A Brief History Of Film & Editing

Two of the earliest film makers in history were brothers, The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière. Both of which were born in France in 1862 and 1864. They moved to Lyon in 1870 where they both attended the largest technical school, La Martiniere. During this time they worked for their father who ran a photogenic firm. While working there, Louis had made some improvements to the still-photograph process. One of the most notable improvements being the dry-plate process which contributed a lot towards moving images. However the brothers didn't begin to make moving images until 1892 after their father had retired.

During the time in which the brothers were developing their film camera, they both patented a number of significant processes, such as perforations as a means of advancing the film through the camera and projector. The cinematograph, a film camera which acts as a film projector and developer, was patented by the brothers on the 13th of February in 1895, the first footage to be recorded using it was recorded on March the 19th in 1895.

On the 28th of December in 1895, the Lumiere brothers showed their work on a 17 metre piece of film, this would last around 50 seconds when run through a crank camera. The footage shown was of a workers leaving a factory. The video below is the entire film of the workers leaving a factory.

Another pioneer of early cinema was George Albert Smith, who was also a a hypnotist, psychic, magic lantern lecturer, astronomer and inventor. He is known as the pioneer of film editing, he recorded a single scene in The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), however once he inserted it into Cecil Hepworth's View from an Engine Front - Train Leaving Tunnel, he created an edited film which demonstrated a new sense of continuity and opened up the possibilities of creative editing. The video below is The Kiss in the Tunnel that gave a new sense continuity editing through editing three shots.

George Albert Smith also was the first to use close up shots as well as his work developing the first colour film process, Kinemacolor. Kinemacolour worked by projecting black and white film behind alternating red and green filters. At the time this was considered revolutionary as it helped the development of media being in colour.

George Albert Smith produced numerous editing techniques that are currently still in use in modern cinema, for example he experimented with reversing film as well as developing the dissolve effect, along side this he pioneered the use of the close up which is used in a countless amount of films.

Cecil M. Hepworth was another pioneer in film editing as he among the first to use cutting to help portray a coherent narrative. He continued to produce films up until the 1920s, after which he began to fall behind with techniques, in turn contributing to his bankruptcy in 1923.

The video above is one of Cecil M. Hepworth's films, named Explosion of a Motor Car (1900). The video shows that Cecil M. Hepworth has used editing to produce a narrative structure for the film, this is achieved with the use of cuts. It shows that he used the to give the impression that the car exploded however, there was a cut to smoke in place of the car, and then an already broken car.

Explosion of a Motor car was also one of the first British films that would exploit the type of trick photography pioneered by George Melies in France, who had intended the cut to be used as a means to show an altering reality.

Another pioneer of film techniques is Lev Kuleshov who made films from around 1899 to 1920. He brought juxtaposition into cinema, by using juxtaposition in film, he gave film makers a way to change the viewers interpretations of images. Juxtaposition is the act or placement of two things near each other.

One example of when Lev Kuleshov used juxtaposition is when he took a shot of a Russian actor with an expressionless face from a silent film that had to be destroyed. He then edited the shot of the actor with three different endings, a plate of soup, a seductive woman and a dead child in a coffin. Even though the same shot of the actor was used, the audience reacted differently. They felt that the actor acted differently when looking at the soup, woman or the coffin, it seemed to them like he would have been showing hunger, desire or grief. This shows that Lev Kuleshov used juxtaposition to manipulate the viewers emotional reactions.