Editing Chronicles (II): The Establishment of the Continuity Editing System (Edwin S. Porter and the Father of Film Editing D. W. Griffith)

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Video version: Editing Chronicles (II): The Establishment of the Continuity Editing System: The Father of Editing D. W. Griffith

Across the Atlantic, another key figure also began to drive the development of film editing: 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 cinematographer. His creative thinking was heavily influenced by Méliès, and he also absorbed the Brighton School’s awareness of editing.

In 1903, Porter made the film Life of an American Fireman (1903). It was the first American film with a plot, notable for its action and even a narrative close-up of a hand pulling an alarm. The film tells the story of firefighters rescuing a mother and child from a fire. There are two versions of this film. In the first version, Porter simply achieved a more continuous narrative. He inserted fades between shots, just as Georges Méliès was already doing: the firefighter rescues the mother and child from the burning building, the image fades out, then fades in again and the film repeats the same action once more, this time from an exterior viewpoint; in other words, it shows the same event happening at the same time from another angle. Porter used the change of camera position and screen space to explain the story twice. This kind of repetitive narration now appears extremely drawn out, but Porter did improve the narrative capacity of film.

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

In the same year, 1903, Porter directed The Great Train Robbery (1903). This was the first Western in film history and the prototype of the genre film. Unlike Life of an American Fireman, this film consciously used editing to compress time. Using 14 scene shots, Porter told a relatively complex story, employing intercutting between different locations to show actions happening simultaneously in different places. The birth of this work is a milestone because Porter discovered that editing could control time and space. In earlier films, characters on screen had to complete an entire action before the shot would fade out and then fade in to the next scene. In The Great Train Robbery, he abandoned fades and dissolves and instead used direct, hard cuts to accelerate the narration. Porter realized that what determines narration is no longer the linkage from scene to scene. The smallest unit of narration is the shot. When two shots are joined together, the audience will automatically fill in the gaps and construct a sense of context. These shots can be filmed at different times and in different places, and finally assembled in post-production into a unified narrative. Based on this discovery, Porter later re-edited Life of an American Fireman. This time he no longer repeated the narrative but intercut the actions happening simultaneously inside and outside the house, thus giving birth to cross-cutting, this great structural grammar of editing.

At this point, all the basic conceptual foundations of editing technology had already been discovered. Of course, this was far from enough. The editing system still needed another great director to refine it.

In 1908, Porter hired a young actor to appear in a film he was shooting, Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest. This opportunity launched a legendary screen career of nearly 40 years for that actor—D. W. Griffith, later hailed as the father of American cinema.

Griffith was born in a down-and-out rural family in Kentucky, USA. Before starting his film career, he did all kinds of jobs. His ambition was to become a writer like Dickens, but the poems and novels he wrote were unremarkable.

Griffith, born into a poor rural family in Kentucky, tried many jobs before entering the film industry. He dreamed of becoming a writer like Dickens, but his poems and novels attracted little attention. On the advice of friends, Griffith reluctantly joined the Edison Company in 1908. Although he applied as a screenwriter and wrote many scripts, Porter rejected them because they contained far too many scenes. Porter also felt Griffith looked better than he wrote, so he gave him an acting role in Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest. For the sake of his dream of directing and to make a living, the unrecognized Griffith had no choice but to join the Biograph Company as an actor. At that time, Biograph was mired in debt, and its director was ill, so the company reluctantly let Griffith direct, promising that if it didn’t work out he could return to acting. That same year, he shot his directorial debut The Adventures of Dollie (1908). After the film, the company offered Griffith a contract of $45 per week and stipulated that between 1908 and 1911, in four years, Griffith had to make more than 450 films for the company. These were, of course, all shorts. During this period, Griffith truly began his legendary career. His first editorial innovation 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, changing shot scale in a progressive way to emphasize the emotional exchange between actors. This was a completely new concept in film editing at the time.

