Editing is the practice of altering existing images, text and/or footage for the purpose of improving and/or correcting elements that do not portray the artists’ vision. In film, specifically, editing is the difference between the works we see today & an uninterrupted sequence as seen from a fixed position; every angle, effect, sound effect & transition that takes place in every scene of any film is a direct result of editing. The practice of editing is essential to process of film-making, aiding in the creation of a compelling narrative, inserting appropriate audio effects, providing the best possible perspective, & eliminating any errors, such as continuity, effects, performance, technical or factual errors. In many ways, Editing is one of the most important aspects of film-making.
In 1895, the Lumiere Brother’s were produced the first recorded examples of cinema, including a train pulling into a station & factory employees leaving the workplace. These short productions, known as actualities, were filmed & produced without any editing, whatsoever, & each depicted a single location from only one angle from start to finish. This new medium was so different from anything that had come before that, when the world’s first film audience watched the world’s first screening of the world’s first production, the appropriately named Train Arriving At The Station, in 1895, many of them could not distinguish the images on the screen from reality & panicked, believing that the 180 tonne steel steam engine would come out of the backcloth!
However, three years later, in 1898, Georges Melies, a young artist inspired by the Lumieres’ work, invented the practice of ‘jump-cutting’ (momentarily pausing the process of filming so as to rearrange the set &/or performers to achieve a specific effect once the process is resumed), & essentially inventing the practice of film-editing! The most famous film that Melies ever produced was called A Trip To The Moon, made in 1903 & depicting a team of astronomers who ride a capsule launched from a cannon at the moon & capture an alien being known as a Selenite.
Even as his audience became disenchanted with his own work, Melies’ method was imitated, advanced & diversified throughout his life. In 1901, Edwin Porter used Melies’ jump-cutting technique to become the first director to change the location of the events his films depicted.
In the aftermath of Vladimir Lenin’s communist Russian revolution in 1917, the new government soon discovered the value of the film medium as a means of communicating with their country’s massive & growing population, as well as a tool for broadcasting their Marxist propaganda. They produced films that encouraged the Russian citizenry to celebrate the abdication of the Emperor Nicholas Romanov II, the triumph of communist Bolsheviks in Russia & the establishment of a new socialist state. Film-makers that made a real difference to both the promotion of the Soviet Union & the advancement of the film industry include Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein & Dziga Vertov. In 1918, Lev Kuleshov established the Kuleshov effect, stating that people are effected more by the interaction of two separate shots than by a single shot, & that the effect is dependent on what the images are & how they interact. In 1925, Sergei Eisenstein popularised the montage with the propaganda film Battleship Potemkin, depicting a massacre of innocent civilians by Tsarist soldiers using jump-cuts & camera angles to dramatic effect. This grim depiction has been remembered by history as the Odessa Steps Sequence, a universally identified blueprint for the creation of any action scene & the subject of countless parodies. Documentary film-maker Dziga Vertov’s greatest claim to fame was a film called the Man With A Movie Camera. This was a film that documented a day in the life of the Russian capital city of Moscow, using editing techniques such as double exposure, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups and tracking shots in a sequence known today as the montage.
In 1960, legendary director & Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock wrote & directed the iconic primogenitor of the Slasher sub-genre, Psycho. Psycho provided an excellent example of a montage sequence, known simply as the Shower Scene. The Shower Scene sequence was composed of 72 shots, each depicting the brutal murder of the film’s protagonist, Marion Crane. The official reason for Hitchcock’s decision to apply this method was his issues with censorship, as nudity was still a rather serious offence in cinema at the time & he need a way to avoid showing it without sacrificing his vision, which he achieved with the montage. Unofficially, the montage also served as a means to conceal his own appearance in the scene; frustrated by how unconvincing his lead actress’ screams were, he surprised her between takes in the shower with a knife & had his crew film her reaction, inserting the footage into the montage. This sequence not only achieved his initially goal but also allowed him to cut to the rhythm of the knife & heighten the intensity of the emotions such an image would inspire.
Walter Murch, the director behind Apocalypse Now, one of the most powerful war-themed films ever made, identified a distinct relationship between the emotion that a film inspires & the process of editing. To Walter Murch, emotion is the most important of six ideal results of the editing process, which includes emotion (51%), story (23%), rhythm (10%), eye-trace (7%), a two-dimensional plane of screen (5%) & a three-dimensional space of action (4%).
In the last century, editing techniques have become firmly established as inarguably indispensable aspects of the film-making process, & include cross-cutting (when scenes cut between locations & narratives – also known as parallel plotting), eye-line match (when the camera simulates a character’s point of view), match on action (when there is a cut from one type of framing to another), the 180˚ rule (when a conversation between two or more characters is filmed consistently from one direction to establish that they are looking in each other’s direction) & transitions (when the angle &/or location being depicted is changed between shots). Transitions can be done in many different ways, such as the dissolve (when the previous scene becomes increasingly transparent until it disappears completely), the fade in/out (when a scene becomes progressively darker/lighter until the entire screen is black/white), the wipe (when the following scene appears to physically push the previous out of frame) & the cut (when the scene ends suddenly & without effect).
To sum-up, editing is essential to the film-making process; no brilliant director, genius story-telling, pricy equipment or number of talented actors could make a production worth the price of a cinema ticket without someone in post-production crossing the Ts.
Damon Mealor 