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

Picking up from the previous article: Editing Chronicles (I): The Birth of Film and Editing (Georges Méliès and the Brighton School)

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 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 cameraman. His creative ideas were greatly influenced by Méliès, and he likewise absorbed the Brighton School’s awareness of editing.

In 1903, Porter made the film Life of an American Fireman (1903). This was the first American film with a storyline, characterized by action and even narrative close-ups of pulling a fire alarm. The film tells the story of a fireman 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 each shot, just as Méliès was already doing. The fireman rescues the mother and child from the burning house, then the image fades out; after the fade-in, the film repeats the same plot again, this time from an exterior view of the house—that is, the same events occurring at the same time. Porter used a change of camera position and spatial perspective to show the story twice. This kind of repetitive staging now seems extremely drawn-out, but Porter did improve the narrative form of film.

The film Life of an American Fireman (1903) has two versions. In the first one, 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 prototype of the genre film. Unlike Life of an American Fireman, this film consciously used editing to compress time. With 14 scenes, it told a relatively complex story. Porter used intercutting between scenes to show actions happening simultaneously in different locations. The film’s birth was a milestone because Porter discovered that editing could control time and space.

In earlier films, characters on screen had to complete their actions before a fade-out/fade-in would take the viewer to the next scene. In The Great Train Robbery, Porter abandoned fades and dissolves, instead using direct, hard cuts to speed up the narrative. He realized that what determined narrative was no longer just the transition between scenes. The smallest unit of narrative is the shot. When two shots are joined, the audience will naturally infer and create a contextual relationship. These shots can be filmed at different times and in different places, then assembled in post-production into a coherent narrative whole. Based on this discovery, Porter later re-edited Life of an American Fireman. This time he didn’t redundantly repeat the story; instead, he intercut between events happening inside the house and outside it at the same time. Thus, cross-cutting—this great structural grammar of film—was born.

At this point, all of the basic conceptual tools of editing had been discovered. Of course, that 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 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 a poor, declining family in rural Kentucky. Before his film career, he worked a variety of jobs. His ambition was to become a writer like Charles Dickens, but his poems and novels were unremarkable.

Griffith was born into a poor, declining family in rural Kentucky. Before his film career, he worked a variety of jobs. His ambition was to become a writer like Charles Dickens, but his poems and novels failed to stand out. At the urging of friends, Griffith reluctantly joined the Edison company in 1908. Although he applied for a screenwriting position and wrote many scripts, they were rejected by Porter, partly because there were simply too many scenes in Griffith’s scripts, and partly because Porter thought Griffith looked better than he wrote. So Porter gave him a role in Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest.

For the sake of his directing dream and to make a living, the underappreciated Griffith had no choice but to join the Biograph company as an actor. At the time, Biograph was mired in debt and its director had fallen ill, so the company, also reluctantly, allowed Griffith to direct and promised that he could go back to acting if it didn’t work out. That same year, he shot his directorial debut, The Adventures of Dollie (1908). After the shoot, the company offered Griffith a contract of $45 a week, with the stipulation that from 1908 to 1911 he was to make more than 450 films for them. These were all shorts. During this period, Griffith formally began his legendary career. His first editorial discovery 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, using progressive changes in shot scale to emphasize the emotional exchanges between characters. This was a completely new concept in film editing at the time. Griffith then continued experimenting with different editing techniques and gradually refined the continuity editing system.

Continuity editing, also known as invisible editing, emphasizes that no matter how shot scales and camera angles change, time and space must remain continuous and actions consistent across cuts. In other words, the performance’s continuity must be highlighted so that viewers do not notice the presence of editing at all. The most important principle here is the 180-degree rule. Griffith discovered that there is an imaginary axis between two characters in the frame. As long as the camera stays on one side of this line, the audience will accept the shots in editing no matter how you shoot them. But if you jump to the other side, you “cross the line,” creating a highly uncomfortable experience for viewers.

Another of Griffith’s great contributions was his refinement of Porter’s cross-cutting and his elaboration of editing’s structural role. He brought narrative techniques from Dickens’ novels into film, creating a more macro-level method than cross-cutting: parallel editing. This includes multi-threaded narratives, flashbacks, and memory sequences—as in After Many Years (1908). These devices are common in today’s films, but at the time they were a revolutionary cinematic language.

Biograph’s management could not accept Griffith’s ideas, but he ignored them and continued exploring. In 1909, he made The Lonely Villa (1909), in which a woman is trapped in a house as robbers try to break in and her husband hurries back to save her. Three locations are intercut continuously and with increasing speed, culminating in the film’s climax. This is considered the best model of cross-cutting and the classic “last-minute rescue” concept. Establishing shots, shot/reverse-shot, eyeline matches, and match-on-action—nearly all the editing grammar we now take for granted in films—were created by Griffith and belong to the continuity editing system.

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

In 1914, Griffith shot what was then the world’s most expensive feature film, The Birth of a Nation (1915). The editing techniques he had accumulated over the years were fully concentrated in this one work. The film not only contains a large number of narrative close-ups that guide the audience’s attention to specific details, but also uses flashbacks and parallel narratives to direct attention to the story’s structure. Griffith perfected both the micro- and macro-level systems of editing and formally established the classic editing doctrine: a shot should always be fluid and continuous in movement; the purpose of editing is to erase the traces of cuts so that the viewer does not notice—or even forget—that they are watching a film. This seamless editing is the continuity editing system.

This technique is still in use today and has been Hollywood’s mainstream editing method 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 a Southern plantation are shown happily and diligently working.

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

But as the war spread, more and more Black slaves fled the plantations and joined the fighting. The final 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 racism. Yet he did not stop there. The very next year he made another epic work, Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916). The film cost 1.9 million dollars to produce, and Griffith even poured in all of his personal savings. This conceptually advanced film both continued the techniques of The Birth of a Nation and, even more innovatively, wove four different narrative threads into one film through parallel editing.

If the theme of The Birth of a Nation is “nation,” then the theme of Intolerance is “history,” telling four stories set in different historical periods. Despite its advanced narrative structure and grand theme, the film still ended up losing a huge amount of money. Even today, such a complex narrative structure would not guarantee that audiences could easily understand it; placed nearly a century ago, it was almost like talking in dreams. As many critics at the time summed it up: “Griffith jumbled all the stories together.” The box-office failure of Intolerance marked the beginning of Griffith’s decline, and by the 1920s new filmmakers had taken his place.

The real reason for Griffith’s downfall remains debated. Some say he had lost interest in and devotion to cinema; others say he later became obsessively extreme, that his hunger for fame and wealth damaged film as an art. But whatever the case, one point stands, as Godard put it: “Cinema begins with Griffith.” Griffith is unquestionably the first film director to refine editing into a complete narrative system.

Looking back at the first twenty years of cinema’s history: from the Lumière brothers’ refusal to sell their camera to Méliès, to Méliès discovering editing through stage-magic inspiration, to the underappreciated Griffith working as an actor for Porter and ultimately perfecting Porter’s narrative editing system to establish film as an art form—there seems to be, in the midst of all this, a kind of fate. Each director and each school tread a path of learning and exploration; each fleeting encounter, each accidental historical event, seems to have become a necessary condition for the development of editing.

After Griffith ultimately defined the continuity editing system, the progress of editing did not stop. A school then emerged whose theories completely ran counter to Griffith’s continuity model. Continuity editing hides cuts and establishes time-space relationships, whereas this other school’s theories argued that editing could change—or even create—time and space. This is the subject of our next video: the Soviet Montage School.