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

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

Video version: Chronicle of Film Editing (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 Porter.

Porter had previously been 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 concepts were heavily influenced by Méliès, and he also absorbed the editing consciousness of the Brighton School.

In 1903, Porter made Life of an American Fireman (1903). This was the first American film with a storyline, featuring 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 created a more continuous narrative. He inserted fades between shots, just as Georges Méliès was already doing. The fireman rescues the mother and child from the burning house, the image then fades out, and after the fade-in the film repeats the same story again, but this time from the outside of the house—two renderings of the same events occurring at the same time. Porter explained the story twice by changing the camera position in space. This kind of repeated depiction feels extremely drawn-out today, but Porter improved the narrative form of film.

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

Also in 1903, Porter directed The Great Train Robbery (1903). This was the first Western in film history and a prototype of the genre film. Unlike Fireman, this film consciously used editing to compress time. It uses 14 scene shots to convey a relatively complex story. Porter used intercutting among scenes to show actions happening 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 on screen had to complete their actions before a fade-out/fade-in transition could lead 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 determines the narrative is no longer just the connection between scenes. The smallest narrative unit 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 finally combined in post-production into a coherent narrative whole.

Based on this discovery, Porter later re-edited Life of an American Fireman. This time he did not repeat the narrative; instead, he alternated between the actions happening inside and outside the house at the same time. Thus, cross-cutting—this great structural grammar—was born.

At this point, all the basic concepts of editing technology had been discovered, but that was far from enough. The editing system needed another great director to perfect it.

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

Griffith was born in a poor rural family in Kentucky, USA. Before starting his film career, he did all kinds of jobs. His ambition was to become a Dickens-like writer, but his poems and novels attracted little attention.

Griffith was born in a poor rural family in Kentucky, USA. Before starting his film career, he did all kinds of jobs. His ambition was to become a Dickens-like writer, but his poems and novels were unremarkable. At his friends’ urging, he reluctantly joined the Edison company in 1908. Although he applied as a screenwriter and wrote many scripts, Porter rejected them because they had far too many scenes—and Porter also felt Griffith looked better than he wrote. So he gave him a role in Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest.

For the sake of his dream of directing and to make money, Griffith, whose talent was not being recognized, had no choice but to join the Biograph Company as an actor. At that time, Biograph was deeply in debt and its director was ill, so the company reluctantly let Griffith direct, promising that if he failed he could return to acting.

That same year, he shot his debut film The Adventures of Dollie (1908). After the shoot, the company gave Griffith a contract of $45 a week, with the stipulation that between 1908 and 1911—four years—he had to make more than 450 films for the company. These were all short films. During this period, Griffith officially began his legendary career. His first discovery in editing was the invention of the cut-in technique. In The Greaser’s Gauntlet, Griffith used editing to cut from a long shot to a medium shot, progressively changing shot scale to emphasize emotional exchanges between actors. For film editing at that time, this was an entirely new concept.

Griffith then continued experimenting with different editing methods and gradually perfected the continuity editing system. Continuity editing, also known as invisible editing, emphasizes that regardless of changes in shot scale or angle, the before-and-after must maintain temporal and spatial continuity and consistency of action. The goal is to highlight the continuity of performance and make the audience unaware of the presence of editing. 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 shots in editing. But if you jump to the other side, you cross the line, creating an extremely uncomfortable experience for viewers.

Another of Griffith’s great contributions was improving Porter’s earlier cross-cutting and refining the structural function of editing. He adapted the narrative techniques of Dickens’s novels to film and created a more macro form than cross-cutting: parallel editing—such as multi-strand narratives, flashbacks, and memory sequences. Films like After Many Years (1908) used these structures. These techniques are very common in films today, but at that time they were undeniably revolutionary film language.

The company at the time could not accept Griffith’s ideas, but he ignored this and continued to explore. In 1909, Griffith shot Lonely Villa (1909), about a woman trapped in a house while bandits attempt to break in and the husband rushes home to rescue her. Three sets of scenes are intercut continuously, with the pace getting faster and faster, culminating in the film’s 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, and match on action—almost all the editing grammar we are familiar with today was created by Griffith, and all of it belongs to the continuity editing system.

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

In 1914, Griffith made 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 features not only a large number of narrative close-ups that guide the audience’s attention to specific details, but also flashbacks and parallel narratives that direct attention to the story’s structure. Griffith had already perfected both the micro and macro systems of editing. He formally established the classical editing dogma: a shot should always be smooth and flowing in its movement; the purpose of editing is to erase the traces of cuts so that viewers do 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 Southern plantations are shown happily and diligently working.

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

But as the flames of the Civil War spread, more and more enslaved people escaped the plantations to join the fighting, and the final defeat of the Southern army led to large numbers of Black people being set free. This grand theme brought Griffith heavy criticism; he was labeled a racist. Yet he did not stop there. The following 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 savings. While this forward-thinking work continued the techniques of The Birth of a Nation, it was even more pioneering in unfolding four narrative threads from different historical periods in a single film through parallel editing.

If the theme of The Birth of a Nation is the nation, the theme of Intolerance is history. It tells four stories set in different historical eras. Despite its advanced narrative techniques and grand theme, the film still lost a fortune. Even today, such a complex narrative could not easily guarantee audience comprehension; placed almost a century ago, it was close to wishful thinking. As many critics of the time concluded, “Griffith got all the stories mixed up.” The box-office fiasco of Intolerance marked the beginning of Griffith’s decline. By the 1920s, new filmmakers had taken his place. The real reasons for his downfall remain debated. Some say he had lost interest and ambition in film; others claim he became so obsessive that his craving for fame and fortune damaged the art of cinema. But regardless, as Godard said, “Cinema begins with Griffith.” Griffith was unquestionably the first director to perfect editing into a complete narrative system.

Looking back at the first twenty years of film history: from the Lumière brothers’ refusal to sell a camera to Georges Méliès, to Méliès discovering editing through his magician’s intuition, to Griffith’s unrecognized talent leading him to act for Porter and ultimately perfect Porter’s narrative editing system and establish film as an art—there seems to be a mysterious logic at work. Every director and every school traveled a path of constant learning and exploration; every brief encounter and seemingly accidental historical event became a necessary condition for the development of editing.

After Griffith finally established the continuity editing system, the development of editing did not stop. A school then emerged whose theories directly opposed Griffith’s continuity approach. Continuity editing hides the traces of cutting and establishes spatial-temporal relationships; the theory proposed by this new school could instead alter or even create time and space. This is the subject of our next video: the Soviet Montage school.