Editing Chronicles (II): The Establishment of the Continuity Editing System (Edwin S. 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 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 cinematographer. His creative ideas were heavily influenced by Méliès, and he also drew on the Brighton School’s sense of editing.

In 1903, Porter made the film Life of an American Fireman (1903). This was the first American film with a plot, characterized by action, and it even featured narrative close-ups of pulling a fire alarm by hand. 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 created a more continuous narrative. He added fade-outs and fade-ins between shots, just as Méliès had been doing. The firefighter rescues the mother and child from the burning house; then the image fades out, and after the fade-in, the film repeats the same story from an exterior view of the house—that is, the same events happening at the same time. Porter explained the same moment twice by changing the camera position and space. This kind of repetitive depiction feels very drawn-out today, but Porter improved the narrative form of film.

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

Also in 1903, Porter directed The Great Train Robbery (1903). This is the first Western in film history and a progenitor of genre cinema. Unlike Life of an American Fireman, this film consciously used editing to compress time. The film uses 14 scene shots to tell a relatively complex story. Porter intercuts scenes to show actions happening simultaneously in different places. The birth of this work is a milestone, because Porter discovered that editing could control time and space.

In earlier films, characters on screen had to fully complete an action before a fade-out and fade-in could take the story 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 realized that narrative was no longer determined by the junction between scenes. The smallest unit of narrative is the shot. When two shots are spliced together, viewers will automatically fill in the gaps and create a contextual relationship between them. These shots may be filmed at different times and in different places, but are ultimately assembled in post-production into a narrative whole. Based on this discovery, Porter later re-edited Life of an American Fireman. This time, instead of retelling overlapping narrative segments, he cross-cut between the different actions happening at the same time inside and outside the house. Thus, cross-cutting, this great structural grammar of film, was born.

By this point, all the basic concepts of editing technique had been discovered. But 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 shot, Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest. This opportunity launched a legendary career that would last nearly forty years. That actor was D. W. Griffith, hailed as the father of American cinema.

Griffith was born into a declining rural family in Kentucky, USA. Before starting his film career, he held all kinds of jobs. His ambition was to become a Dickens-like writer, but his poems and novels were unremarkable.

Griffith was born into a declining rural family in Kentucky, USA. Before starting his film career, he held all kinds of jobs. His ambition was to become a Dickens-like writer, but his poems and novels were unremarkable. At the urging of friends, Griffith reluctantly joined the Edison Company in 1908. He applied for a screenwriting position and wrote many scripts, but they were rejected by Porter, partly because the scripts had far too many scene changes 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 dream of directing and to make a living, Griffith, whose talent was not recognized, had no choice but to join the Biograph Company as an actor. At that time, Biograph was in deep debt, and their director was ill. Biograph reluctantly let Griffith direct and promised that if he failed, he could go back to acting. In the same year, he made his directorial debut The Adventures of Dollie (1908). After the shoot, the company gave Griffith a contract of $45 per week and stipulated that between 1908 and 1911, he had to make more than 450 films for the company. These were all shorts. During this period, Griffith formally began his legendary career.

His first important editorial discovery 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, using a progression of shot scales to emphasize emotional interaction between the actors. This was a completely new concept in film editing at the time. Griffith went on to experiment 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 camera angle, the sequence must maintain continuity of time and space and consistency of action. In other words, performance should appear seamless, so that viewers cannot sense 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 on screen. As long as the camera remains on one side of that axis, the shots can be edited in any order and the audience will easily follow. But if the camera crosses to the other side, it “crosses the line,” creating a jarring and uncomfortable viewing experience.

Another of Griffith’s great contributions was to refine Porter’s cross-cutting and to perfect the structural role of editing. He brought narrative techniques from Dickens’s novels into film and created an approach even more macro than cross-cutting: parallel editing. This included multi-strand narratives, flashbacks, and recollections—structural experiments seen in works like After Many Years (1908). These devices are common in films today, but at that time they were a revolutionary film language.

The company initially could not accept Griffith’s ideas, but he paid no heed and continued to explore. In 1909, he made Lonely Villa (1909), in which a woman is trapped in a house as bandits try to break in, while her husband rushes home to save her. The three scenes are continually cross-cut, with the cutting pace growing ever faster, building to a climax. This film is regarded as one of the best models of cross-cutting and the classic example of the “last-minute rescue.” Establishing shots, shot/reverse shot, eyeline match, and match on action—almost all the editing grammar we now take for granted in mainstream films was created by Griffith and belongs within the continuity editing system.

A selection of Griffith’s works. During his apprenticeship years at Biograph, he not only shot at a staggering rate, but also grew dissatisfied with the short length of films and began nurturing far 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 the years were concentrated in this one film. It features a large number of narrative close-ups to guide the audience’s attention to specific details, as well as flashbacks and parallel narratives to guide attention toward story structure. Griffith had perfected both the micro and macro systems of editing. He formally established the classic editing dogma: a shot should always be smooth and fluid, and the purpose of editing is to erase the traces of cuts, so that viewers are unaware—or forget—that they are watching a movie. This seamless editing is the continuity editing system. Used to this day, it has been Hollywood’s dominant editing approach for decades.

At the same time, The Birth of a Nation reconstructed the story-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 taken his place.

But as the war spreads, more and more Black slaves flee the plantations and join the fighting, and the South’s defeat ultimately leads to the mass freeing of Black people. The film’s grand theme brought Griffith fierce 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). It cost 1.9 million dollars, and Griffith even poured in all his personal savings. This conceptually advanced film both extends the techniques used in The Birth of a Nation and, more innovatively, unfolds four narrative threads from four different historical periods within a single film, intercutting them in parallel.

If The Birth of a Nation is about a nation, then Intolerance is about history, telling four stories set in different historical eras. Despite its avant-garde narration and grand themes, the film still ended up a colossal financial failure. Its narrative is so complex that even today audiences might not easily follow it, and placing it almost a century ago was nearly quixotic. As many contemporary critics summarized it, “Griffith jumbled all the stories together.” The box-office disaster of Intolerance marked the start of Griffith’s decline, and 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 cinema; others suggest that in his later years he became obsessively extreme, and that his hunger for fame and success damaged the art of film. Whatever the explanation, one thing stands, as Godard said: “Cinema begins with Griffith.” Griffith was unquestionably the first director to refine editing techniques into a complete narrative system.

Looking back at the first twenty years of cinema, from the Lumière brothers refusing to sell a camera to Georges Méliès, to Méliès discovering editing through his magician’s intuition, to the underappreciated Griffith working as an actor for Porter and eventually perfecting Porter’s narrative editing system and establishing cinema as an art—these seemingly chance events and fleeting encounters between directors and schools all became necessary conditions for the development of editing. After Griffith finalized the continuity editing system, the evolution of editing did not stop. A school soon emerged that completely contradicted Griffith’s continuity theory. While continuity editing hides cuts and establishes time–space relations, this new school proposed an editing theory that could alter and even create time and space. That is what we will discuss in the next episode: the Soviet Montage School.