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

Following the previous article: 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 Film Editing” D.W. Griffith

Across the Atlantic, another key figure began to advance the development of editing: American director Edwin S. Porter.

Porter had previously worked as a film projectionist. He joined the Edison Studios in 1900 and began making films for the company in 1901, working as both director and cameraman. His creative ideas were deeply influenced by Méliès, and he also drew on the Brighton School’s consciousness of editing.

In 1903 Porter made the film Life of an American Fireman (1903). This was the first American film with a plot, distinguished by its action and even narrative close‑ups of pulling an 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 achieved a more continuous narration. He inserted fades between shots, just as Georges Méliès was already doing. The firefighter rescues the mother and child from the burning house, then the image fades out; after the fade‑in, the film repeats the same scene again from an exterior point of view—i.e., the same events happening at the same time. Porter used a change of camera position and space to show the story twice. This sort of repeated rendition looks very drawn‑out today, but Porter improved the narrative of film.

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

Also in 1903, Porter directed The Great Train Robbery (1903). This was the first Western in film history and the prototype of the genre film. 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 an intercutting method to depict 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 then fade‑in could take the viewer to the next scene. In The Great Train Robbery, he abandoned fades and dissolves and instead used hard cuts to speed up the narrative. Porter discovered that narrative was no longer determined by the linkage of one scene to the next. The smallest unit of narration is the shot. When two shots are spliced together, the audience will automatically infer and create a contextual relationship between them. These shots can be filmed at different times and in different places and then assembled 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 retell the overlapping action; instead, he intercut the different actions happening at the same time inside and outside the house. Thus, cross‑cutting, this great structural grammar of film, was born.

At this point, all the basic conceptual tools of editing had been discovered, though far from fully developed. The editing system needed another great director to perfect it.

In 1908, Porter hired a young actor to star in a film he shot, Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest. This opportunity launched a legendary career of nearly forty years for that actor, later hailed as the father of American cinema: D.W. Griffith.

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

Griffith, born into that poor Kentucky family, took on various jobs before starting in film. Aspiring to be a Dickens‑like author, he produced poetry and fiction that failed to stand out. At the urging of friends, he reluctantly joined the Edison Company in 1908. Although he applied for a screenwriting position and wrote many scripts, Porter rejected them because they involved far too many scenes, and Porter felt Griffith looked better than he wrote. So he offered Griffith an acting role in Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest. For the sake of his directing dream and to earn 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 had fallen ill, so the company reluctantly let Griffith direct, promising that if he failed, he could return to acting. That same year he shot his directorial debut, The Adventures of Dollie (1908). Afterward the company gave Griffith a contract of $45 per week and stipulated that between 1908 and 1911, over four years, he had to make more than 450 films for the company. These were, of course, short films. During this period Griffith truly embarked on his legendary career.

His first 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 exchanges between characters. This was an entirely new concept in film editing at the time. Griffith continued experimenting with different editing techniques and gradually perfected the continuity editing system. Continuity editing, also known as invisible editing, emphasizes that regardless of how shot size and angles change, temporal and spatial continuity and the consistency of action between shots must be maintained. In other words, performance continuity must be highlighted so that viewers are unaware of the editing.

The most important principle within this system 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 line, no matter how one shoots, the viewer’s sense of direction will remain coherent in editing. If the camera crosses to the other side, it “crosses the line,” causing great discomfort for the audience. Another of Griffith’s major contributions was the refinement of Porter’s earlier cross‑cutting, further developing the structural role of editing. He brought narrative methods from Dickens’s novels into film, creating techniques even more macro in scope than cross‑cutting: parallel editing. This includes multi‑strand narratives, flashbacks, and experiments with structural devices such as memory sequences, as in After Many Years (1908). These are commonplace in films today, but at the time they were a revolutionary film language.

The company could not accept Griffith’s ideas, but he ignored their doubts and continued to explore. In 1909 he made Lonely Villa (1909), about a woman trapped in a house as robbers try to break in, while her husband rushes home to save her. The film intercuts three locations repeatedly, with the tempo accelerating until it reaches a climax. It has been hailed as the best model of cross‑cutting and a classic articulation of the “last‑minute rescue” concept. Establishing shots, shot/reverse‑shot, eye‑line match, match on action—almost all the editing grammar we now take for granted were created by Griffith and belong to the continuity editing system.

A selection of Griffith’s works. During his years learning the craft at Biograph, he not only maintained a staggering output but also grew dissatisfied with the length of short films and began nurturing greater ambitions.

In 1914, Griffith began shooting what became the most expensive feature film in the world, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith distilled years of editorial technique into this one film. It features a large number of narrative close‑ups that guide the viewer’s attention to specific details, while also using flashbacks, parallel narratives, and other techniques to draw attention to story structure. Both the micro and macro systems of editing were perfected by Griffith. He 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 cutting so that viewers do not notice—or even forget—that they are watching a movie. This seamless editing is the continuity editing system. This technique has been used ever since and for decades has been Hollywood’s mainstream editing approach.

At the same time, however, The Birth of a Nation reconstructed the world of the American Civil War. At the start, Black slaves on Southern plantations appear happy, joyfully working hard.

The box‑office failure of Intolerance marked the beginning of Griffith’s career decline; by the 1920s new filmmakers had replaced him.

As the war spreads, more and more enslaved Black people flee the plantations to join the fighting, and the South’s defeat leads to large numbers of Black people being freed. The film’s grand theme brought Griffith heavy criticism and the label of racist. But 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 of his personal savings. This conceptually advanced work both continues the techniques of The Birth of a Nation and, more innovatively, unfolds four narrative threads from different historical periods in one film through parallel editing.

If The Birth of a Nation takes “nation” as its theme, then Intolerance takes “history.” It tells four stories set in different historical eras. Despite its advanced narrative design and grand theme, it still ended in a disastrous financial loss. Even today such a complex narrative would be hard for audiences to follow; placed nearly a century ago, it was almost quixotic. As many critics at the time concluded, “Griffith muddled all the stories together.” The box‑office disaster of Intolerance marked the start of Griffith’s decline, and by the 1920s new filmmakers had supplanted him. The real reason for Griffith’s fall remains debated. Some say he lost interest in and pursuit of cinema; others say he became obsessively paranoid in his later years and that his hunger for fame and fortune damaged film art. Whatever the case, one point, as Godard said, remains: “Cinema begins with Griffith.” Griffith is unquestionably the first film director to perfect editing into a complete narrative system.

Looking back at the first twenty years after film’s birth: from the Lumière brothers refusing to sell a camera to Georges Méliès, to Méliès using his magic‑show intuition to discover editing, to the under‑appreciated Griffith acting for Porter and ultimately perfecting Porter’s narrative editing system and establishing film as an art—there seems to be a kind of predestined chain. Each director and school’s path of learning and exploration, each chance encounter, each seemingly accidental historical event, all became necessary conditions for the development of editing.

After Griffith finally established the continuity editing system, the evolution of editing did not stop. A school soon emerged that completely opposed Griffith’s continuity theory. Continuity editing hides the cut and establishes clear spatial‑temporal relationships, whereas the theory proposed by this new school claims editing can alter or even create time and space itself. This is the subject of our next video: the Soviet Montage school.