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Hi - John Hess from Filmmaker IQ.com and today we'll look at the birth of Film Editing
the origins of the cinematic language and the beginning of continuity editing.
It's hard for modern audiences who are grew up with video to imagine the spectacle of
the first film screening in 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 completely unseen before.
In the year of film's infancy, the dancing shadows 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 Cafe screening saw much more potential:
a professional magician by the name of Georges Melies who owned and operated the Theatre
Robert-Houdin.
He attempted to buy a Cinematographe machine for ten thousand Francs.
But the Lumieres saw him as potential competition and 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 shooting a bus coming out of a tunnel
when his camera jammed in the middle of the take. When he got the camera working again,
the bus was gone and replaced by a hearse.
When Melies developed the film, he discovered a startling and magical thing
- the bus turned into the hearse right there on 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 lantern experience Melies also introduced editing
devices
like fade-in and fade-out, overlapping dissolves, and stop motion photography.
Through these techniques and showmanship Milies began to push the medium of film from mundane
single action shots into a narrative story telling vehicle.
But Milies was very much grounded in the theater mode of thinking.
His narratives were comprised of tableaus - detailed scenes all shot from the same angle
- like a viewer who had the perfect theater seat.
In the 500 or so films he created, Melies never once moved the camera
- even going so far as to mount the set and moon on elaborate dollies for this famous
shot from The Voyage to the Moon
instead of moving the camera - which would have been much more practical.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, another key figure was 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 City in April of 1896.
For a few years he operated his own equipment until 1900 when he joined Edison Manufacturing
company
and became head of production for Edison's Skylight studio in 1901.
For the next five years he served as Edison's go to director and cameraman.
Porter's projectionist background gave him some unique insight into film.
Greatly influenced by the work of Milies especially 1902's A Trip To the Moon - often duplicating
it for distribution for Edison
albeit illegally
Porter decided to try his hand at a narrative film with 1903's "Life of an American
Fireman".
Firemen were common subject matter for early films but what Porter did was rather unique.
He took stock footage from the large Edison Library 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 duplicated from one shot to the other, were common
- as in this opening shot where the firemen all rush down the pole followed by
a shot from the bottom of the pole before the firemen land...
to our modern sensibilities would be like a mini flashback.
Porter does this again in the fire rescue - first showing the drama from the inside
of the building then moving outside and showing the same rescue from the
perspective of the firemen.
This editing looks long and clunky to our modern sensibilities but the overlap was acceptable
to contemporary audiences who were still amazed by these flicker machines and looking for
animated photographs.
But the novelty would wear off and Porter himself would push the narrative envelope
a bit further by the end of 1903 with his landmark 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 using fades or dissolves and,
most importantly, without letting the scene reach it's logical end.
For example - Porter cuts out of this shot before the train has cleared the frame.
This departure shows how filmmakers were beginning to see editing's ability to compress time
in favor of impact over reality.
Porter was beginning to forge a new cinematic language.
Through his work we start to see that the most basic unit of cinema was NOT the scene
as Milies and his contemporaries thought, but the shot.
Meaning came not only in the spatial arrangement of objects and actors in a frame like in theater
and in still photography
- but in the way that shots are arranged in time.
But like Georges Milies before him, Porter would only take editing so far.
Cinema would require another artist to build on their work and expand the editing vocabulary
And in one of those serendipitous moments of history, Porter would inspire just that
artist.
In 1908, just before leaving Edison to start his own production company,
Portered hired a young starving actor to fill the lead part in "Rescued from an Eagle's Nest"
This would end up being the first break of a 40-year-career of one David Wark Griffith.
The seventh child of a Confederate Army Colonel from a rural district of Kentucky, David Wark
Griffith tried everything
- from hop picking, selling encyclopedias door-to-door to acting.
His life-long ambition was to be a writer falling 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 tried his 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 star in one of his films.
That's when the Filmmaking bug bit... Griffith found a position at Biograph, a production
company struggling in debt and looking for directors.
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 would make over 450 films from 1908-1911, pushing
cinema out of the primitive tableau mentality and 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 after his first film for Biograph.
Griffith cut from a medium long shot of a hanging tree to a full shot in the middle
of the scene
to emphasize the emotional impact of an exchange between 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 called continuity editing.
Continuity editing is cutting between shots with the purpose of maintaining smooth sense
of continuous space and time.
With multiple camera setups being used, the 180 degree rule evolved out of practice.
Griffith as well as his contemporaries discovered that 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 confusing geography when cutting from one angle to another.
Griffith's next invention in editing was one that would become his favorite - intercutting
or crosscutting - bouncing between two different scenes in a
parallel action which he first put to use on
After Many Years based on the poem Enoch Arden showing a shipwrecked man and the woman he
left at home.
Now this is commonplace in today's cinema language but wholly new at the time.
Biograph's managers thought the experiment was dangerous and would be confusing to the
public, but Griffith stood firm,
likening the technique to the writing style of Dickens.
It paid off, as After Many Years was hailed as 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 trying to break in, and a husband rushing home to
rescue.
Griffith amps up the tension by continously building up the tempo of the cuts faster and
faster to an ultimate cinematic climax.
Through varying the spatial distance with long 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, matching eyelines - everything we think about in terms
of continuity editing.
By 1911 Griffith was ready to pursue bigger and 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 independent that 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 during it's time, The Birth of a Nation was the
culmination of all of Griffith's editing and cinematic techniques.
But the pro-Ku Klux Klan film didn't sit well with many,
Censorship boards requested alterations, some states flat out banned the film as riots broke
out at premieres in Boston, Atlanta and Chicago.
A born and raised Confederate Kentucky Colonel's son Griffith couldn't understand the charge
of racism
and saw all this as an attack on him personally
- he responded by publishing a pamphlet: The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America,
vigorously defending his film against what he thought was Intolerance.
In 1916 he set out to make a massive epic decrying just that - Intolerance.
Intercutting 4 separate narratives, Intolerance cost nearly 2.5 million dollars to produce,
sinking most of the profits from Birth of a Nation which only cost $115,000.
The first cut ran 8 hours before Griffith came to his senses and trimmed it to a tidy
3 and a half hours.
But that wasn't enough - Intolerance bombed at the box office.
Though Griffith would still go on to direct 26 more features he would die still paying
off the debt on Intolerance.
D.W. Griffith remains a controversial figure of history but he almost singlehandedly invented
the conventions of editing that would establish
the continuity style of cutting that is still very much with us today.
His greatest artistic and financial gamble failed but Intolerance was not destined for
obscurity.
Instead - it would be key to the development of a new style of editing devised by Soviet
Filmmakers
who studied and picked apart Griffith's editing style.
A new theory of editing they called montage which we'll explore in the next lesson.
Even in the birth of cinema, the first 20 years of filmmaking, the history of editing
has been the story of filmmakers learning from each other and adding
their own voice into the mix.
Cinema was becoming a language, and editing is the syntax.
Learn it and use it - go make something great,
I'm John Hess and I'll see you at FilmmakerIQ.com