Technique of Film Editing, Reissue of 2nd Edition, 2nd Edition

2525

General

“ The development of fi lm technique . . . has been primarily the development of editing. ” If one is thinking of

the silent cinema alone, Ernest Lindgren’s statement remains an indisputable truism. Men like Porter, Griffi th

and Eisenstein, together with many lesser innovators, evolved editing techniques which gradually transformed

cinematography from a simple means of recording actuality to a highly sensitive aesthetic medium. The his-

tory of silent fi lm-making is the history of the struggle to widen the cinema’s visual appeal through more and

more elaborate editing. The desire to tackle increasingly complex intellectual and emotional themes forced

directors to experiment with fresh, more evocative patterns of visual continuity, and produced by the end of

the silent period a fairly comprehensive “ grammar ” of fi lm construction.

The introduction of sound brought with it a temporary reversal of this process. All the dramatic effects were,

for a time, derived from the sound-track. While fi lm theorists claimed on the one hand that dialogue could

only lessen a fi lm’s total appeal

1

and, on the other, that sound must be used in counterpoint, not in synchro-

nisation with the picture,

2

commercial fi lm-makers eagerly went about making the (highly successful) hundred

per cent talkies.

Looking back, it is easy to say that these fi lms showed a retrogressive development, but that is to ignore the

background against which they were made. The majority of silent fi lms made in the twenties in this country

and in U.S.A. relied on the use of numerous long subtitles: it was natural that their makers should welcome

the advent of actual sound. (The adjective actual, as applied to sound effects, is used in this book in a specially

defi ned sense.) In retrospect, it seems unreasonable to condemn the directors of the numerous hundred per

cent talkies for misusing their new toy: their fi lms were the sort of products which, had they been made a

few years earlier, would certainly not have utilised the full resources of Griffi th’s (much less Eisenstein’s) silent

editing methods and would have received no serious critical attention.

Yet the hundred per cent talkies — that is to say musicals and stage adaptations which relied solely on the

appeal of spoken dialogue and songs, and made the picture into a static, unimportant background for the

sounds — proved, after the novelty had worn off, dull and unimaginative. Part of the trouble was undoubt-

edly that in the early days of sound recording the microphone had to be kept static on the set: a scene which

Chapter 2

Editing and the Sound Film

1

See, for instance, Paul Rotha’s theoretical section in The Film Till Now. Cape, 1929.

2

See A Statement, signed by S. M. Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin and G. V. Alexandrov, fi rst published in Moscow in 1928. Film Form. Denis Dobson,

1951 .