Film editing is both a creative and a technical part of the post-production process of filmmaking. The term is derived from the traditional process of working with film which increasingly involves the use of digital technology.
The film editor works with the raw footage by selecting shots and combining them into sequences which create a finished motion picture. Film editing is described as an art or skill unique to cinema, separating filmmaking from other art forms that preceded it, although there are close parallels to the editing process in other art forms such as poetry and novel writing. Film editing is often referred to as the 'invisible art' because when it is well-practiced, the viewer can become so engaged that they are not aware of the editor's work.
Early films were short films each consisting of a long, static, and locked-down shot. Motion in the shot was all that was necessary to amuse an audience, and so the first films simply showed activity such as traffic moving along a city street. There was never any story or editing. Each film ran as long as there was film in the camera.
The use of film editing to establish continuity, involving action moving from one sequence into another, is attributed to British film pioneer Robert W. Paul's Come Along, Do!, made in 1898 as one of the first films to feature more than one shot. In the first shot, an elderly couple is outside an art exhibition having lunch, before following other people inside through the door. The second shot shows what they do inside. Paul's 'Cinematograph Camera No. 1' of 1896 was the first camera to feature reverse-cranking, which allowed the same film footage to be exposed several times and thereby to create super-positions and multiple exposures. One of the very first films to use this technique, Georges Méliès's The Four Troublesome Heads from 1898, was produced with Paul's camera.
The further development of action continuity in multi-shot films continued in 1899-1900 at the Brighton School in England, where it was definitively established by George Albert Smith and James Williamson. In that year, Smith made As Seen Through a Telescope, in which the main shot shows a street scene with a young man tying the shoelace and then caressing the foot of his girlfriend, while an old man observes this through a telescope. There is then a cut to close shot of the hands on the girl's foot shown inside a black circular mask, and then a cut back to the continuation of the original scene.
Even more remarkable was James Williamson's Attack on a China Mission, made around the same time in 1900. The first shot shows the gate to the mission station from the outside being attacked and broken open by Chinese Boxer rebels, before there is a cut to the garden of the mission station where a pitched battle ensues. An armed party of British sailors arrive to defeat the Boxers and rescue a missionary's family. The film used the first 'reverse angle' cut in film history.
James Williamson concentrated on producing films taking action from one place shown in one shot to the next shown in another shot in films like Stop Thief! and Fire!, made in 1901, along with many others. He also experimented with the close-up, and made perhaps the most extreme one of all in The Big Swallow, when his character approaches the camera and appears to swallow it. Smith and Williamson of the Brighton School also pioneered the editing of the film; they tinted their work with colour, and used trick photography to enhance the narrative. By 1900, their films were extended scenes of up to five minutes long.
Other filmmakers took up all these ideas. Among these filmmakers was American Edwin S. Porter, who started making films for the Edison Company in 1901. Porter worked on a number of minor films before making Life of an American Fireman in 1903. The film was the first American film with a plot, featuring action, and even a closeup of a hand pulling a fire alarm. The film comprised a continuous narrative over seven scenes, rendered in a total of nine shots. He put a dissolve between every shot, just as Georges Méliès was already doing, and frequently had the same action repeated across the dissolves. His film, The Great Train Robbery, made in 1903, had a running time of twelve minutes, with twenty separate shots, and ten different indoor and outdoor locations. He used the cross-cutting editing method to show simultaneous action in different places.
These early film directors discovered important aspects of motion picture language: that the screen image does not need to show a complete person from head to toe, and that splicing together two shots creates in the viewer's mind a contextual relationship. These were the key discoveries that made all non-live or non live-on-videotape narrative motion pictures and television possible - that shots (in this case, whole scenes since each shot is a complete scene) can be photographed at widely different locations over periods of time (hours, days or even months) and combined into a narrative whole. For instance, The Great Train Robbery contains scenes shot on sets of a telegraph station, a railroad car interior, and a dance hall, with outdoor scenes at a railroad water tower, on a train itself, at a point along the track, and in the woods. However, in the film, when the robbers leave the telegraph station interior (set) and emerge at the water tower, the audience believes that the characters traveled immediately from one to the other. In addition, when they climb on the train in one shot and enter the baggage car (set) in the next, the audience believes the robbers to be on the same train.
