The technique of film editing (1958)

effect ; masking, which was used by Griffith, is now rarely employed, again because it is unnaturalistic ; quick, momentary flash-backs, such as Griffith has in The Birth of a Nation, are rarely used since they tend to look arbitrarily planted. It would be rash to say that these devices will never be used again, but they have at present fallen into disfavour because they draw attention to technique and disturb the illusion of reality. Larger problems of planning and editing the story continuity have considerably changed since the advent of sound because it is now no longer necessary to show everything visually. In The Birth of a Nation, for instance, there is a scene where a mother promises her son who is lying wounded in hospital and is later to be courtmartialled, that she will go to see President Lincoln and plead on his behalf. From the shot of the mother in hospital, Griffith cuts to a shot of Lincoln in his study, and then, after an explanatory title, cuts back again. The insert is necessary if the audience is to become aware of what the two characters are discussing and is a much more elegant way of conveying it than would be a title alone. In a sound film, obviously, this sort of explanatory editing is no longer necessary since we would hear the mother's words. A detailed comparison between the editing of silent and sound films will perhaps emerge, if we consider the whole complex of problems which constitute editing under four separate headings : The Order of Shots In the silent days, the director and editor (they were usually the same person) worked with a great deal of freedom. The only factor which decided the order of shots was the desire to achieve the most satisfactory visual continuity. Often a great deal of material was shot which only found its appropriate place in the final scheme of continuity on the cutting bench. Griffith is said to have shot most of his films " off the cuff," shooting a certain amount of cover which allowed him enough footage to experiment with the material when he came to edit it. Eisenstein worked on his scripts in much greater detail, but he too relied to a great extent on the cutting stage of production to shape and reorganise the shot material. German film-makers, on the other hand (Carl Mayer, for instance), tended to work with much tighter scripts ; but the point is that in the silent cinema it was possible, creatively and economically, to let even the broader outlines of continuity take shape after the shooting was finished. The medium was extremely flexible in that there was no physical 46