuously from
beginning to end, with no thought given to editing the reality taking
place in front of the camera. At this point in Film History filmmakers
content tended to centre around entertaining or amusing subjects which
would later be described as the cinema of attractions by film historians,
with no real narrative being developed to tell stories.

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 Around the turn of the century though this started
to change, when shots started to be edited
together in a bid to develop storylines in the new
medium. One of the earliest proponents of a
slowly developing narrative style was a
contemporary of the Lumieres , Georges Melies who had
offered to buy one of their Cinematographe machines from

them for 10,000 Francs but had been refused, the Lumieres seeing
the Cinematographe as a serious instrument for documenting the worlds
of science and anthropology, rather than as entertainment as Melies (who
performed as a magician/illusionist on stage) viewed it.
The possibilities of the new technology were beginning to be realised
by Melies where perhaps the Lumieres could not visualise it, and after
securing and adapting various different cameras as the technology
developed, he would go on to make films with a primitive narrative in
which different shots would succeed each other in a bid to build a
plot/storyline of some sort, as evidenced in his A
Trip to the Moon 1902,and Impossible Voyage
1904 films.
Although both films really served to display
Melies growing skill incorporating camera tricks as
dominant attractions, they also showed his
developing incorporation of narrative to the new
medium. Having initially produced actualities
and some conjurors tricks in the style of the
Lumieres and the Edison company for projection in his theatre in Paris,
Melies would go on to devote himself more to fictional film as his career
progressed.
Melies would go on to set up his own film company to cater for the
fairground clientele, who were enamoured by his illusions and growing
art, while the Lumieres had embarked on a series of ethnographic

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documentaries, sending camera operators all over the globe to document
the world using the new film form, in keeping
with their belief that the Cinematographe was
a serious instrument in the pursuit of scientific
and historical study.
Melies early films were quite similar in
content to his magic theatre shows with
conjuring tricks and objects dissappearing or
changing size, as in The Four Troublesome
Headsin which Melies removes his own head three times. As he made
more films he began to experiment more with the new technology, and he
is credited with some inventive techniques eg. using multiple exposures
in his film The One Man Band in which he assumes the roles of 7
different characters simultaneously. He is also credited with the Stop
Trick/Substitution Trick which he discovered when filming a street scene in
Paris with his camera jamming in the

process, and when it resumed after a short delay a bus had turned
into a hearse and women had changed into men.
Having built his own Film Studio at his home outside Paris, with a
glass wall construction to allow for natural light to enhance the exposure
for film, and his actors performing in front of a painted set similar to the
magic and musical theatre of the day. The introduction of his own studio
allowed for further experimentation especially in the use of the technology
and the editng process, much of which was performed in camera. He
would superimpose images to create a double exposure, and also
developed the Reverse Shot where he would crank a strip of film
backwards through his camera to acquire the desired aesthetic from his
arsenal of developing special effects, as seen in A Dinner Under
Difficulties.

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 Melies
would go
on to
produce
over 500
films
between 1-
40 minutes in length and is probably best known for his magic
tricks and feeries ( fairy stories), he would also cover comedies, dramas,
historical reconstructions and even advertisements in his career from
1896 - 1913.
At around the same time as Melies was making films in France, DW
Griffiths was also pursuing a filmmaking career with Biograph Films
between 1908 and 1913 in America. During this period Griffiths would
make more than 400 films and many of which would flow with a
seamlessness of storytelling that set them apart, with characters and plot
moving through a story with more narrative structure, in an ordered and
linear progression through the film. This technique had been employed by
-
Edwin S Porter grandafather of the narrative editing style1, which
would also come to be known as the continuity style, and it allowed the
presentation of a story in forward progression, Griffiths becoming one of
its greatest exponents, with it becoming the dominant editing form in film
editing ever since, with some historians believing its use helped Griffiths
to be the cinemas first great auter.

