Chronicle of Editing (Part 2): The Establishment of the Continuity Editing System (Edwin S. Porter and the Father of Editing, D. W. Griffith)

Continuation from: Chronicle of Editing (Part 1): The Birth of Film and Editing (Georges Méliès and the Brighton School)

Video version: Chronicle of Editing (Part 2): The Establishment of the Continuity Editing System – The Father of Editing, D. W. Griffith

Across the Atlantic, another key figure also began pushing the development of editing forward: the American director Edwin S. Porter.

Porter had previously worked as a film projectionist. He joined the Edison studio in 1900 and began making films for the company in 1901, serving as both director and cameraman. His creative ideas were heavily influenced by Méliès, and he also absorbed the editing awareness of the Brighton School.

In 1903, Porter made Life of an American Fireman (1903). This was the first American film with a narrative plot, characterized by action, and it even included narrative close-ups such as a hand pulling an alarm. The story depicts a firefighter rescuing a mother and her child from a fire. There are two versions of this film. In the first version, Porter simply completed a more continuous narrative: he added fades between shots, just as Méliès was already doing. The firefighter rescues the mother and child from the burning house, the image fades out, then fades in again to replay the same event from an exterior view of the house—in other words, the same story happening at the same time, explained twice through a change of camera position. This kind of repeated staging now feels extremely slow and redundant, but Porter improved the narrative capacity of film.

Life of an American Fireman (1903) exists in two versions. In the first version, Porter simply achieved a more continuous narrative.

Also in 1903 came Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903). This was the first Western in film history and the progenitor of genre cinema. Unlike Life of an American Fireman, this film consciously used editing to compress time. With 14 scene shots, it tells a relatively complex story. Porter used intercutting between scenes to show actions happening simultaneously in different places. The birth of this work is a milestone, because Porter discovered that editing can control time and space. In earlier films, characters on screen had to finish their actions before the filmmaker would use a fade-out/fade-in to move on to the next scene. In The Great Train Robbery, Porter abandoned fades and dissolves, instead using direct cuts to accelerate the narrative. He realized that narrative is no longer determined by the transition from scene to scene. The smallest narrative unit is the shot. When two shots are cut together, the audience will automatically fill in and create a contextual relationship between them. These shots can be filmed at different times and places and later assembled into a single narrative whole in post-production. Based on this discovery, Porter later re-edited Life of an American Fireman. This time he no longer duplicated the entire interior and exterior action in sequence; he intercut between the inside and outside of the house, showing different actions happening at the same time. Thus, cross-cutting—this great structural grammar—was born.

At this point, all the basic conceptual tools of editing had been discovered, but this was far from enough. The editing system still needed another great director to perfect it.

In 1908, Porter hired a young actor to appear in a film he shot called Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest. This opportunity launched the actor’s nearly 40-year legendary career. He was D. W. Griffith, later hailed as the father of American cinema.

Griffith was born into an impoverished family in rural Kentucky. Before starting his film career, he worked a variety of jobs. His ambition was to become a Dickens-like writer, but his poems and novels attracted little attention.

Griffith was born into an impoverished family in rural Kentucky. Before starting his film career, he worked a variety of jobs. His ambition was to become a Dickens-like writer, but his poems and novels were unimpressive. Persuaded by friends, Griffith reluctantly joined the Edison Company in 1908. He applied for a screenwriter position and wrote many scripts, but Porter rejected them because they contained far too many scenes. Porter also felt Griffith looked better than he wrote, so he gave him a role in Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest. For the sake of his directing dream and to make a living, Griffith, whose talent was not yet recognized, was forced to join the Biograph Company as an actor. At the time, Biograph was mired in debt, and its director was ill. The company reluctantly let Griffith direct, promising that if he failed he could return to acting. That same year he shot his directorial debut The Adventures of Dollie (1908). Afterward, the company offered him a contract of $45 per week and stipulated that between 1908 and 1911, over four years, Griffith was to make more than 450 films for the company. These were all shorts. During this period, Griffith officially began his legendary career. His first major discovery in editing was the invention of the “cut-in.” In The Greaser’s Gauntlet, Griffith used editing to cut from a long shot to a medium shot, progressively changing shot scale to emphasize emotional exchanges between actors. This was a completely new concept in film editing at the time. Griffith then continued to experiment with different editing techniques and gradually perfected the continuity editing system.

