The Development Of Editing

Editing is a key part of moving image, it can set the tone of the genre and set the narrative of the text being able to film scenes out of order and then edit them together to "make sense". Before editing in the 1900s film makers used to have to shoot each scene in the order it would appear in the moving image.

Lev Kuleshov, David Griffiths and Sergei Eisenstein are the main the film makers that experimented with editing techniques that are still used in the editing world today.

L. Kuleshov believes that the construction of a film is vital for it to be successful which is usually done through editing where the way two shots interact with each other matter more than the way two actors interact with each other. The "Kuleshov Effect" is his very own method of film making. This is where through the use of editing an audience can tell how a character is feeling with a close up and a cut to what the character is looking at.





D. Griffiths is known to have created parallel editing. This technique is where there is an alteration of two or more scenes that are happening simultaneously but in different locations. The conclusion of this occasionally ends up with the two parties meeting each other in a single place.

S. Eisenstein believed that montages were a way to create meaning to a scene and also show a progress of time. He was a student of Kuleshov, but they went separate ways due to conflicting opinions.


To edit before, film makers used to have to physically cut the film with a razor blade. This method was massively time consuming but was the only way to do it until 1924. This was when the Moviola invented by Iwan Serrurier was brought into action. This allowed editing within film to become much easier and more precise.

In the 1930s when the Flatbed was invented by Steenbeck and K-E-M (Keller-Elektro-Mechanik) the Moviola became less popular however the Flatbed didn't become mainstream until the 1960s as they were much smaller and easier to use. 

Until the 1990s linear editing was the only way to edit moving image using two video tape machines and a video monitor. Non-linear editing computers were introduced in the 90s the first being the CMX-600. Non-linear editing is more widely preferred today over linear editing. Non-linear editing is computer based, you upload footage from a camera into your editing software and you choose how you want to edit from there, the possibilities are endless from cuts, transitions and effects which are all built into the editing software.