180 degree rule

The Purposes of editing

The first films weren’t edited, they consisted of one camera angle throughout the film and audiences soon became bored. Filmmakers soon realised that editing their films, with different camera angle and scenes, would offer a much experience. Editing shots into a specific order tells a story, this helps engage the audience, creating a sense of time and space. Editing has completely improved films, and is one of the most important aspects of film making.

The Principles of editing

There are many different reasons for the choices of editing and why different directors use different techniques of editing in their work. Editing has been a tool that directors have used for around 100 years to make films have a certain feel or even to create a new meaning. These skills have been used over and over again in the film industry and have progressively changed as the years have progressed and different directors use different and new techniques to help their movie they have created meet their expectations. some may require braking the norm and coming up with new ideas which help portray what they are trying to get across.

A Russian director called Vsevolod Pudovkin who started making films in 1920. A few years later wrote a book called Film Technique and Film Acting: 

Pudovkin’s 5 principles of editing

Pudovkin’s techniques describe several ways editing can be used to enhance the viewer’s understanding of a story, and they’re all designed to create a specific reaction from the audience, something he calls relational editing.

01. Contrast: cutting between two different scenarios to highlight the contrast between them. As an example, Pudovkin suggests moving from scenes of poverty to someone really rich to make the difference more apparent.

.02 Parallelism: here you can connect two seemingly unrelated scenes by cutting between them and focusing on parallel features. For example if you were shooting a documentary about fish stocks in the Atlantic, you could cut from a trawler being tossed about in the ocean to a family chomping down on some  fish’n'chips – in both scenes drawing our attention to the fish: the object that connects them. It creates an association in the viewers’ mind.

.03 Symbolism: Again, more inter cutting, you move from your main scene to something which creates a symbolic connection for the audience. Pudovkin (living in Soviet Russia) suggested cutting between shots of striking workers being shot by Tsarist police and scenes of cows being slaughtered: in the audience’s mind, they associate the slaughter of the cattle with the slaughter of the workers.

.04 Simultaneity: This is used lots in Hollywood today: cutting between two simultaneous events as a way of driving up the suspense. If you’re making a film about a politician on election night, you might cut between shots of the vote being counted to shots of your main subject preparing to hear the result. This extending of time builds anticipation.

.05 Leit motif: This ‘reiteration of theme’ involves repeating a shot or sequence at key moments as a sort of code. Think how Spielberg uses a ‘point of view’ shot in Jaws showing the shark looking up at swimmers. The first time he does it creates a visual code for “the shark’s about to attack”. Every time we see that underwater POV we know an attack is imminent. He has allowed us to participate in the decoding.

Pudovkin

Here is a useful link too read more about Pudovkins work: Pudovkins five priciples of editing

Film & Video Editing history

Films have been around for many years and have changed throughout the years due to the style of editing that has been done. The first ever films created were in black and white were shot on large reels of film by the director of continuous footage or of different scenarios for example trains coming into the station or documentaries of certain things that they personally were interested in. However as the years progressed film directors wanted their films to run more smoothly and look neater with different cuts and scenes which meant that they could use different shot types and angles too create the perfect picture and footage on screen for their audience, by which enabling them to connect with their audience and allow the audience too denote what visually they are seeing (sound was not introduced into the earliest movies, it was used more into early 20's) and therefore allow them to connote what it may mean.

The earliest well known editors to be recognised for their outstanding work were such people as, D.W Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein. Both of these editors were the very well known men for their talented skills as editors and for both creating outstanding pieces of work, due to their editing of footage they had collated and put together to create films which flowed smoothly and and used such fine cuts of films which they placed together to make it almost invisible to the naked eye so that it looked like nothing had changed in the next scene. This was a huge hit globally and revolutionised the way that editing is now done and seen, all the way up to the present day.

 

 Sergei Eisenstein

Eisenstein was a pioneer in the use of montage, a specific use of film editing. He and his contemporary, Lev Kuleshov, two of the earliest film theorists, argued that montage was the essence of the cinema. His articles and books particularly Film Form and The Film Sense explain the significance of montage in detail.

Sergei Eisenstein's writings and films he had created still to this very day continue to influence and have a  major impact on subsequent filmmakers to this very present day. Eisenstein believed that editing could be used for more than just expounding a scene or moment, through images. Eisenstein felt the shots could be used together to manipulate the emotions of the audience and create film metaphors. He believed that an idea should be derived from the juxtaposition of two independent shots, bringing an element of collage into film.

He developed what he called "methods of montage":

1. Metric
2. Rhythmic
3. Tonal
4. Overtona
5. Intellectual

With Japanese kabuki actor Sadanji Ichikawa II, Moscow, 1928

 

Sergei Eisenstein

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of Sergei Eisenstein's most celebrated films he did was the famous film called "Battleship Potemkin". The reason for his success was due to his most well known "Odessa Steps sequence", this sequence has been described as one of the most influential in the history of cinema, because it introduced concepts of film editing and montage into  the cinema industry . In this scene, the soldiers march down a seemingly extremely large flight of steps in rhythm with the ambient music in the background whilst shooting at the oncoming people at the bottom of the stair flight . The most well known scene however is the scene of a mother pushing a pram with baby laid inside, as she falls to the ground dying and the carriage rolls down the steps amidst the fleeing crowd, here Sergei Eisenstein used various camera shots and angles which enabled him to show the pram with the young baby inside scuttling down the odessa steps. This scene has been perhaps the best example of Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage and using various shots within editing to create mixed emotions and also grab the audiences attention.

 

 

D.W Griffith 

David Llewelyn Wark "D. W." Griffith was an American film director, mostly remembered as the director of the  famously well known film The Birth of a Nation. It was recognized for its editing and camera techniques such as the panoramic long shot which can be identified when watching the film. The Birth of a Nation made pioneering use of advanced camera and narrative techniques, and its immense popularity set the stage for the dominance of the feature-length film in the United States. Griffith began making short films in 1908, and released his first feature, Judith of Bethulia, in 1913.  

 

Judith of Bethulia

 Several of Griffith's later films, including Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1921) were also successful. By the time of his final feature, The Struggle (1931), he had made roughly 500 films. For his pioneering techniques and early understanding of cinema, Griffith is considered among the most important figures in the history of the medium.

D.W Griffith

Griffith on set filming "Way down east"