|
Best Film Editing Sequences of All-Time
|
Film Title
Director & Editor
(chronological order)
|
Film Description
|
Example
|
| The Life of an American Fireman (1903)
d. Edwin S. Porter
|
American director and film pioneer Edwin S. Porter, chief of production at the Edison studio, helped to shift film production toward narrative story telling with such films as this one -- the first realistic (or documentary) film with continuity editing. It featured overlapping action and cross-cut editing, and a last-minute rescue of a mother and child in a burning building (in an interior shot), interspersed with scenes of the firemen responding to the sound of the alarm (a hand pulled the alarm in close-up), descending on a fire pole, and coming to the rescue in a horse-drawn wagon pumper (in exterior shots), heightening suspense. |
|
| The Great Train Robbery (1903)
d. Edwin S. Porter |
This 10-minute dramatic film was the first to use a number of innovative, modern film techniques, many of them for the first time, such as parallel editing, minor camera movement, location shooting and less stage-bound camera placement; it also featured multiple camera positions, filming out of sequence and later editing the scenes into their proper order; there were 14 scenes with parallel cross-cutting between simultaneous events in its narrative story with multiple plot lines; Porter's film was a milestone in film-making for its storyboarding of the script (about a robbery, the getaway, the pursuit, and the capture), the first use of title cards, an ellipsis, and a panning shot, and for its cross-cutting editing techniques; jump-cuts or cross-cuts were a new, sophisticated editing technique, showing two separate lines of action or events happening continuously at identical times but in different places; the film was intercut from the bandits beating up the telegraph operator (scene one) to the operator's daughter discovering her father (scene ten), to the operator's recruitment of a dance hall posse (scene eleven), to the bandits being pursued (scene twelve), and splitting up the booty and having a final shoot-out (scene thirteen); the film also employed the first pan shots (in scenes eight and nine), and the use of an ellipsis (in scene eleven); rather than follow the telegraph operator to the dance, the film cut directly to the dance where the telegraph operator entered. |
|
| An Unseen Enemy (1912)
d. D.W. Griffith |
Building upon what Edwin S. Porter had accomplished, director D.W. Griffith began to establish the basic vocabulary of film-making and editing; in this Biograph melodrama short, he used the close-up of a gun emerging from a stove-port hole in a wall to intensify the emotional effect upon the two adolescent sisters (Lillian Gish and Dorothy Gish in their film debuts); the gun was menacingly brandished by their drunken housekeeper ("slattern maid") who was attempting to steal their inheritance money by locking them in a room, as they frantically phoned for help to be rescued. |
|
| The Birth of a Nation (1915)
d. D.W. Griffith |
Griffith's controversial, explicitly racist, but landmark American film masterpiece was remarkable for bringing together many new
cinematic innovations and refinements, technical effects and artistic advancements,
including a color sequence at the end; it had a major formative influence on future
films and has had a recognized impact on film history and the development
of film as art; its pioneering technical work, often the work of Griffith's under-rated
cameraman Billy Bitzer, included many techniques that are now standard features
of films, but first used in this film; Griffith brought all of his experience
and techniques to this film from his earliest short films at Biograph, including the definitive usage of the still-shot, many scenes innovatively filmed from many different and
multiple angles to vary the shot for impact, the technique of the camera "iris" effect (expanding or contracting
circular masks to either reveal and open up a scene, or close down and conceal
a part of an image), the use of parallel action and editing in a sequence, the effective use of total-screen close-ups to reveal intimate
expressions, the use of flashbacks, seamless editing (masking one cut to the next matching frame), the use of vignettes seen in "balloons" or "iris-shots"
in one portion of a darkened screen, the use of lap dissolves to blend or switch from one image
to another, high-angle shots and the abundant use of panoramic long
shots, impressive, splendidly-staged battle scenes with hundreds
of extras, and extensive cross-cutting between two scenes to create a montage-effect
and generate excitement and suspense. |
|
| Intolerance (1916)
d. D.W. Griffith |
Griffith's expensive, most ambitious silent film masterpiece was one of the milestones and landmarks in cinematic
history; many reviewers and film historians consider it the greatest film
of the silent era; four widely separate, yet paralleled stories were set in different ages
- and in the original print, each story was tinted with a different color; interwoven into the 4 stories, spanning several
hundreds of years and cultures, were themes of intolerance,
man's inhumanity to man, hypocrisy, bigotry, religious hatred, persecution,
discrimination and injustice achieved in all eras by entrenched political,
social and religious systems; the four historical periods were THE 'MODERN' STORY (A.D. 1914) in America, THE JUDAEAN STORY (A.D. 27) during Jesus' time in Jerusalem, THE FRENCH STORY (A.D. 1572) in Huguenot France, and THE BABYLONIAN STORY (539 B.C.) in the time of King Belshazzar; in his radically non-linear, hybrid film, Griffith simultaneously cross-cut
back and forth and interweaved the segments over great gaps of space and time
- there were over 50 transitions between the segments; the symbolic bridging device that interconnected and linked together the various
stories was the recurring cameo shot of Lillian Gish, his greatest star, as
Eternal Motherhood; she endlessly and eternally rocked a cradle, accompanied
by the title from Walt Whitman's poem Leaves of Grass: "Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking. Uniter of Here and Hereafter - Chanter of Sorrows
and Joys"; using
cinematic methods ahead of their time and influencing a whole generation of
future film-makers, he included a crane shot and spectacular crowd scenes
and exterior sets (and live elephants!) for the fantastic Babylonian sequence; the innovative finale was an overwhelming, rhythmic, conglomerate sequence
which placed all four stories into a stirring, fast-moving and exciting climax
- as the suspenseful drama began to conclude, the cross-cutting increased
in tempo and rapidity with shorter and shorter segments of each tale flowing
together; all of the same cinematic tools that Griffith had used in The Birth of a Nation (1915) were present in this film too. |
|
