Film’s first cut was a beheading
Thanks to the American director Martin Scorsese’s 2011 movie “Hugo” filmmakers were reminded that Frenchman Georges Méliès invented movie special effects but he wasn’t the first filmmaker to use creative film editing.
Let’s go back a bit.
In the beginning of filmmaking there were many Europeans involved and almost only one American, Thomas Edison. Regarded as the fourth most prolific inventor in history Edison saw potential in ‘moving photography’ and built a research laboratory and a studio to film in. Edison hired Engineer William Dickson to build a viewing machine (Kinetoscope) and a film camera (Kinetograph) and as part of his research, Dickson experimented with joining strips of exposed.
He later wrote for the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE):
“…we had to devise certain essentials; such as a circular film cutter or trimmer, a perforator and a clamp with steady pins to fit the punch holes, to use in joining the film with a thin paste of the base dissolved in amyl acetate…”
Dickson then created films at Edison most famously Fred Ott’s Sneeze, before he left to team up with the Latham family of New York and design a method for film to be shot and projected for a period longer than one minute, a process later called the Latham Loop.
Meanwhile in-house Edison director Alfred Clark made an 18 second film called The Execution of Mary Stuart (1895). It was this film that made editing history. Clark cut between a shot of an actor’s head on an executioner’s block and that of a mannequin head falling into a basket in the same setting to portray the Queen’s death.
Filmmaker Matt Barry observed:
“Clark may very well have been the first filmmaker to utilize this technique.”
The method to create Clark’s edit was almost as brutal as the act it portrayed. A camera operator or laboratory technician took a sharp knife and held the film steady enough to cut it close to the film frame line either side of the break. Then he scraped enough emulsion from each frame with a metal blade, to apply a joining agent such as amyl acetate cement. He held the two pieces together with metal clamps or bare fingers while the cement dissolved enough of the film base to fuse the clips together
Méliès, and many other filmmakers in Europe, saw Clark’s work the following year and they copied it in their own films. While the use of editing evolved with each year, the equipment to make edits did not.
25 years passed before an eclectic group in Germany turned their minds to something more sustainable than scissors and cement. Anthropologist Dr. Odo Deodatus Tauern joined forces with director Arnold Fanck, and camera operator Sepp Allgeier to create a production company called Bergfilm.
They teamed with Dr Nikolau Lyon to create Lyta Kino Werke (Lyta Cinema Works) named for Ly (Lyon) and Ta (Tauren) to build production equipment for their films. Lyta worked from a building on Richard Wagner Strausse in Freiburg where the first products were a hand cranked 35 mm film camera, and a manual film splicer. Then Lyta released the world’s first dedicated editing system. The Kinoskop Viewer was a precision glass viewing lens designed to sit on an existing work table between film winds.
The company showed the device publicly in April 1924, and refined it by year’s end as a complete package called the Lyta Universal Desk (Lyta-Universal-Arbeitstisch). It now included two hand cranks, a foot brake and a recessed bottom-lit screen set into a table desktop.The back of the unit housed a gallows, and storage facilities for short film rolls. The Lyta Universal was advertised as a ‘fully equipped work desk’ with detachable legs and a foot brake to control film movement.
Trade journals described the Lyta as a ‘horizontal’ editing machine because its film reels lay flat but the phrase flatbed became more popular. The Lyta was adopted by filmmakers from Vertov, to the director Leni Reifenstahl who was directing films for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
“Primitive as this instrument was, I found it indispensable. My Lyta had no screen, only a double magnifying glass, through which frames could be pulled to and fro.”
Source — Timeline: The history of editing.