Griffiths brought a new seriousness to the craft of filmmaking and

moved away from the cinema of attractions that had preceeded him,
bringing further innovation to the editing process as well as filming
techniques. One of his first innovations was to -
alternate shots of different spatial lengths ( i.e of different camera
to subject distance) to create cinematic sentences within sceneslater he

1 Allen,RC and Gomery,D

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 would cut long shots, medium shots, close
shots and close-ups together in order to
render a single dramatic scene from multiple
points of view.2
Incorporating these techniques had allowed
Griffiths to break up his scene into a number
of shots to create more interest and dramatic intent, and in so doing he
had brought the audience into the action, breaking away from the static
camera position and the hitherto set distance between the audience and
the action. Through this experimentation Griffiths learned the value of the
close-up as opposed to other spatial lengths, allowing the actors to
convey emotion through facial expression rather than the histrionic code
of broad gestures previously ubiquitous in filmmaking with the use of
much wider shots. Having been an actor himself these close-ups allowed
Griffiths to fill the screen with the actors face, and
in so doing giving greater
emphasis to their reactions would
help to convey more complex
psychological
emotions, and
heighten their intensity.
In contrast to the close-up Griffiths also realised the
importance of the extreme wide and long shots,
which would help visually to convey a sense of scale/perspective,
sometimes with epic effect as employed in his film The Birth of a Nation
1914. Editing these different shots together allowed Griffiths to construct
his narrative -
Narrative flow is pieced together out of small fragments of action in
such a way that the piecing together goes unnoticed and the action
appears continuous.3

2 Cook,D

3Hill,J and Gibso,P p45

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 4
Griffiths believed - . films were narratives or stories, that were
told through the arrangement not of words, but of moving photographic
images, and as his career developed so did technology, allowing him to
be more inventive and ambitious with his filmmaking,
The contribution of Porter, Ince, and Griffith followed as much from
the availability of portable cameras, interchangeable lenses and improved
emulsions as it did from their individual artistic vision and talent.5
And so having started his career with one reel productions which
Porter before him had fought hard to attain, ( Porters employers sceptical
that the public would sit through a film a FULL reel in length), Griffiths
would later have a similar argument with his employers BIOGRAPH FILMS,
in order for him to adapt more ideas and develop stories on a two reel
format that could then be acheived with changing
technology ie. larger magazines and the introduction of
the Latham Loop technology in the camera which
allowed reels of greater length to be used without
breaking.
In camera editing was still at the forefront of
Griffiths narrative structure, and he would develop the
motivated points of view shot, where he would
cut from a character looking at something off-
screen to a shot of what the character sees, also the flashback, where
the present narrative is interupted by a shot or possibly a series of shots
that return us briefly to the past. In his 1909 melodrama The Lonely Villa
he intercut between 3 parallel actions happening simultaneously, a band
of brigands attempting to break into a home, with one of the householders
and her children trying to keep them at bay, and thirdly the husband
rushing to rescue his family. Cutting from one scene to another
continuously he gradually increased the tempo between the three
scenarios until they all converged into a dramatic climax, a technique that
would be developed further in Soviet Cinema.

4 Cook, D A PG56

5 Fielding,R from film history-theory and practice page 112

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 Sergei Eisenstein came to prominence as a film director in Russia,
after the Russian revolution of 1917, embarking on his film career after
serving in the Red Army as an engineer. With a state sponsored film
industry behind him the Russian director had a great deal of freedom to
experiment with editing techniques, and writing in the review Lef he
suggested a new editing form, which he called the montage of
attractions. This new approach would involve the insertion of impact
images independent from the action, and positioned in a non linear way,
in whichever time-frame would engender the maximum psychological
impact on the audience to provoke a strong emotional response, guiding
them through to the intended message, which often involved important
political ideologies in many of his films. Film had already come a long way
in a few short decades, and Eisensteins editing allowed much more
intellectually complex ideals to come into play, allowing the text to be
developed further and used as propaganda.
This concept was much to the fore in Eisensteins first film in 1924,
Strike, which told the story of the brutal repression of a strike by Tsarist
soldiers. Employing his montage of attractions theory in the editing
process, Eisenstein intertwined images of workers being decimated by
machine guns, with those of cattle being butchered in a slaughterhouse,
the metaphor being less than subtle, but powerful nonetheless. Building
on the intercutting technique utilised a decade earlier by Griffiths, it
attempted to agitate the audience into identifying with the striking

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 workers, it worked, with the film widely
acclaimed.
He again used the montage technique with
great effect in 1925, in his masterpiece
Battleship Potemkin, most famously in the
Odessa Steps scenes. Celebrating the rebellion
of a Russian Naval crew against its own officers,
the film was so evocative that it would be banned
in the UK for thirty years fearing it would lead to
worker insurrection, but ultimately would be voted the Best Film ever
made, by an international poll of critics at the Brussels World Fair in 1958.

