Editing and Special/Visual Effects

Charlie Keil, Kristen Whissel

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780813570815
• eBook ISBN: 9780813573571
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

Most moviegoers think of editing and special effects as distinct components of the filmmaking process. We might even conceive of them as polar opposites, since effective film editing is often subtle and almost invisible, whereas special effects frequently call attention to themselves. Yet, film editors and visual effects artists have worked hand-in-hand from the dawn of cinema to the present day.    Editing and Special/Visual Effects brings together a diverse range of film scholars who trace how the arts of editing and effects have evolved in tandem. Collectively, the contributors demonstrate how these two crafts have been integral to cinematic history, starting with the “trick films” of the early silent era, which astounded audiences by splicing in or editing out key frames, all the way up to cutting-edge effects technologies and concealed edits used to create the illusions. Throughout, readers learn about a variety of filmmaking techniques, from classic Hollywood’s rear projection and matte shots to the fast cuts and wall-to-wall CGI of the contemporary blockbuster.    In addition to providing a rich historical overview, Editing and Special/Visual Effects supplies multiple perspectives on these twinned crafts, introducing readers to the analog and digital tools used in each craft, showing the impact of changes in the film industry, and giving the reader a new appreciation for the processes of artistic collaboration they involve.   

1

The Silent Screen, 1895–1927: Editing

Scott Higgins

By the late 1920s, Hollywood filmmakers constructed time and space in the editing room, weaving it from flexible fragments held together by character psychology and story. Cinematic actions and geographies were determined not so much by the event occurring before the camera as by the ordering of shots. The path from the advent of projected films around 1895 to this fully functional system of narrative editing was an uneven one, traversed in fits and starts. Comparing the practices of film editors in cinema’s early period (before 1906) and transitional period (1907–1913) affirms Thomas Elsaesser’s observation that “change is not linear, but occurs in leaps: not on a single front, but in more jagged lines and waves.”¹ Fundamentally different concepts underlie the editing in films from the early and late silent era, and yet most of the techniques we associate with storytelling appeared in some form before 1906. Once the film industry became organized around selling narrative experiences, roughly by 1905, filmmakers concentrated on solving problems of clarity. Editing was central to their efforts, and it was shaped by the twin demands of engaging viewers in the story and keeping them oriented in space.

This chapter considers the development of editing into a central means of articulating drama during the first two decades of commercial cinema, specifically analytical editing or scene dissection, the technique of cutting to different camera angles in a continuous scene. A subtle means of controlling information and setting rhythm, analytical editing formed the backbone of scene construction during the studio era. It was a relatively late addition to the narrative filmmaker’s toolbox, in part because staging and composition could adequately clarify most action played in a continuous shot. Filmmakers experimented with breaking the tableau cautiously and for specific reasons between about 1909 and 1917. Methods and motivations for changing angle accumulated until both audiences and filmmakers accepted that cinematic space should be fragmented and rebuilt according to dramatic needs.

Cutting in Early Cinema

Editing, conceived as joining two pieces of separately shot film, probably emerged in late 1896 with the advent of a loop that eased tension and allowed projectionists to assemble up to twelve single-shot movies on one reel. This practice had its roots in the magic lantern tradition of itinerant showmen who organized hand-drawn and photographic slides into thematic and narrative presentations.² Producers sold films on a shot-by-shot basis, but sometimes suggested they be grouped together into longer units. Queen Victoria’s Jubilee procession in 1897 was a watershed event, as it yielded multiple views gathered by camera operators stationed along the route. Stephen Bottomore suggests that projectionists who assembled various shots onto single reels practiced an early form of contiguity editing, or following a single action through multiple, connected, spaces.³ By the close of 1898, exhibitors were splicing together the rounds of boxing matches, tableaux depicting the stages of the cross in Passion Plays, actualities of fire brigades responding to alarms, and other thematically grouped shots into continuous presentations.⁴ Editing was the province of projectionists who selected and arranged fragments of space and time into short programs.

Trick films, meanwhile, presented the earliest examples of editing ongoing action within a single space. Edison’s The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895) features the substitution of a mannequin for an actress across a cut to create the impression of her decapitation. In 1896, when Georges Méliès used the technique in The Vanishing Lady to turn his assistant into a skeleton, he embarked on a career of miraculous transubstantiations. As Tom Gunning points out, the substitution edit was meant to be literally invisible, masked by the “continuity of framing.”⁵ This kind of continuity placed creative responsibility in the filmmaker’s rather than the projectionist’s hands, and required the strict control of space to create the illusion of unbroken time, a fundamental basis of scene dissection.

