The Evolution of Film Language

Edwin S Porter (1870 -1941) was one of the first film makers to understand that a single shot was just the basic building block of film and it was the organisation or editing of these shot that gave films dynamism. An American

This 2 best known pieces of work are:

The Life of an American Fireman (1903)

and:

The Great Train Robbery

Starting to move away from the tableau style of earlier George Melies, these films introduced some of the basic convention of film editing that we know today.

“The Life of an American Fireman” was stock footage from the Edison company where he worked and using basic editing techniques he created a basic narrative structure. It still had an tableau style using Temporal overlaps in the cutting process (a Mini flashback) i.e shot of firemen going down the pole, the a shot of the empty pole before the fireman start coming down. Audiences did not question this, style of editing as the audiences we still pretty much amazed by the spectical over a moving picture.

However, within a year audiebce sophistication was increasing and Porter produced “The Great Train Robbery” this introduced cross cutting, double exposure, camera movement and location shooting and pushes the narrative form much further for the audiences. The film jumps between shots without fades and dissolves and scenes are cut before the reach at natural end the beginning of using editing to compress time – impact over reality.

Porters work as started to establish the language of film that we understand today and as suggested in the opening sentence of this post Porter established that it was not the scene that was the basic block of film but the single shot and how they are arranged in time.

Porters work only took film editing so far and it was an employee D.W. Griffiths who made big strides in completely moving movies out of the tableau to the multi-shot multi camera mediun we would recognise today.

Griffith invented the “cut-in” moving a long shot to a tighter shot of the actors in a scene to stress the emotional significace of the exchange – this was first used in the “The Greaser Gauntlet” (1908). He continued to develop using multiple camera set up and shot lengths creating “continuity editing” – a cutting style that maintains a sense of continuous space and time and crearing the 180° rule moving camera on a axius of action to avoid continuity errors.
Griffith alos invest the intercut or cross cut – that is movinbg between different scenes in parallel action. Firsr used in “After Many Years” were he showed a shipwrecked man and the woman he left behind. Griffith used this method of cutting to up the tension of the scenes be buikding up the tempo of the cuts as scene in “the lonely villa” (1909).

This continual experimentation lead to the the concepts that we know of today:
Establishing shots
Reverse shots
Matching Eyelines
Cutting on action.

Griffith eventually branched out on his own and produced the world most expensive film todate, “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) this was the world first blockbuster but was widely condemned even during it original release.

Despite it subject matter “The Birth of a Nation” is a hiostorically important piece of cinema it is the cumunnation of all of Griffith earlier work and experimentation and creates and feature film tin the style that we would recognise.

Unfortumnatelty, Griffiths not understand this claims of racium against his film and regarded the critisum as intolerance. Partially to silience his critics he followed up a “Birth of a Nation” with “intolerance” a spralling epic that intercut 4 different stories and cost over USD2.5Million. Unfortunatle this was not as well received as “the Birth of a Nation” failed at the box office.

Griffith will remain a controvertial figure in film history due to the subject matter of “ The Birth of Nation” however, it cannot be denighed his did almost single handedly invest cinema ediuting as we know it today.