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

Following on: Chronicle of Editing (I): The Birth of Film and Editing (Georges Méliès and the Brighton School)

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

Crossing the Atlantic, another key figure also began to drive the development of editing: the American director Edwin S. Porter.

Porter had previously been 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 philosophy was heavily 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 narrative, characterized by action and even narrative close‑ups of pulling the 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 simply completed a more continuous narration. 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, then fades in again to replay the same event from outside the house—in other words, the same story happening at the same time. Porter used a change of camera position and space to explain the story twice. This kind of repetitious storytelling seems extremely draggy today, but Porter improved the narrative capabilities of film.

Life of an American Fireman (1903) has two versions. In the first, Porter simply completed a more continuous narration.

Also in 1903, Porter directed The Great Train Robbery (1903). This was the first Western in film history and the progenitor of genre films. 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 a method of intercutting scenes to depict actions taking place simultaneously in different locations. The birth of this work was a milestone, because Porter discovered that editing could control time and space. In earlier films, characters in the frame had to complete their action before the film could fade out and then fade into the next scene. In The Great Train Robbery, he abandoned fades and dissolves, and instead used direct hard cuts to speed up the narration. Porter discovered that narration was no longer determined by the linking of whole scenes. The smallest unit of narration is the shot; when two shots are spliced together, the audience will automatically fill in and create a contextual relationship. These shots can be filmed at different times and in different places, and ultimately combined in post‑production into a single narrative whole. Based on this discovery, Porter later re‑edited Life of an American Fireman. This time he did not repeat the narrative as before, but interwove the actions taking place at the same time inside and outside the house. Thus, cross‑cutting—this great structural grammar—was born.

At this point, all the basic concepts of editing technique had already been discovered, but that was far from enough. The editing system required another great director to refine it.

In 1908, Porter hired a young actor to appear in a film he shot, Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest. This opportunity opened the door to a nearly 40‑year legendary career for this actor: D. W. Griffith, who would come to be known as the father of American cinema.

Griffith was born in a declining family in rural Kentucky. Before starting his film career, he had done all kinds of jobs. His ambition was to become a Dickens‑like writer, but the poems and novels he wrote were unremarkable.

Griffith was born in a declining family in rural Kentucky. Before starting his film career, he had done all kinds of jobs. His ambition was to become a Dickens‑like writer, but the poems and novels he wrote were unremarkable. On the advice of friends, in 1908 Griffith reluctantly joined the Edison Company. Although he applied as a screenwriter and wrote many scripts, Porter rejected them because the scripts contained far too many scenes—and Porter felt Griffith looked better than he wrote. So he gave Griffith an acting role in Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest. For the sake of his directing dream and to make money, Griffith, whose talent had gone unrecognized, had no choice but to join the Biograph Company as an actor.

At the time, Biograph was deeply in debt and its director had fallen ill, so the company reluctantly let Griffith direct and promised that if he failed he could return to acting. That same year, he shot his directorial debut The Adventures of Dollie (1908). After filming, the company gave Griffith a contract of $45 per week, and stipulated that between 1908 and 1911—four years—he had to make more than 450 films for the company. These were of course all shorts. During this period, Griffith formally embarked on his legendary career. His first editorial discovery was the invention of the “cut‑in” technique. In The Greaser’s Gauntlet, he used editing to cut from a long shot to a medium shot, stepping inward in shot scale to emphasize emotional exchanges between the actors. This was an entirely 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, stresses that regardless of how shot scales and angles change, temporal and spatial continuity and consistency of action must be maintained before and after each cut. The goal is to highlight the continuity of performance and prevent the audience from noticing the presence of editing. The most important principle here is the 180‑degree rule. Griffith discovered that between two people in the frame there is an imaginary axis; as long as the camera stays on one side of that axis, no matter how it shoots, the audience will accept the resulting cuts in the edit. But if the camera crosses to the other side, it constitutes “crossing the line,” which is extremely uncomfortable for the viewer.

Another of Griffith’s great achievements was improving Porter’s earlier cross‑cutting and refining the structural function of editing. He transplanted the narrative techniques of Dickens’s novels into film, creating an even more macro technique than cross‑cutting: parallel editing. He experimented with multi‑strand narratives, flashbacks, and memories and other structural devices—for example in After Many Years (1908). These are common in films today, but at the time they were undeniably a revolutionary cinematic language.

The company at the time could not accept Griffith’s ideas, but he paid them no mind and continued to explore. In 1909, Griffith shot The Lonely Villa (1909). In it, a woman is trapped in a house while robbers attempt to break in; her husband rushes home to rescue her. The three locations are constantly cross‑cut, with the pace accelerating until the film reaches its climax. This is regarded as the best model of cross‑cutting and a classic instance of the “last‑minute rescue” concept. Establishing shots, shot/reverse‑shot, eye‑line matches, and action matches—nearly all the editing grammar we are now familiar with were created by Griffith, and all fall under the continuity editing system.

A selection of Griffith’s works. During his years learning the craft at Biograph, he not only kept shooting at an astonishing rate, but also chafed at the short length of films and nursed larger 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 many years were concentrated in this one film. It contains not only a large number of narrative close‑ups that guide the audience’s attention to particular details, but also flashbacks, parallel narratives, and other methods that direct the audience’s focus to the story’s structure. Both the micro and macro systems of editing were perfected by Griffith. He formally established the classic doctrine of editing: a shot should always be continuous, smooth, and moving; the purpose of editing is to erase the marks of the cut, so that viewers do not notice—or even forget—that they are watching a film. This seamless editing is the continuity editing system. The technique is still in use today and has been Hollywood’s mainstream 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 all 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 the Civil War spread, more and more enslaved Black people fled the farms and joined the fighting. 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 there. 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 put in all his own savings. This conceptually advanced film both continued the expressive techniques of The Birth of a Nation and, in an even more pioneering way, developed four narrative threads in a single film, cutting between them 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 the advanced narrative techniques and vast scope, the film still ended up losing money disastrously. Even today, a narrative this complex would not necessarily be easy for audiences to grasp; set nearly a century ago, it was almost like talking in one’s sleep. As many critics of the time summed it up: “Griffith has tangled the stories together.” 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. The true cause of Griffith’s fall is still debated. Some say he had lost interest in and pursuit of cinema; others say that in his later years he became obsessively fanatical, and that his hunger for fame damaged the art of film. But whatever the case, one point stands, just as Godard said: “Cinema begins with Griffith.” Griffith is without doubt the first film director to refine editing technique 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 Georges Méliès, to Méliès discovering editing through his magician’s imagination, to the talented‑but‑unrecognized Griffith acting for Porter and ultimately perfecting Porter’s narrative editing system and establishing film as an art form—mysteriously, every director and school kept learning and exploring; each brief encounter and every seemingly accidental historical event became a necessary condition for the development of editing.

After Griffith finally established the continuity editing system, the evolution of editing did not stop. A school then emerged that completely contradicted Griffith’s theory of continuity. Continuity editing can hide cuts and clarify relationships of time and space, while the theory proposed by this new school could alter or even create time and space. This is the Soviet Montage School, which we will discuss in the next video.