Generally, filmmakers before 1906 treated the continuous shot as an autonomous unit in which all action occurs within a given space from a single viewpoint. Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 Edison film Life of an American Fireman famously demonstrates this principle in the scene of firefighters rescuing a mother and child from a burning room. In one tableau, framed from within the room, a firefighter climbs through a window, carries the mother out, and then quickly returns to retrieve her baby. The next shot shows the action repeated from outside the house, as the rescuer climbs his ladder, enters the room, and reemerges to carry the woman to safety. She then begs him to return for her child, which he does. For Porter, simultaneous actions needed to be depicted in succession.⁶ When filmmakers did break the tableau or interrupt continuous action, they did so for specific, spectacular effects, what Tom Gunning calls “attractions.” For example, in The Gay Shoe Clerk (also 1903), Porter cuts from long shot to close-up to exhibit a young lady’s lower leg as the eponymous clerk fondles her calf. Gunning views this close-up, and others like it, as a novelty used not “for narrative punctuation, but as an attraction in its own right.”⁷ Porter, in fact, was bringing together techniques from other attraction films.⁸ The closer view is a one-off effect, a demonstration to the viewer of the camera’s ability to magnify objects, a power readily displayed in earlier attraction films like Grandpa’s Reading Glass (AMB, 1902). The fact that Porter would cut in to the customer’s leg in Gay Shoe Clerk but not the suffering baby or the crying mother in American Fireman testifies to early cinema’s priorities; spectacle, not narrative clarity, was a compelling reason to edit.

Telling Stories: Cutting between Spaces

Filmmakers first harnessed editing to the tasks of storytelling by cutting between spaces. Charles Musser notes that several factors, including rising audience demand and the threat of imports, led American producers to concentrate on story films between 1903 and 1905.⁹ In 1904, Biograph was the first studio to consolidate editorial control of its films as part of its move toward fiction.¹⁰ The shot was increasingly subordinated to narrative as the basic unit of production. A key genre in this transition was the chase film, which links successive spaces together through character movement. Biograph’s Personal (1904), for instance, depicts a horde of women pursuing an eligible bachelor over fences and across rivers through eight shots. Each composition is sustained until all figures exit the foreground, and then in the next shot they enter the background and encounter another obstruction. The chase offered an easily comprehensible and extensible narrative framework, which could be packed with gags and attractions. Chase films remained popular until around 1908 and, according to Charlie Keil, the genre was “the most influential model of narrative construction” among early story films.¹¹ Their rudimentary structure instituted the principle of linearity: each successive space followed a continuous action that moved forward in time. Between 1907 and 1913 editors built on this basic linearity to construct increasingly complex narratives. Characters exiting one shot and entering another became a common means for establishing contiguity. After 1909, filmmakers relied on contiguity cutting to unify spaces, and set designs that placed doors to adjoining rooms at the edges of the frame clearly marked an actor’s movement from shot to shot.¹²

Once editors could depend on viewers to assume that shots were successive, they could create the impression of simultaneity by alternating between actions occurring in two or more spaces. Scenes of the hero’s race to the rescue, rendered in chase-film contiguity, were intercut with scenes of a victim’s imperilment, with both lines of action converging in the nick of time. Few sequences better illustrate the technique than the climax of D. W. Griffith’s Biograph short An Unseen Enemy (1912). Dorothy and Lillian Gish play adolescent orphans, left alone in their country home with a large sum of money in the family safe while their older brother (Elmer Booth) bicycles to his office. The girls’ “slattern maid” (Grace Henderson) and her criminal accomplice (Harry Carey) lock the girls in a sitting room while the villains attempt to bust the safe in the adjoining parlor. To prevent the girls from escaping and to conceal her identity, the maid holds a gun on them by reaching through a small hole in the wall between the rooms (an unused stove-pipe hookup). The maid, drinking heavily, becomes increasingly trigger-happy by the minute. Mad with fear and rage, the brother commandeers a passing auto and races to his sisters’ aid.