Although Eisenstein would only complete 7 films in his 23 year career,

the bearing of these films and his theoretical writings on film form, would
leave a body of work that only DW Griffiths could match in terms of
importance to the film medium. While he had been working within the
realms of the silent film, technology kept progressing and by the 1930s
the first talking movies were to grab the attention of the viewing public.
Thomas Edison had initially built his Kinetoscope as an
accompaniment to his existing phonograph technology for sound
recording, and had always intended to try to link the two together. The
Lumieres too recognising the importance of sound, provided a pianist to
accompany their first screenings.The link proved difficult and there were
many attempts by various manufacturers to acheive it at the turn of the
century, all of which relied on the phonograph to reproduce the
soundtrack to accompany the film performance. At the outset wax
cylinders were used which developed later into the use of discs -
.but all had three difficulties in common: synchronizing the sound
recording with the filmed event, amplifying the sound for presentation to
a large audience, and reconciling the brevity of the cylinder and disc
formats with the standard length of motion pictures.6

6 Cook, D A PG205

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 While these limitations were being addressed as technology changed
there were many failed attempts to resolve the issues at hand, for
instance the phonographic cylinder had a playing time of 4 minutes while
the 12 inch disc that replaced it had only a slightly improved 5 minute
duration, which was a problem for the lengthening narrative films that
were being developed after 1905. Bigger discs were tried but they were
found to be of an inferior sound quality. Multiple discs too were tried, but
often led to synchronisation issues.The issues with amplification was
usually dealt with by placing an array of single-horn speakers behind the
screen, while experiments with the compressed-air-speakers which are
used today started in around 1910.
While the goal of reliable synchronised sound was still being
formulated, cinemas often employed musicians (pianists and organists
especially), sometimes even full orchestras to enhance the film
experience after the first original piece of film music composed in1907 for
the film LAssassinat du duc de Guise. But this proved costly and
economics drove the search for an inexpensive and effective means of
recording sound for films continued during and after the war (First), when
experimental emphasis shifted from sound-on-disc to sound-on-film
systems.7

In 1910 Eugene Augustin Lauste was the first person to successfully

record sound directly on a film strip side by side with the image, by means
of converting sound-modulated light beams into electrical impulses by
way of a photoconductive selenium cell. However this new optical sound
would not be perfected until after the First World War, when in 1919 three
German inventors patented the Tri Ergon sound on film process. Another
innovation came in 1923 when the American Dr Lee de Forest patented a
similar system that also solved the issue of amplification, when he
incorporated his Audion tube into his sound on film process, allowing
more amplification than had been possible before. De Forest would go on
to make one and two-reel phonofilms each week, including musical

7 Cook, D A PG207

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performances and speeches from prominent people. However Hollywood
would not take up his process as to do so would involve big and expensive
changes to their current means of production, and Hollywood executives
believed talking films were an expensive novelty and it wasnt until a
rival sound on disc system
named Vitaphone (1926)
had huge success that they
re-evaluated their position.
Warner Bros, with
financial backing from
investment bank Goldman
Sachs would lease the
Vitaphone sound system from
its developers Western Electric, and
sub-lease it to other studios. The initial idea being that it would bring
synchronized musical accompaniment to all Warner Bros. Productions,
without the need for musicians or dependent on the size of a theatre, with
still no thought given to talking movies at this point. The studio would
debut its new technology in the film Don Juan with a soundtrack
performed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in August 1926. After
an expensive advertising campaign it would run in New York for 8 weeks
and be seen by more than 500,000 people receiving rave reviews. This led
Warner Bros. to announce that all their silent
films of 1927 would have synchronized
musical aacaccompaniment.

