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

Following 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: D. W. Griffith, the Father of Film Editing

Crossing the Atlantic, another key figure was also beginning to advance 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 cinematographer. Porter’s creative ideas were greatly influenced by Méliès, and he also drew on 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 plot, notable for its action and even featuring narrative close-ups such as a hand pulling a fire alarm. The film tells the story of firefighters rescuing a mother and child from a burning building. There are two versions of this film. In the first version, Porter simply achieved 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, and after fading in again, the film repeats the same plot from the angle outside the house—that is, the same events unfolding at the same time, shown twice. Porter used a change in camera position and space to explain the story twice. From today’s perspective this kind of repetitive staging feels very drawn-out, but Porter did improve the film’s narrative.

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

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, Porter told a relatively complex story, using intercutting between locations to show actions happening simultaneously in different places. The birth of this work was a milestone because Porter discovered that editing could control time and space. In earlier films, characters had to complete their actions within the frame, then a fade-out and fade-in would lead to the next scene. In The Great Train Robbery, he abandoned fades and dissolves and instead used hard cuts to speed up the storytelling. Porter realized that narrative was no longer determined by the simple linking of one scene to the next. The smallest unit of storytelling 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 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 did not narrate the same events twice; instead, he crosscut between the actions happening simultaneously inside and outside the house. At this point, cross-cutting—this great structural grammar of film—was born.

By now, 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 refine it.

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

Griffith was born into a ruined family in rural Kentucky. Before he began his film career, he worked all kinds of jobs. His ambition was to be a Dickens-like writer, but his poems and novels were unremarkable.

Griffith was born into a ruined family in rural Kentucky. Before he began his film career, he worked all kinds of jobs. His ambition was to be a Dickens-like writer, but his poems and novels didn’t stand out. On a friend’s suggestion, Griffith reluctantly joined the Edison Company in 1908. Although he applied for a screenwriting position and wrote many scripts, Porter rejected them, arguing that Griffith’s scripts had far too many scenes—and that 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, Griffith, whose talent remained unrecognized, had no choice but to join the Biograph Company as an actor.

At that time Biograph was deeply in debt, and its director had fallen ill, so Biograph grudgingly allowed Griffith to direct, promising he could return 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 per week and stipulated that between 1908 and 1911—over 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 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, gradually tightening the shot scale to emphasize the emotional exchanges between the actors. This was a completely new concept in film editing at the time. Griffith then continued experimenting 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 must remain continuous and actions consistent from shot to shot. The goal is to highlight the continuity of performance and make the audience unaware of the editing. The most important element within this 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’s perception will remain stable in the edit. If you cross to the other side, you “cross the line,” and the audience’s viewing experience becomes extremely uncomfortable.

Another of Griffith’s great contributions was improving on Porter’s cross-cutting and refining the structural role of editing. He brought the narrative techniques of Dickens’ novels into film and created a more macro-level method than cross-cutting: parallel editing, including multi-strand narratives, flashbacks, and memory sequences. Works like After Many Years (1908) contain these structural experiments. These are common tools in today’s films, but at the time they were revolutionary cinematic language.

The company at the time could not accept Griffith’s ideas, but Griffith ignored this and continued exploring. In 1909 he made Lonely Villa (1909): a woman trapped in a house, robbers trying to break in, and her husband rushing home to rescue her. Three locations are crosscut back and forth with increasing speed, culminating in the film’s climax. This is considered one of the best models of cross-cutting and the classic “last-minute rescue” concept. Establishing shots, shot/reverse-shot, eye-line matches, and match-on-action—almost all of the editing grammar we now take for granted—were created by Griffith and fall under the continuity editing system.

A selection of Griffith’s works. During these years apprenticing at Biograph, he not only made films at a staggering rate, he was also dissatisfied with the length of short films and was nurturing 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 concentrated in this one film. It not only features extensive narrative close-ups that guide the audience’s attention to specific details, but also flashbacks and parallel narratives that guide the audience’s focus to the structure of the story itself. Griffith had perfected both the micro and macro systems of editing and formally established the classic editing doctrine: a shot should always be continuous, smooth, and in motion; the purpose of editing is to erase the traces of cuts and make the audience unaware they are watching a film—seamless editing, that is, the continuity editing system. This technique has been used ever since and for decades has been the mainstream editing method in Hollywood.

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 appear to be happily and industriously 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 fires of war spread, more and more enslaved Black people fled the plantations to join the fighting, and the final defeat of the Southern army led to large numbers of Black people being freed. The film’s 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 work, Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916). The film cost $1.9 million to produce, and Griffith even invested his entire personal fortune. While this conceptually advanced film continued the techniques used in The Birth of a Nation, it was also highly innovative in unfolding four separate narrative threads from four different historical periods within a single movie, using parallel editing to interweave them.

If the theme of The Birth of a Nation is “nation,” then the theme of Intolerance is “history.” It tells four stories set in different historical eras. Even with its advanced narrative structure and grand themes, the film still could not escape becoming a total box-office disaster. Even today such a complex narrative could not guarantee easy audience comprehension; set nearly a century ago, it was almost like talking in dreams. As many critics at the time summarized, “Griffith mixed up all the stories.” The commercial failure of Intolerance marked the beginning of Griffith’s decline. By the 1920s, new filmmakers had replaced him.

The true cause of Griffith’s downfall remains debated. Some say he lost interest in and pursuit of film; others say that in his later years he became obsessively extreme, and that his thirst for fame and fortune damaged the art of cinema. But regardless, one point is as Godard said: “Cinema begins with Griffith.” Griffith was, without question, 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 refusing to sell their camera to Georges Méliès, to Méliès discovering editing through his magician’s intuition, to the frustrated Griffith acting for Porter and ultimately perfecting Porter’s narrative editing system and establishing cinema as an art form—there seems to be a kind of destiny at work. Each director and school walked a path of constant learning and exploration. Every brief encounter, every seemingly accidental historical event, appears in hindsight to have been 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 of thought then emerged that was completely opposed to Griffith’s continuity theory. Continuity editing can hide the traces of cuts and establish the relationships of time and space; the theory proposed by this new school claimed editing could alter or even create time and space. This is the Soviet Montage School, which we will discuss in the next episode.