Week 8: INTRODUCTION TO EDITING PRINCIPLES Rough Cut It Came From Beneath the Sea

The Early History of Cutting Film

In Week 8, when we were introduced to film language, we learned about Georges Méliès and his clever film illusions. He was perhaps the best representative of what was known as the cinema of attractions. Early on, when Méliès was testing the very first film camera he purchased as a budding filmmaker, he was on a busy street in Paris and was filming a bus full of people. Suddenly, his camera jammed for a moment, at which time the bus moved out of the camera's frame and was replaced by a hearse. When Méliès got the camera running again, he took this short footage home and developed it. He discovered something that amazed him and would quickly become his trademark. On the screen, the bus turned into a hearse!

He witnessed the birth of the jump cut. He also jumped (no pun intended) at the opportunity to immediately use this technique in his films, creating scenes with disappearing and reappearing effects.

The jump cut became a creative way of managing time within a film sequence and is still used frequently by filmmakers. We will look at the jump cut in more depth when we explore editing techniques later on in this module.

This early film era was a very creative time for Méliès. His other contributions to the medium include the technique of fading in and fading out of a scene, as well as early experiments in stop-motion photography. But remember also that his artistic background was the stage and theater. Because of this, although he was pushing film into new territory by using new simple narrative themes instead of the popular single-event films (like a train arriving at a train station), he was always shooting his films from one camera angle only. The camera was placed where one would find an excellent theater seat at a play.

Enter Edwin S. Porter. Remember how he made the shot, and the not the scene, the primary unit of filmmaking? Among his editing innovations, he is perhaps best known for continuity editing and cross cutting, also known as parallel action. Unlike scenes in a play, where on one wide stage, multiple things are happening, continuity editing occurs when a film's action starts in one shot (complete with camera angles and positions) and finishes in the next. This style of editing makes the cuts less visible and seem smoother. It also establishes a sense of story, place, and consistency.

A theater stage