Summer Task Two

Development of editing technology

Early Editing - Cutting:

In early cinema films were done in one shot therefore there was no editing involved. Cutting soon began to emerge and become fundamental to the filmmaking process. There was a trend between audiences and filmmaker alike for longer and more intricate films but this could only be achieved by editing shots together to create a longer narrative. 

In Georges Méliès (1861–1938) A Trip to the Moon each shot is filmed in a single shot 

for example, creates a narrative by assembling a series of scenes, with each scene filmed in a single shot. The edit points occur between the scenes, in order to link them together.

Life of an American Fireman(1903), directed by Edwin S. Porter(1870–1941), presents the same narrative events—a fireman rescuing a woman from a burning building—as seen first from inside the building and then from camera setups outside the building, repeating the same narrative action. From the standpoint of continuity as it would develop in cinema, this duplication of event was a deviant use of editing, although other early films feature this kind of overlapping action. It demonstrated, however, the manner in which cutting could impose its own laws of time and space on narrative.

Griffith became famous for his use of crosscutting in the many "rides to the rescue" that climax his films. In The Girl and Her Trust(1912), for example, Griffith cuts back and forth from a pair of robbers, who have abducted the heroine and are escaping on a railroad pump car, to the hero, who is attempting to overtake them by train. By intercutting these lines of action, Griffith creates suspense, and by shortening the lengths of the shots, he accelerates the pace. Crosscutting furnished a foundation for narrative in cinema, and there is little structural difference between what Griffith did here and what a later filmmaker such as Steven Spielberg (b. 1946) does in Jaws(1975). Griffith extended his fluid use of continuity editing and crosscutting in his epics The Birth of a Nation(1915) and Intolerance (1916). The latter film is a supreme example of crosscutting, which is here used to tell four stories set in different time periods in simultaneous fashion.

Read more: http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Criticism-Ideology/Editing-THE-DEVELOPMENT-OF-EDITING.html#ixzz5TQ1btQMB