Griffith directs viewer expectations with impeccable timing. From the moment that the older sister phones her brother, Griffith alternates among three lines of action: the sisters in the parlor, the villains in the front room, and the brother and his assistant in his office and then on the road as they race home. Action shifts among distinct locales at a blistering pace; Griffith alternates a full thirty-seven times (most often between the sisters and their brother) in about five minutes. Just as the younger sister (Dorothy Gish) approaches the gun, the brother’s car becomes trapped on a swing-bridge, which is rotating to allow a boat to pass. The younger sister faints as the maid’s gun turns to point directly at her head, and her older sister covers her body with her own. Time moves achingly slowly at the bridge but with tragic swiftness in the sisters’ room. For the thirty-eighth shift, Griffith introduces a fourth line of action, the younger sister’s rejected boyfriend moping about the estate. From this point, the lines of action quickly converge. Crosscutting allowed filmmakers to shape story time to precise dramatic needs. As soon as the solution to the dilemma becomes apparent, Griffith permits both brother and boyfriend to cover ground efficiently. In four more alternations the boy has arrived at the sisters’ window, and, four more crosscuts after that, the brother’s car arrives on the scene. In tracing the evolution of this schema, which began around 1908 in Pathé films, Gunning notes that Griffith pushes crosscutting to the center of his storytelling system and “makes the progression of time palpable through its interruption, imposing a rhythm on the unfolding events.”¹³ Parallel editing intervenes in the flow of events, expands and compresses time, and orchestrates viewer expectations.

Analytical Editing: Breaking Tableaux and Building the Scenes

Crosscutting and contiguity editing juxtaposed actions filmed in different locations and on different pieces of film. The adoption of cutting on angle within a single space was surprisingly gradual, considering its eventual importance. According to Barry Salt, the angle change remained quite rare before 1913, “unless the camera was forced away from the standard move straight down the axis by the physical nature of the set or location.”¹⁴ Two practices, the insert shot and the emblematic shot, helped ease editing into the continuous scene. From around 1909 onward, inserts of notes and letters served to clarify narrative in a manner equivalent to an intertitle. Some inserts took on the quality of cut-ins as filmmakers began to integrate them into the ongoing action by including characters’ hands or other elements of the surrounding mise-en-scène. Meanwhile, the practice of including closer shots of characters at the start or close of a film to help sum up its general identity gave way to character introductions anchored within the story world.¹⁵ The practice became generalized in 1912, when American filmmakers were cutting directly in from a longer shot with some regularity.¹⁶ Still, where editors were crafting dynamic stories by cutting between established locations from 1909 onward, they remained cautious about fragmenting a single space. Filmmakers appear to have required a specific and compelling reason to introduce a new perspective on a preexisting space.

The process by which changing the angle within a space, as opposed to directly cutting in, became a common tool reveals how filmmakers negotiated formal innovation. Moving the camera forward for a closer shot maintained obvious spatial orientation because visual information was repeated across the edit. Pointing the camera in a different direction, on the other hand, threatened to fracture the tableau beyond recognition. Perhaps the earliest example of cutting to a significantly different angle on a single space occurred in Bamforth and Co.’s comedy from 1900, Ladies’ Skirts Nailed to a Fence. The film consists of three shots:

1. Two women stand before a small fence, conversing.

2. On the other side of the fence, two young men sneak up and nail the women’s dresses to the fence.

3. In a return to shot 1, the women angrily thrash about, having discovered their plight.

As noted by Salt and Noel Burch, the film is remarkable for simulating the 180-degree cut by keeping the camera in place and moving the actors.¹⁷ Across the edit, Bamforth has the ladies move to the other side of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Silent Screen, 1895–1927: Editing
• 2. The Silent Screen, 1895–1927: Special/Visual Effects
• 3. Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946: Editing
• 4. Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946: Special/Visual Effects
• 5. Postwar Hollywood, 1947–1967: Editing
• 6. Postwar Hollywood, 1947–1967: Special/Visual Effects
• 7. The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980: Editing
• 8. The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980: Special/Visual Effects
• 9. The New Hollywood, 1981–1999: Editing
• 10. The New Hollywood, 1981–1999: Special/Visual Effects
• 11. The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present: Editing
• 12. The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present: Special/Visual Effects
• Academy Awards for Editing
• Academy Awards for Special/Visual Effects
• Notes
• Glossary
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Color Plates