At some point in 1918, Russian director Lev Kuleshov performed an experiment that proves this point. He took an old film clip of a head shot of Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine, and intercut the shot with one of a bowl of soup, then with a child playing with a teddy bear, before with a shot of an elderly woman in a casket. When he showed the film to people they praised the actor's acting - the hunger in his face when he saw the soup, the delight in the child, and the grief when looking at the dead woman. Of course, the shot of the actor was filmed years before the other shots, and Ivan was never filmed 'seeing' any of the items. The simple act of juxtaposing the shots in a sequence made the relationship.
Before the widespread use of digital, non-linear editing systems, the initial editing of all films was done with a positive copy of the film negative called a film workprint, by physically cutting and splicing together pieces of film. Strips of footage would be hand-cut and attached together with tape, and then later in time, glue. Editors were very precise; if they made a wrong cut or needed a fresh positive print, it cost the production money and time for the lab to reprint the footage. Additionally, each reprint put the negative at risk of damage. With the invention of a splicer and threading the machine with a viewer such as a Moviola, or flatbed editor, such as Steenbeck or K-E-M (Keller-Elektro-Mechanik), the editing process quickened slightly, and cuts came out cleaner and more precise. The Moviola editing practice is non-linear, allowing the editor to make choices faster - a great advantage to editing episodic films for television which have very short timelines to complete the work. All film studios and production companies that produced films for television provided this tool for their editors. Flatbed editing machines were used for playback and refinement of cuts, particularly in feature films and films made for television, since they were less noisy and cleaner to work with. They were used extensively for documentary and drama production within the BBC's Film Department. Operated by a team of two, an editor and assistant editor, this tactile process required significant skill but allowed for editors to work extremely efficiently.
Today, most films are edited digitally (on systems such as Avid Media Composer, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Premiere Pro) and bypass the film positive workprint altogether. In the past, the use of a film positive (not the original negative) allowed the editor to do as much experimenting as they wished, without the risk of damaging the original. With digital editing, editors can experiment just as much as before except with the footage completely transferred to a computer hard drive.
When the film workprint had been cut to a satisfactory state, it was then used to make an Edit Decision List (EDL). The negative cutter referred to this list whilst processing the negative, splitting the shots into rolls, which were then contact printed to produce the final film print or answer print. Today, production companies have the option of bypassing negative cutting altogether. With the advent of Digital Intermediate (DI), the physical negative does not necessarily need to be physically cut and spliced together; rather the negative is optically scanned into the computer/s, and a cut list is confirmed by a DI editor.
Post-production editing may be summarised by three distinct phases commonly referred to as the editor's cut, the director's cut, and the final cut.
There are several editing stages, with the editor's cut being the first. An editor's cut is normally the first pass of what the final film will be when it reaches picture lock. The film editor usually starts working while principal photography starts. Sometimes, prior to cutting, the editor and director will have seen and discussed 'dailies' (raw footage shot each day) as shooting progresses. As production schedules have shortened over the years, this co-viewing happens less often. Screening dailies give the editor a general idea of the director's intentions. Since it is the first pass, the editor's cut might be longer than the final film. The editor continues to refine the cut whilst shooting continues, and often, the entire editing process occurs for many months or sometimes for more than a year, depending on the film.
When shooting is finished, the director can then focus their full attention to collaborating with the editor in order to further refine the cut of the film. This is the time that is set aside in which the film editor's first cut is molded to fit the director's vision. In the United States, under the rules of the Directors Guild of America, directors receive a minimum of ten weeks after completion of principal photography to prepare their first cut. While collaborating on what is referred to as the 'director's cut', the director and the editor review the entire movie in great detail, for scenes and shots are reordered, removed, shortened and otherwise tweaked. Often it is discovered that there are plot holes, missing shots or even missing segments which might require new scenes to be filmed. Due to this time spent working closely and collaborating - a period that is normally far longer and more intricately detailed than the entire preceding film production - many directors and editors form a unique and artistic bond, thereby making arrangements to continue working with each other in similar ways on future projects.
Often after the director has had their chance to oversee a cut, the subsequent cuts are supervised by one or more producers, who represent the production company or movie studio. Interestingly, there have been several conflicts in the past between the director and the studio, sometimes leading to the use of the 'Alan Smithee' credit signifying when a director no longer wishes to be associated with the final release.
