Briefly describe the development history of film editing.

When studying film editing, it is extremely beneficial to review the development history of film and television. Especially in China, due to the long-term closure, for example, the research on the development of world film history only really started in the late 1970s. These objective reasons have caused most film and television creators, even science and engineering writers, to be very unfamiliar with today's film and television development, and even have a wrong understanding. For example, some people think that the law of axis was discovered by Eisenstein. In fact, it was invented by Griffith in the United States. Eisen's intellectual montage is just opposite to the law of this axis, because the intellectual montage has no narrative. Obviously, we must understand the direction of film and television development.

When the film was invented, people didn't have the concept of editing. The inventor of film camera only thought of using it to record moving images in life. For example, Lumiere's early films (just a shot in the present concept), such as Train Entering the Station, Factory Gate and Baby Breakfast, are only uninterrupted moving image records from the beginning to the end of the shot. If this kind of record is called a movie, it is also a lens and a movie. Its content is just a faithful record of a video of life activities. Later, when the person who shot the film stopped unexpectedly due to mechanical failure during the operation and then started shooting again, the developed image produced unexpected effects: for example, before the mechanical failure,

The photographer is shooting a moving carriage. When the machine is repaired, he will take another picture, and the carriage has already left. Although he didn't fly the plane, he took another picture. The effect of uninterrupted playback on the screen is that the carriage suddenly disappears like magic. At that time, people called this visual effect "stop shooting", and the means of film composition began to become complicated. Stopping shooting is still a useful means. For example, at the beginning of the Hollywood movie A Long Day, German general Rommel gave a speech to his subordinates on the coast of the English Channel with the sea as the background, but in the middle of the speech, his image suddenly disappeared for a while and then reappeared. Early film creators, such as Amelia, used his rich imagination to stop shooting.

As a result, there are many magical visual effects that can't appear on the stage. His trip to the moon (1902) further developed the effect of stopping shooting. He turned a scene into a paragraph in his movie story, which is what we usually call the concept of drama, just like the "screen" in a stage play. He also realized the left and right direction of the picture, as well as the entry and exit of characters (that is, painting and painting). In the scene where scientists boarded the rocket and set off, both the scientists, the bathrobe girls who came to bid farewell and the creatures in the palace on the moon were lined up horizontally, which is the concept of the fourth wall of the stage. There is movement in his lens. He is still very active, but the camera never moves. Even the background is a scene close to or away from the lens, not the lens push and pull. Remember, the fixed plane position and the left-right movement or lateral movement are the most original movie concepts, not new technologies. Later, film creators gradually realized that this could not be regarded as the essence of film artistic expression.

Although Amelia's imagination is non-film, he is the first film creator to exert his imagination after all. His influence was considerable, until the first decade of this century, many film creators, especially French film creators.

Or imitate his practice and do magic tricks on the screen. For example, Zika's slick Jim (1905) shows slick Jim by stopping shooting, and the police will never catch him. In short, their works are all one shot at a time, developing in chronological order. The camera clung to the protagonist and never left. This kind of hit-it-off film has no jump in time and space, and there is no omission in the development of events. The distance between the camera and the subject is at least panoramic.

Kracauer and Bazin, both film theorists, have noticed that Lumiere and Meria have played two potential development directions of films. Lumiere is developing towards recording real life truthfully, which is the predecessor of documentary. Meria, on the other hand, develops in the direction of reappearing a world on the screen, which is the predecessor of fictional feature films. However, even for feature films, the means it uses is still recording, that is, recording fictional reality. The documentary nature of film and television brings fidelity. This is something that no movie can ignore except cartoons.

The life of an American firefighter

The further development of film structure was started by an American. Edwin Porter was hired by Edison as a photographer and director of the experimental studio. In 1903, he made two important films: The Life of an American Firefighter and great train robbery. In the life of an American firefighter, Potter switches back and forth between different places very smoothly, and his shots are subordinate to narrative logic, rather than following the activities of the protagonist scene by scene. This is a great breakthrough in the means of film expression. For example, it was a fireman who first dreamed of his wife.

