Shooting for Editing Techniques:

Early Cinema - Single shot, long take, no cutting

(Edison) - Motion in the shot was all that was necessary to amuse an
audience, so the first films simply showed activity such as traffic moving on a
city street. There was no story and no editing. Each film ran as long as there
was film in the camera.
(E.S. Porter; 1900) - Porter is generally thought to be the American
filmmaker who experimented with film editing. Porter worked on a number of
minor films before making Life of an American Fireman in 1903. The film was
a breakthrough having a plot, action, and even a closeup of a hand pulling a
fire alarm. The film comprises a continuous narrative over seven scenes,
rendered in a total of nine shots.
Soviet Montage Variety in shots: Various angles, long & short takes, cutting
Lev Kuleshov was among the very first to theorize 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 is editing. He
argues that editing a film is like constructing a building. Brick-by-brick (shot-byshot) the building (film) is erected. His often-cited Kuleshov Experiment
established that montage can lead the viewer to reach certain conclusions
about the action in a film. Montage works because viewers infer meaning
based on context.
Kuleshov may well be the very first film theorist as he was a leader in Soviet
montage theory. For Kuleshov, the essence of the cinema was editing, the
juxtaposition of one shot with another. To illustrate this principle, he created
what has come to be known as the Kuleshov Experiment. In this nowfamous editing exercise, shots of an actor were intercut with various
meaningful images (a casket, a bowl of soup, and so on) in order to show how
editing changes viewers' interpretations of images.
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.
Continuity Editing Connecting action in different locations
Although, strictly speaking, U.S. film director D.W. Griffith was not part of the
montage school, he was one of the early proponents of the power of editing

mastering cross-cutting to show parallel action in different locations, and

codifying film grammar in other ways as well. Griffith's work during 19131919 was highly regarded by Kuleshov and other Soviet filmmakers and
greatly influenced their understanding of editing.
What became known as the popular 'classical Hollywood' style of editing was
developed by early European and American directors, in particular D.W.
Griffith in his films such as The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. The
classical style ensures temporal and spatial continuity as a way of advancing
narrative, using such techniques as the 180 degree rule, Establishing shot,
and Shot reverse shot.