In motion picture terminology, a montage (from the French for 'putting together' or 'assembly') is a film editing technique. There are at least three senses of the term. In French film practice, 'montage' has its literal French meaning, and simply identifies editing. In Soviet filmmaking of the 1920s, 'montage' was a method of juxtaposing shots to derive new meaning that did not exist in either shot alone. In classical Hollywood cinema, a 'montage sequence' is a short segment in a film in which narrative information is presented in a condensed fashion.
Although film director D.W. Griffith was not part of the origins of montage, he was one of the early proponents of the power of editing - mastering cross-cutting to show the occurrence of parallel action in different locations, and codifying film grammar in other ways as well. Griffith's work was highly regarded by Lev Kuleshov and other Soviet filmmakers, greatly influencing their understanding of editing.
Kuleshov was among the very first to theorise about the relatively young medium of the cinema in the 1920s. For him, the unique essence of the cinema - that which could be duplicated in no other medium - was editing. He argued that editing a film is like constructing a building. Brick-by-brick (shot-by-shot), the building (film) is erected. His often-cited Kuleshov Experiment established that montage can lead the viewer to reach certain conclusions about the action within films. Montage works because viewers infer meaning based on context. Sergei Eisenstein was briefly a student of Kuleshov's, but the two parted ways because they had different ideas of montage. Eisenstein regarded montage as a dialectical means of creating meaning. By contrasting unrelated shots, he tried to provoke associations in the viewer, which were induced by shocks. Nevertheless, Eisenstein did not always perform his own editing, as some of his most important films developed were edited by Esfir Tobak.
A montage sequence consists of a series of short shots that are edited into a sequence to condense narrative. It is usually used to advance the story as a whole (often to suggest the passage of time), rather than to create symbolic meaning. In many cases, a song plays in the background to enhance the mood or reinforce the message being conveyed. One famous example of a montage sequence was seen in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, depicting the start of man's first development from apes to humans. Another example that is employed in many films is the sports montage. The sports montage shows the star athlete training over a period of time, each shot having more improvement than the last. Classic examples of this include Rocky (1976) and The Karate Kid (1984).
Continuity is a term for the consistency of on-screen elements over the course of a scene or film, such as whether an actor's costume remains the same from one scene to the next, or whether a glass holds the same amount of liquid if not drunk throughout the scene. Since films are typically shot out of sequence, the script supervisor will keep a record of continuity, and provide that to the film editor for reference. The editor may try to maintain continuity of elements, or may intentionally create a discontinuous sequence for stylistic or narrative effect.
The technique of continuity editing, part of the classical Hollywood style, was developed by early European and American directors - in particular, D.W. Griffith in his films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). The classical style embraces temporal and spatial continuity as a way of advancing the narrative, using such techniques as the 180-degree rule, establishing shot, and shot reverse shot. Often, continuity editing entails finding a balance between literal continuity and perceived continuity. For instance, editors may condense action across cuts in a non-distracting way. A character walking from one place to another may 'skip' a section of floor from one side of a cut to the other, but the cut is constructed to appear continuous so as not to distract the viewer.
Early Russian filmmakers such as Lev Kuleshov further explored and theorised about editing and its ideological nature. Sergei Eisenstein developed a system of editing that was designed to be unconcerned with the overall rules of the continuity system of classical Hollywood that he called Intellectual montage.
Alternatives to traditional editing were also explored by early surrealist and Dada filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel (director of 1929's Un Chien Andalou) and René Clair (director of 1924's Entr'acte, which starred famous Dada artists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray).
The French New Wave filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, as well as their American counterparts such as Andy Warhol and John Cassavetes also pushed the limits of continuity editing during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. French New Wave films and the non-narrative films of the 1960s used a carefree editing style, and did not conform to the traditional editing etiquette of Hollywood films. Just like its Dada and surrealist predecessors, French New Wave editing often drew attention to itself by its lack of continuity, its demystifying nature (often reminding the audience that they were watching a film), and its overt use of jump cuts or the insertion of material not often related to any narrative. Three of the most influential editors of French New Wave films were the women who (in combination) edited 15 of Godard's films. These were Françoise Collin, Agnès Guillemot, and Cécile Decugis.
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