Later the same year Al Jolson starring in

The Jazz Singer, described as a singing
movie , would ad-lib briefly on screen in an
informal way amongst the musical content
and the audience would be wowed, having
grown used to the conventions of silent film this new development
captured their imagination and the talking movie had been born. With

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Hollywood realising it was here to stay, (Fox having bought the American
rights to the Tri-Ergon process), other studios signed the Big 5 agreement
to adopt a uniform sound system, and would now invest in their own
sound-recording equipment.
A year after its part-talkie featuring Al
Jolson it was again Warner Bros who would
premiere the first 100% all - talkie, Lights
of NewYork in 1928. With the industry totally
converting to sound by 1929, amid massive
investment to overhaul and update systems
of production and exhibition.
At around the same time as sound
making its mark on the film industry, the
introduction of natural Colour was to
further enhance the viewing experience.
1928 saw Technicolor introduce a imbibition dye transfer process,
which made it possible to mass produce release prints in a process they
would use into the 1970s. Like sound, colour had been part of the film
experience for a long time going back to the days of Melies and Edison,
both of whom had various films laboriously hand tinted for effect frame by
frame. But as films got longer and the demand for the number of prints
grew it became unviable to pursue this method, and Pathe would produce
its Pathecolor stencil process which allowed any one of 6 standard colours
to be added to a print, run through a staining machine at 60 feet per
minute, mechanising and speeding up the whole process to keep up with
demand., with it being used in europe right up to the 1930s.
But the two-colour process could lead to poorly rendered colour on
screen in the early days (blamed on untrained studio cameramen by
Technicolour), with varying tints of skin tones especially annoying
audiences. And lighting had become more of an issue as well with the new
process as arc lighting was needed with the Technicolor format. When
Eastman introduced its Panchromatic film stock in 1928 which registered
tones from a wider colour

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 range than ever before, it meant that less expensive
incandescent/tungsten lighting could be used. Technicolour would
introduce a three way process in 1932 that would bring more accurate
tones and greater uniformity, and this would become the norm for colour
over the next 2 decades. However overcoming these issues took time and
Black and White remained the standard for early talkies, right up to the
early 1950s when technological advances in colour and lighting systems
meant the colour look could be acheived at less expense.
While there would be further developments in the industry in the
30s, the outbreak of War in Europe in 1939 would wreak havoc on many
national film industries across Europe, with only Italy keeping its
production facilities reasonably intact. Because of this after the war saw
the Golden age of Italian Cinema , with Roma, citta aperta directed by
Roberto Rossellini giving birth to Italian Neo-Realism. Released in 1945 it
was filmed on the streets of Rome (due to the damage to the Cinecitta
film studios) during the Nazi occupation, and would set the template for
the film movement that was to follow.
One of the most famous films of the Neo-Realism movement was
Vittorio de Sicas The Bicycle Thief,1948, which helped establish many
of the conventions of Neo-Realism - focusing on the struggles of working
class life, using non-professional actors, shooting on location with
available light - and it would help to redirect cinema away from its classic
roots to a new post war
modernism, being cited as
one of the 15 most
influential films of all time
by Turner Classic Movies,
leading director Franc
Roddam to say -
. set in post war
Italy, this film brings a

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beautiful brutal honesty to the plight of the have nots8, and would
influence his own cult classic Quadrophenia.

De Sica a keen supporter of the Communist party believed in social

justice and his films gave a voice to to the oppressed and the poor, with
his realist approach giving beauty to the ordinary as also seen in
Umberto D, and inspired by Soviet cinema previously.
Having acted himself De Sica thought it .. a strange illusion that a
few people could faithfully embody the experience of so many.De Sica
was casting according to the authenticty of a face, De Sica asserted there
are millions of characters, but only 50 or 60 movie stars9.
His films aimed to get into the psyche of post war Italy and the use of
sound allowed him to formulate more complex ideas than was probably
possible in the silent era, with the use of title cards for dialogue not
condusive to elaboration.
With sound and colour and the further development of technology
including the use of smaller handheld cameras allowing the French
Nouvelle Vague directors of the 1950s to indulge in a freer form of
filmmaking (inspired by Italian Neo Realism), the advancing technology
allowing for the further development of filmmakers vocabulary and
pallette over the coming decades.

8 Roddam, F http://www.criterion.com

9 The gaurdian.com

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