Concise History of Film Editing Techniques
- Deconstructing English
- Sep 5, 2018
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 10, 2020
Here is a very short presentation I had to give at University about the history of some of the most well-known editing techniques. It is a summary that accompanies a PowerPoint presentation you can find here, which includes short explanations of how the techniques were developed throughout time as well as a couple of videos that exemplify the techniques themselves. Nonetheless, you can find all those details in this article and use the PowerPoint for class, in case you need it—toodles, x.
“The film is made in the editing room. The shooting of the film is about shopping, almost. It’s like going to get all the ingredients together, and you’ve got to make sure before you leave the store that you’ve got all the ingredients. And then you take those ingredients and you can make a good cake” (Philip Seymour Hoffman).
Of utmost importance to any film is the contribution made by the editor, whose function is to assemble the complete film. Because of the importance of the editing process, the editor’s role may nearly equal that of the director. Careful judgement is exercised in deciding when each segment will appear and how long it will remain on the screen.
During the first stages of cinematography, the content of the film was not so important, the Lumiere films, like Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, were essentially animated photographs, moving images of everyday occurrences.
1903’s Life of an American Fireman by E. S. Porter has the significant addition of being a fictional narrative, it depicts the rescue of a woman and child from a burning building. Now, Porter was still stuck in this Tableaux mentality —constructing each shot as a complete scene.
W. Griffith advanced the story-telling tools Porter had developed. He invented and popularised techniques such as the cut-in, close-up, flashbacks, parallel action (cross cutting), among others. Through varying the spatial distance with long medium and close up shots and the temporal length of the shot, Griffith began to establish the tenets of classic Hollywood continuity editing. Wide (or “master”) shots usually came first, followed most often by “two shots,” and finally, “single shots,” establishing a smooth and predictable progression of images for the viewer.
The Camerons, the Southern family, preside over a modest but idyllic plantation in Piedmont, South Carolina, where slaves pick cotton in satisfaction and happily dance to entertain their masters.
With the advent of the French New Wave in 1959 began a direct frontal assault upon the traditional editing style, using such techniques as frequent jump cuts to create deliberately erratic rhythms.
Not all contemporary directors demand such speed from their editors, some refuse to go in fear of the long take. Surely the champion of this “slower” technique remains Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark, whose ninety-five-minute running time is a single take.
The film editor is responsible for putting the pieces together into a coherent whole. He has to make sure that the interrelationships of separate images and sounds are clear and the transitions between scenes and sequences are smooth. He must consider the aesthetic, dramatic, and psychological effect of the juxtaposition of image to image, sound to sound, or image to sound, and place each piece of film and soundtrack together accordingly.
In the past, filmmakers made routine use of several opticals:
Wipe. A horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line that moves across the screen to wipe the previous image away.
Wipes are faster and are employed when the time lapse or place change is more logical or natural. The use of these transition wipes in Star Wars movies was a signature choice by George Lucas to move from one scene to another. He was inspired by similar wipes used in the films of Akira Kurosawa.
Fade-Out/Fade-In. The last image of one sequence fades momentarily to black, and the first image of the next sequence is gradually illuminated.
Dissolve. The end of one shot gradually merges into the beginning of the next.
Generally speaking, dissolves and fades in/out signal relatively great transitions and are used to make the viewer aware of major scene changes or the passage of time.
Form cut. The shape of an object in one shot is matched to a similarly shaped object in the next shot. Because both objects appear in the same area of the frame, the first image flows smoothly into the second. Similar to the form cut are cuts that use color or texture to link shots.
Two different editing patterns have become more or less standard in making transitions in time and space. The more traditional pattern, outside/in editing: we get our bearings with an establishing shot of the whole setting, move into the setting itself, and then focus our attention on the details of that setting.
Inside/out editing does the exact opposite: we back off from the detail of the first close-up and gradually find out where we are and what is happening.
Many factors work together and separately to create rhythms in a motion picture: the physical objects moving on the screen, the real or apparent movement of the camera, the musical score, and the pace of the dialogue and the natural rhythms of human speech, as well as the pace of the plot itself. Perhaps the most dominant tempo of the film, its most compelling rhythm, results from the frequency of editorial cuts and the varying duration of shots between cuts. Slow cutting simulates the impressions of a tranquil observer, and quick cutting simulates the impressions of an excited observer. The cutting speed of each scene is determined by the content of that scene, so that its rhythm corresponds to the pace of the action, the speed of the dialogue, and the overall emotional tone. The action, the dialogue, and the visuals all set up different natural rhythms, but sometimes that music is unnatural and totally pre-planned.
The axiom of action cutting is never complete an action. Always leave it incomplete so it keeps the forward momentum of the sequence. In dramatic cutting you have to create your own rhythms—how long you stay on a character.
Works Cited
Boggs, Joseph. The Art of Watching Films. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Print.
SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Birth of a Nation.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 5 Sept. 2018.
Filmmakers IQ Editors. The History of Cutting: The Birth of Cinema and Continuity Editing. 20 Jan. 2014.
Filmmakers IQ Editors. The History of Cutting: The Soviet Theory of Montage. 12 Feb. 2014.
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