History of Film

In the early stages of film making editing wasn’t used at all. A good example of this is in the lumiere brother’s ‘Arrival of a train at the station’ 1895. This is one long shot with no cuts of any kind and was one of the first times an audience had seen a moving image, in fact they believed that a train was really coming towards them.

Editing was slowly introduced into film making, the first reason to create visual effects. In George Melies ‘A trip to the moon’ 1902 we get a good example of how editing was first used. Here we see a jump cut being used in order to create the effect of the telescopes turning into chairs, this is for visual effect only and isn’t used to add to the story.

In the 1903 film ‘A trip to the Moon’ by Edwin Porter we get to see the first examples of editing being used to tell the story and not just for visual effects. This scene shows a shot of a fire alarm being pulled and then a different shot of Firemen getting out of bed. With this technique the audience connect the two shots in order to make sense of them and this begins to tell a story without the need for one long shot.

DW Griffith’s ‘Birth of a Nation’ 1915 is a good example of how close shots and cutting started being used and shows how film began to be considered as an art form.

Film makers began to realise that by choosing carefully which shots they showed and in what order they could begin to create a story, by relying on peoples ability to find a correlation between shots they could manipulate how people perceived and interpreted what they saw. This is proved by using the same shot of the mans face and changing what shots are shown with it, this creates the illusion that his facial expressions are changing.

In the 1925 film ‘Battleship Potemkin’ by Sergei Eisenstein, editing is being used in a revolutionary way. By cutting to different characters and areas within the location he can create separate strands of story line to show different viewpoints. A good example of this is in the Odessa Steps scene where they follow, the troops marching down, the crowd running away and the mother with her son, as a few examples. These are all cut together to form one continuous story, like single strands weaving in and out of each other to make rope. This is when we start to see more modern types of shots being used like over the shoulder shots and more purposely positioned close ups.

In the movie breathless there is this car scene. Here the shots are being used in a way to tell us things that we can’t see. The same over the shoulder shot of the woman is used throughout the sequence, this show how deeply the man feels about he and represents his gaze being fixed on her. Jump cutting is being used to break up the journey and shorten time, this could be symbolic of how time feels short with her.

The shower scene in the movie psycho uses editing techniques to create fear and tension. The length of the shots and cuts is used by having a longer shot of her in the shower and the killer creeping up behind to build tension which is then followed by a string of fast paced cuts looking all round the shower. This help to create energy and disoriented the audience. The shots show how she is looking madly around in a panic not knowing what to do. This scene also relies on the audience’s association of multiple images. The knife is never shown going into the body, but we see a collection of shots of a knife being swung, her screaming, the shower head and blood flowing away. This allows the audience to draw the conclusion that she’s being murdered without actually showing it.