Passage 1

       Although the earliest films in cinema were done in one shot without any editing,cuUing is so fundamental to the medium that it began to emerge relatively quickly. There was a basic disparity between the amount of film that a camera's magazine could hold and the evolving desire of filmmakers and audiences for longer and more elaborate story films. Only by editing shots together could longer narrativeforms be achieved.A Trip to Moon(1914) ,directed by Georges Melies ( 1861 ~ 1938) ,for example,creates a narrative by assembling a series of scenes,with each scene filmed in a single shot. The editpoints occur between the scenes,in order to link them together.

        The Great Train Robbery( 1930) ,directed by Edwin S. Porter( 1870 ~ 1941 ) ,follows a band of Western outlaws robbing a train and interrupts the chronology of the action with a cutaway showing the rescue of a telegraph operator whom the outlaws earlier had tied up. F'ollowing the cutaway,Porter introduces a second line of action,showing the roundup of a posse and the pursuit of the outlaws. Film historians commonly cite this as an early example of parallel editing,showing two lines of narrative action happening at the same time,although Porter's use of this device here is ambiguous. It's not clear that he means for the parallel editing to establish that the two lines of action are in fact happening simultaneously.ln other respects,editing in The Great Train Robbery remains very primitive,with cuts  used only to join scenes and with no intercutting inside a scene.

       In contrast with Porter, D. W. GriffiLh( 1875 ~ 1948) freed the camera from the conventions of stage perspective by breaking the action of scenes into many different shots and editing these according  to the emotional and narrative rhythms of the action. Griffith explored the capabilities of editing in the films he made at Biograph studio from I908 to 1913,primarily the use of continuity matches to link  shots smoothly and according to their dramatic and kinesthetic properties. Cutting from full-figure shots  to a close-up accentuated the drama,and matching the action on a cut as a character walks from an exterior into a doorway and,in the next shot,enters an interior set enabled Griffith to join filming locations that were physically separated but adjacent in terms of the time and place of the story.

        Griffith became famous for his use of crosscutting in the many " rides to the rescue"  Lhat climaxhis films.ln The Girl and Her Trust( 1912) ,for example,Griffith cuts back and forth from a pair of robbers,who have abducced the heroine and are escaping on a railroad pump car,to the hero,who is  attempting to overtake them by train. By intercutting these lines of action,Griffith creates suspense, and by shortening the lengths of the shots,he accelerates the pace. Crosscutting fumished a foundation  for narrative in cinema,and there is little structural difference between what Griffith did here and what  a later filmmaker such  as Steven Spielberg( b. 1946) does in Jaws  ( 1975 ) . Griffith extended his fluid  use of continuity editing and crosscutting in his epics The Binh of a Nation( 1915) and Intolerance  ( 1916). The latter film is a supreme example of crosscutting,which is here used to tell four stories set  in different time periods in simultaneous fashion.