Editing Chronicles (II): The Establishment of the Continuity Editing System (Edwin Porter and the Father of 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 push the development of editing: American director Edwin Porter.

Porter had previously worked as a film projectionist. He joined the Edison studio in 1900, and in 1901 began making films for the company as a director and cinematographer. His creative ideas were heavily influenced by Méliès, and he likewise 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 plot, characterized by action, and it even contained narrative close‑ups of pulling a fire alarm. The film tells the story of a firefighter rescuing a mother and child from a fire. There are two versions of this film. In the first version, Porter merely achieved a more continuous narrative. He added fades between shots, just as Georges Méliès was already doing. The firefighter rescues the mother and child from the burning house, the image fades out, and after the fade‑in the film repeats the same scene again, this time from the exterior of the house—that is, the same story happening at the same time. Porter used a change in camera position and space to explain the action twice. From today’s perspective this kind of repetitive staging feels very draggy, but Porter improved the narrative of film.

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

Also in 1903, Porter directed The Great Train Robbery (1903), which appeared as the first Western in film history and the progenitor of genre films. Unlike Life of an American Fireman, this film began to consciously use editing to compress time. The film uses 14 scene shots to tell a relatively complex story. Porter used intercutting between scenes to depict actions occurring simultaneously in different locations. 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 complete their actions before a fade‑out and fade‑in could take the audience to the next scene. In The Great Train Robbery, he abandoned fades, dissolves, and other such devices, and instead directly used hard cuts to speed up the narration. Porter realized that what determines narrative is no longer the connection between scenes. The smallest unit of narrative is the shot. When two shots are spliced together, the audience will automatically fill in the gaps and create a contextual relationship. These shots can be filmed at different times and places, and in post‑production be assembled into a unified narrative whole. Based on this discovery, Porter later re‑edited Life of an American Fireman. This time, he did not redundantly restage the narrative; instead he intercut between the simultaneous actions occurring inside and outside the house. Thus, cross‑cutting—this great structural grammar—was born.

By this point, all the basic concepts of editing technique had been discovered. Of course, this was far from enough; the editing system still required 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 an impoverished rural family in Kentucky, USA. Before beginning his film career, he held various jobs. His ambition was to become a Dickens‑like writer, but the poems and novels he wrote were unremarkable.

Griffith was born into an impoverished rural family in Kentucky, USA. Before beginning his film career, he held various jobs. His ambition was to become a Dickens‑like writer, but the poems and novels he wrote were unremarkable. At the urging of friends, Griffith reluctantly joined the Edison company in 1908. Although he applied for a screenwriter position and wrote many scripts, Porter rejected them because Griffith’s scripts had far too many scenes—and Porter felt Griffith looked better than he wrote. So he gave Griffith a role in Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest. For the sake of his directing dream and to make money, the under‑recognized Griffith had no choice but to join the Biograph Company as an actor.

At that time Biograph was mired in debt, and its director fell ill, so the company reluctantly let Griffith direct and promised that if he failed he could go back to acting. That same year, he shot his directorial debut The Adventures of Dollie (1908). After the shoot, the company offered Griffith a contract of 45 dollars per week and stipulated that from 1908 to 1911—four years—Griffith had to make more than 450 films for the company. These were of course all shorts. During this period, Griffith formally began his legendary career. His first editing discovery was the invention of the “cut‑in” technique. In The Greaser’s Gauntlet, Griffith used editing to cut in from a long shot to a medium shot, using a progressive change in shot scale to emphasize the emotional exchange between actors. This was an entirely new concept in film editing at the time.

Griffith then continued to experiment with different editing methods and gradually perfected the continuity editing system. Continuity editing, also known as invisible editing, emphasizes that regardless of how the shot scale or angle changes, temporal and spatial continuity and consistency of action must be maintained between shots—that is, the performance should feel seamless so that the audience does not notice the existence of cuts. 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 axis, no matter how you shoot, the audience will accept the resulting edits. But if you cross over to the other side, you “cross the line,” which makes for an extremely uncomfortable viewing experience.

Another of Griffith’s great contributions was perfecting Porter’s earlier cross‑cutting and refining the structural function of editing. He transplanted the narrative techniques of Dickens’ novels into film, creating a more macro‑level method than cross‑cutting: parallel editing. He experimented with multi‑strand narrative, flashback, and memory sequences—structural attempts seen, for example, in After Many Years (1908). These are common in films today but were undoubtedly revolutionary film language at the time.

The company could not accept Griffith’s ideas then, but Griffith ignored this and continued exploring. In 1909, he shot Lonely Villa (1909): a woman is trapped in a house, robbers try to break in, and her husband rushes back to save her. The three locations are intercut continuously, with the cutting pace growing faster and faster until the 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, match on action—almost all the editing grammar we are now familiar with was created by Griffith, and it all belongs within the continuity editing system.

A selection of Griffith’s works. During these years learning his craft at Biograph, Griffith was not only making films at an astonishing rate, he was also dissatisfied with the short length of films and brewing 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 years were集中体现 in this one film. It not only contained numerous narrative close‑ups directing the audience’s attention to specific details but also employed flashbacks, parallel narratives, and other devices to focus the audience on the story structure. Both the micro and macro systems of editing had been refined by Griffith. He formally established the classical editing doctrine: a shot should always be coherent, smooth, and in motion; the purpose of editing is to erase traces of the cut, to make the audience not notice or forget that they are watching a movie—seamless editing, that 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, the Black slaves on Southern plantations are shown as happily and industriously at work.

The box‑office failure of Intolerance marked the beginning of the decline of Griffith’s career. By the 1920s, new filmmakers had taken his place.

But as the flames of war spread, more and more Black slaves flee plantations and join the war. The eventual defeat of the Southern army leads to many Black people being set free. The grand theme brought Griffith heavy criticism; he was labeled a racist. Yet 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 dollars, and Griffith even invested all his personal savings. This conceptually advanced work both continued the expressive techniques of The Birth of a Nation and, more innovatively, unfolded four narrative lines in a single film, intercutting them in parallel.

If The Birth of a Nation is about a nation, then Intolerance is about history. It tells four stories set in different historical periods. Despite its advanced narrative approach and grand theme, it could not escape becoming a financial disaster. Even today, such a complex narrative cannot be guaranteed to be easily understood by audiences; placed nearly a century ago, it was close to fantasizing. As many critics of the time concluded, “Griffith mixed up all the stories.” The box‑office failure of Intolerance marked the beginning of the decline of Griffith’s career. By the 1920s, new filmmakers had replaced him.

The true cause of Griffith’s decline is still debated. Some say he had lost interest in and pursuit of film; others say that in his later years he became obsessively extreme, and that his craving for fame and fortune harmed the art of cinema. Whatever the case, one thing is as Godard said: “Cinema begins with Griffith.” Griffith is undoubtedly the first film director to perfect editing technique into a complete narrative system.

Looking back at the first twenty years of film’s existence—from the Lumière brothers refusing to sell a camera to Georges Méliès, to Méliès discovering editing through his magician’s intuition, to the under‑appreciated Griffith acting for Porter and finally perfecting Porter’s narrative editing system to establish cinema as an art—we can see that, in the unseen currents of history, every director and every school of thought continuously learned and explored. Every chance encounter, every seemingly random historical event, appears to have become a necessary condition for the development of editing.

After Griffith ultimately established the continuity editing system, the development of editing did not stop. A school emerged that completely contradicted Griffith’s continuity theory. Continuity editing hides the traces of cutting and establishes spatial‑temporal relations, whereas the editing theory of this new school could alter or even create time and space. That is the Soviet Montage School, which we will discuss in the next episode.