Son and child, the fire woke him up. A series of actions of firemen's emergency gathering. Finally, they ran to the fire engine, which was running in the street. Burning houses and fire engines arrive at the scene of the fire, and then switch between indoor (the view of victims waiting for rescue) and outdoor (the view of rescuers). Finally, the fireman saved his wife and children. The shot of the dream uses a cartoon convention and a balloon frame (it was not until Griffith that direct switching was used to express the ideological activities of the characters). In the scene where the fire alarm sounded, Potter took a close-up shot and put a hand in the picture to sound the alarm. And from the dream to the alarm, from the alarm to the fireman's dispatch, we use overlapping, and the connection of other shots is switched. However, the cross-switching between indoor and outdoor scenes of rescue work forms a paragraph, which means that Porter has changed the convention that a shot represented by Meria forms a paragraph. Porter seems to have realized that the structure of the film is not a scene of a lens, but many mirrors.

A paragraph consisting of a title. In addition, he also adopted the method that the Soviet Montage School later called "creative geography" or "geographical montage". For example, the outdoor scene of the fire is obviously the exterior of the real house, but the indoor fire was taken in the studio. Porter seems to have felt that the lens logic of the film can create a place that is not available in real life.

(2) great train robbery

In the subsequent great train robbery, although the narration is still in the traditional chronological order, the railway station operator was tied up by robbers and knocked unconscious. Then the robbers sneaked into the train, robbed the mail compartment, killed a conductor, occupied the front of the train, stopped, separated the front from the train, robbed passengers, killed a passenger who tried to escape, boarded the front, drove the front away, and drove to. These traditional shooting methods have smooth lens editing and beautiful exterior. But in the last paragraph, Porter uses a new editing idea. In this passage, there is an obvious time omission, and a shaking lens is used to follow the robbers into the Woods. In the next scene, Porter returns to the position of the opening scene, that is, the telegraph office of the railway station, showing that people have found the attacked operator. Although the scene jumps backward and leaves the center of the film (the robber) in terms of story time, it is logical in terms of story coherence. It answers a question that the audience must ask: how to catch the robbers? The next shot is another omission of time and space. The camera switches to a group of people dancing in the barn, and the rescued operator then comes to the barn to report their news about the robbers. Then there is something missing. The vigilantes have begun to search the forest for robbers. Reasonable narrative logic is convenient for the audience to supplement and omit. Porter shows an effective way to form a work, which is often used in film form, that is, omitting unimportant things. The legend is accidental, because he lacks film.

In any case, he showed the power of ellipsis after all. In this film, we also see the application of depth scenes. We saw a train passing by the window behind the telegraph office. Another feature is that more than half of the films are shot outdoors. This is rare in early movies.

Ironically, the last scene is the robber shooting at the audience at close range, which has nothing to do with the whole film. At that time, the director didn't know how to use close-ups or close-ups effectively.

(3) Rescued by the Rover

Meanwhile, Brighton schools in Britain are conducting more successful research. The Savior of the Dog (1905) by C. Hibworth is the most fluent fragment before Griffith, which is more advanced than the narrative structure and rhythm of Porter. we

To study the narrative structure of this film one by one. The first scene is a nanny pushing a stroller. She offended a gypsy woman and vowed revenge. Then Habworth made a big mistake. The nanny found the baby lost and ran back to the host's house. The third scene is the nanny rushing into the living room to report the bad news. When she told the story, Rover, the domestic dog, was listening attentively. Then rover jumped out of the window. Here's the best part:

In the last scene of the film, the baby, the owner, the hostess and the wanderer are happily reunited in the living room. Here, the Hebrews completely omitted the process of going home. It seems that the Hebrews realized that this passage had no emotional effect. (Note that the director used almost all the depth scenes here. )

This is not called literariness. This is a simulation. In life, you tell someone one thing, and sometimes you just say what you think: "I saw her walk into the Wangs' door with a big box of cakes in Harbin. "I happened to be repairing shoes in the opposite shop. An hour later, I saw her coming out again. It's from Wang Xiu, and they are friendly and warm ... "

This story is all about visual factors. That's what happened. As long as you pay attention to choosing materials from the perspective of audio-visual in your life. Literature, on the other hand, selects materials from life from the perspective of abstract figures and symbols. It's just that sometimes a phenomenon is suitable for two kinds of media. What's more, literature chooses some literal symbols suitable for abstract generalization from the audio-visual factors in life to write. It is not a step-by-step description of a person's walking posture, but a general and metaphorical description, such as "striding" and "limping", while the film is very specific.