Film Editing - Early Experiments

Early Experiments

Early films by Edison (whose company invented a motion camera and projector) and others were short films that were one long, static, locked-down shot. Motion in the shot was all that was necessary to amuse an audience, so the first films simply showed activity such as traffic moving on a city street. There was no story and no editing. Each film ran as long as there was film in the camera.

In 1899, Edison hired Edwin Stanton Porter and soon put him in charge of his New York motion picture studio. Porter is generally thought to be the American filmmaker who experimented with film editing. Porter worked on a number of minor films before making Life of an American Fireman in 1903. The film was a breakthrough having a plot, action, and even a closeup of a hand pulling a fire alarm. The film comprises a continuous narrative over seven scenes, rendered in a total of nine shots. Like all early filmmakers, he took ideas from others, and tried to improve on what he borrowed. In his Jack and the Beanstalk (1902) and Life of an American Fireman he followed earlier films by France's Georges Méliès and members of England's Brighton School, such as James Williamson. Instead of using abrupt splices or cuts between shots, however, Porter created dissolves, gradual transitions from one image to another. In Life of an American Fireman particularly, the technique helped audiences follow complex outdoor movement.

Porter continued to experiment with cinematic techniques in other films. The The Great Train Robbery was ground-breaking and is still shown in film schools today as an example of early editing form. It was produced in 1903 and was one of the first examples of dynamic, action editing - piecing together scenes shot at different times and places and for emotional impact unavailable in a static long shot. Being one of the first film hyphenates (film director, editor and engineer) Porter also invented and utilized some of the very first (albeit primitive) special effects such as double exposures, miniatures and split-screens.

Porter discovered important aspects of motion picture language: that the screen image does not need to show a complete person from head to toe and that splicing together two shots creates in the viewer's mind a contextual relationship. These were the key discoveries that made all non-live or non live-on-videotape narrative motion pictures and television possible—that shots (in this case whole scenes since each shot is a complete scene) can be photographed at widely different locations over a period of time (hours, days or even months) and combined into a narrative whole. That is, The Great Train Robbery contains scenes shot on sets of a telegraph station, a railroad car interior, and a dance hall, with outdoor scenes at a railroad water tower, on the train itself, at a point along the track, and in the woods. But when the robbers leave the telegraph station interior (set) and emerge at the water tower, the audience believes they went immediately from one to the other. Or that when they climb on the train in one shot and enter the baggage car (a set) in the next, the audience believes they are on the same train.

Sometime around 1918, Russian director Lev Kuleshov did an experiment that proves this point. (See Kuleshov Experiment) He took an old film clip of a head shot of a noted Russian actor and intercut the shot with a shot of a bowl of soup, then with a child playing with a teddy bear, then with a shot an elderly woman in a casket. When he showed the film to people they praised the actor's acting—the hunger in his face when he saw the soup, the delight in the child, and the grief when looking at the dead woman. Of course, the shot of the actor was years before the other shots and he never "saw" any of the items. The simple act of juxtaposing the shots in a sequence made the relationship.