History of Cutting Film: Birth of Cinema and Continuity Editing

The first films were made by the Lumiere brothers dating back to 1895 with such films as "Workers leaving the Lumiere Factory" or "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat". These first films were only one shot scenes showing an event occurring, like such. The content of the film wasn't important as it was more about the spectacle on-screen. However, it was until George Melies that cinema began to evolve. In Autumn 1896, Melies was filming in Paris. There he was filming a bus coming out of a tunnel. Midway through shooting however, the camera jammed on him. Once he got it working again, the bus had been long gone and there was a car in its place.

When the film was developed, Melies discovered one of the first techniques used in editing. He accidentaly discovered the jump cut as the bus was replaced with the car in the film. Melies put this discovery into action right away. He employed them into his film "The Manor of The Devil" (1896). It used to create disappearing and reappearing effects in his film. Also through Melies still photographys skills as well, he helped introduce the transition edits commonly known as the fade in/out, overlapping dissolves and stop-motion photography.

Melies began to push cinema from single one scene shots in narrative stories. The prime example being "Voyage to the Moon" (1902). However, his films were still steeped in the theatrical. All his scenes are shot in the exact same angle. The camera remains restricted, unmoved. Influenced heavily by Melies work, newcomer Edwin S. Porter decided to try his hand at filmmaking. Porter's film "The Great Train Robbery" (1906) helped in the evolution of cinema. Although each scene is in one wide shot, he decisively cuts between each scene without using fades or dissolves. And most importantly, without letting the scene reach its logical conclusion. Porter was also one of the precursors which would have went to go on to become the Soviet theory of editing: montage. The compression of time/a series of shots.

However, it was D.W. Griffith who pushed cinema out of his tableau mentality and into the multi-shot films that exist today. His first discovery was The Cut-In. The cut-in captures the emotion on-screen and engages the audience on that level. In his film, "Greasers Gauntlet" (1908). He cuts in from a medium-long shot to a medium shot to highlight the emotional impact of the scene in the graveyard. Griffith also experimented with multiple different shots in a scene. It shows the scene in different angles, this is known as continuity editing. A cutting style of maintaining a sense of continuous space and time. This ultimately led to the discovery of the 180 degree angle rule for two people interacting with each other in a scene.

Another editing technique Griffith discovered was intercutting. This is cutting between shots from two different scenes in a parallel fashion. An example of this first in use is Griffith's "After Man Years" (1908) which cuts between a shipwrecked man on an island to a woman mourning. Griffith later went on to make the first blockbuster feature in cinematic history, "Birth of a Nation" (1915).