Griffith then continued to experiment with various editing techniques and gradually refined the continuity editing system. Continuity editing, also known as invisible editing, emphasizes that regardless of changes in shot scale or cutting, the continuity of time and space and the consistency of movement must be preserved. The goal is to highlight the continuity of performance so that the audience does not notice the existence of the cut. The most important element of this is the 180-degree rule. Griffith discovered that there is an imaginary axis between two characters on screen. As long as the camera stays on one side of this axis, no matter how the shots are taken, the audience will accept them in editing. But if the camera crosses to the other side, it breaks the axis, creating a highly uncomfortable viewing experience. Another of Griffith’s great achievements was perfecting Porter’s cross-cutting and further developing the structural function of editing. He transplanted the narrative techniques of Dickens’s novels into film, creating a more macro form called parallel editing—multi-strand storytelling, flashbacks, memories, and other structural experiments, as in After Many Years (1908). Such devices are common in films today, but at the time they were a revolutionary cinematic language.

The company could not accept Griffith’s ideas at first, but he ignored their doubts and continued to explore. In 1909, Griffith made Lonely Villa (1909), in which a woman is trapped in a house, burglars attempt to break in, and her husband rushes home to save her. The three scenes are cross-cut repeatedly, with increasing speed, ultimately building to a climax. This has been praised as one of the best models of cross-cutting and a classic example of the “last-minute rescue.” Establishing shots, shot/reverse-shot, eye-line match, and match on action—almost all the editing grammar we are familiar with today within the continuity system was created or standardized by Griffith.

A selection of Griffith’s works. During his years learning the craft at Biograph, he not only made films at an astonishing rate, he was also dissatisfied with the short length of the films and was brewing far greater ambitions.

In 1914, Griffith shot what was then the most expensive feature film in the world, The Birth of a Nation (1915). His editing skills, refined over years, were fully showcased in this one film. It featured not only a large number of narrative close-ups, guiding the audience to focus on specific parts of the frame, but also flashbacks, parallel narration, and other devices that directed attention toward the structure of the story. At both the micro and macro levels, the editing system had been perfected by Griffith. He formally established the classic editing doctrine: a shot should always be smooth, coherent, and in motion; the purpose of editing is to erase the traces of the cut, so that viewers pay no attention to or forget that they are watching a film—in other words, seamless editing, the continuity editing system. This technique is still in use and has been the dominant mode of editing in Hollywood for decades.

At the same time, 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 Griffith’s career decline; by the 1920s, a new generation of filmmakers had replaced him.

As the war spreads, more and more Black slaves flee the plantations and join the fighting. The final defeat of the Southern army leads to large numbers of Black people being set free. The film’s grand theme brought Griffith fierce criticism and the label of racist. But he did not stop there. The very next year, he made another epic, Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916). The film cost $1.9 million, and Griffith even poured in all his savings. This conceptually advanced work continued the expressive techniques of The Birth of a Nation and was even more groundbreaking in that it developed four separate narrative strands in a single film, intercut in parallel.

If the theme of The Birth of a Nation is the nation, then the theme of Intolerance is history. It tells four stories set in different historical periods. Despite its advanced narrative form and grand theme, it still ended up a financial disaster. Even today, such a complex narrative would not necessarily be easy for audiences to follow; placed in an era nearly a century ago, it was almost quixotic. As many critics of the time summed it up: “Griffith got his stories all mixed up.” The box-office fiasco of Intolerance marked the start of Griffith’s decline. By the 1920s, new filmmakers had taken his place. The true cause of his downfall is still debated. Some say he had lost interest in and pursuit of cinema; others say that in his later years he became obsessively monomaniacal, and his craving for fame and fortune damaged the art of film. Whatever the case, one point stands, as Godard put it: “Cinema begins with Griffith.” Griffith was without doubt the first director to refine editing into a coherent narrative system.

Looking back at the first two decades of cinema’s history—from the Lumière brothers refusing to sell a camera to Georges Méliès, to Méliès discovering editing through his magician’s intuition, to the unrecognized Griffith acting for Porter and finally perfecting Porter’s editorial narrative system and establishing film as an art—there seems to be a kind of destiny at work. Each director and school learned from and explored the work of the others. Every brief encounter and every seemingly accidental historical event became a necessary condition for the development of editing. After Griffith finalized the continuity editing system, the evolution of editing did not stop. Soon a new school emerged that completely contradicted Griffith’s continuity theory. While continuity editing hides the cut and establishes time-space relations, this school proposed an editing theory that could alter or even create time and space. This is the subject of our next video: the Soviet Montage School.