Continuity editing, also known as “invisible editing,” emphasizes that regardless of changes in shot scale or angle, time and space between shots must remain continuous, and actions must remain consistent. The goal is to highlight the continuity of performance so that the audience does not notice the existence of cuts. The most important principle here is the 180‑degree rule. Griffith discovered that two characters in the frame create an imaginary axis between them. As long as the camera stays on one side of this axis, the audience will accept the shot in editing no matter how it is filmed. If the camera crosses to the other side, it “crosses the line,” creating a highly uncomfortable viewing experience. Another of Griffith’s great contributions was his refinement of Porter’s earlier cross-cutting technique and his enhancement of editing’s structural role. He transplanted narrative techniques from Dickens’ novels into cinema and created a more macro-level method than simple cross-cutting: parallel editing. This includes multi-strand narratives, flashbacks, and memory sequences; for example, After Many Years (1908). These are common devices today, but at the time they were a revolutionary cinematic language.

The company at that time could not accept Griffith’s ideas, but he ignored their resistance and continued to explore. In 1909, Griffith shot Lonely Villa (1909): a woman is trapped in a house, burglars try to break in, and her husband rushes home to save her. The three scenes are intercut continuously, with the pace getting faster and faster until the film reaches its climax. This is regarded as the best model of cross-cutting and the classic “last-minute rescue” concept. Establishing shots, shot/reverse shot, eye-line match, and match on action—almost all the editing grammar we are now familiar with was created by Griffith and belongs to the continuity editing system.

A selection of Griffith’s works. During his years learning the craft at Biograph, he not only shot films at an astonishing rate, but also became dissatisfied with the short length of films and began nurturing greater ambitions.

In 1914, Griffith shot what was then the most expensive feature film in the world, The Birth of a Nation (1915). The editing techniques he had accumulated over the years were concentrated in this one film. It includes not only a large number of narrative close-ups, guiding the audience’s attention to specific details, but also flashbacks, parallel narratives, and other methods guiding the audience to focus on the story’s structure. Griffith perfected both the micro and macro systems of editing. He formally established the classic editing dogma: a shot should always be coherent and fluid in its movement; the purpose of editing is to erase the traces of cuts so that the audience does not notice, or even forgets, that they are watching a film—seamless editing, that is, the continuity editing system. This technique is still in use today and has been Hollywood’s dominant editing method for decades.

At the same time, however, The Birth of a Nation reconstructed the world of the American Civil War. At the beginning, Black slaves on Southern plantations are shown as happily and diligently working.

The box-office failure of Intolerance marked the beginning of the decline of Griffith’s career. By the 1920s, new filmmakers had replaced him.

But as the flames of war spread, more and more enslaved Black people fled the farms and joined the conflict. The eventual defeat of the Southern army led to large numbers of Black people being set free. The film’s grand theme brought Griffith heavy criticism and the label of racist. Yet he did not stop. The very next year he made another epic work, Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916). The film cost $1.9 million, and Griffith even invested all his personal savings. While it continued the techniques of The Birth of a Nation, it was also groundbreaking in its parallel editing of four narrative threads from different historical periods within a single film.

If the theme of The Birth of a Nation is the nation, Intolerance’s theme is history. It tells four stories set in different eras. Even with its forward-looking narrative and grand theme, the film ended up losing a huge amount of money. Such a complex narrative structure would not necessarily be easily understood by audiences even today; placed almost a century ago, it was practically a pipe dream. As many critics at the time concluded, “Griffith mixed up the stories.” The box-office disaster of Intolerance marked the beginning of Griffith’s decline. By the 1920s, new filmmakers had taken his place. The true cause of Griffith’s downfall remains debated. Some say he lost interest in and pursuit of cinema; others say he became obsessively fanatical in his later years, allowing his desire for fame and fortune to damage film art. Whatever the case, one point stands, as Godard said: “Cinema begins with Griffith.” Griffith was unquestionably the first director to perfect editing into a complete narrative system.

Looking back at the first twenty years of cinema’s history: from the Lumière brothers’ refusal to sell a camera to Méliès, to Méliès’ discovery of editing through his magician’s intuition, to the overlooked Griffith acting for Porter and ultimately perfecting Porter’s narrative editing system and establishing cinema as an art—mysteriously, every director and every school kept learning and exploring. Each brief encounter, each apparently accidental historical event, seems to have become a necessary condition for the development of editing. After Griffith finally established the continuity editing system, the evolution of editing did not stop. A new school soon emerged, completely opposed to Griffith’s continuity theory. Continuity editing can hide the traces of cuts and establish time-space relationships; the new school’s editing theory could alter or even create time and space. This is the subject of our next video: the Soviet Montage School.