The History of Editing

The Theory of Editing 
The Theory of editing begins with the idea that a audience naturally relates one shot that is followed by another, and the events occurring within time and/or space. In the first years of film editing wasn't used as it is today.

When film first came about it was mostly used to make actualities. However, it wasn't long before the Lumiere Brothers and the Edison company, produced film containing a plot. These filmmakers would set up a camer, and literally have a short narrative play out in front of the lens. the camera was not moved at all, and shots from different angles were not taken. The idea of editing was not contemplated.

The Lumiere Brothers

Thomas Edison 

                       

 The first film by the Lumiere Brothers entitled La Sortie de I'Usine Lumiere

  

       
Things changed in 1903, when Edwin S. Porter exhibited his unprecedented ability to construct a film and tell a story from multiple shots, rather than just one where the whole story takes place in front of a stationary camera. Porter was the first to use editing as a means of progressing a film's story.

Edwin S. Porter - The Life if an American Fireman

Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) follows a band of Western outlaws robbing a train and itterurpts the chronology of the action with a cutaway showing the rescue of the telegraph perator whom the outlaws ealier had tied up. an early exampl of parallel editing, showing two lines of narrative action happening at the same time, is evidence in The Great Train Robbery. 

D.W Griffiths

In 1908 D.W Griffiths film "For Love Of Gold" featured the first ever continuity cut when a scene was cut. From this Griffiths realised that emotions could also be portrayed through different camera angles and pace of editing and it wasn't all down to actors. Cutting from long shots to a close up accentuated the drama, and matching the action on a cut as a character walks from an exterior into a doorway and, in the next shot, enters an interior set enabled Griffith to join filming locations that were physically separated but adjacent in terms of the time and place of the story.

Sergei Eisenstein 
Sergei Eisenstein as a filmmaker and a theoretician of cinema who made films and wrote voluminously about their structure and the nature of cinema. Eisenstein believed that editing was the foundation of film art. The meaning in cinema lay not in the individual shot but only in the relationship among shots established by editing, for Eisenstein.

His metric and rhythmic montages were supplemented with what Eisenstein call tonal and intellectual montage, due to his interest in guiding the viewer's emotions and thought processes. the aim was for subtle emotional effects and to convey more abstract ideas.