The history
A century and more from a jammed camera in Paris to editing a Hollywood epic on a Mac.
The first films were single shots. Within a few years, film-makers found that cutting between shots could leap across space and time, build suspense and even create feelings that were in no single shot. Machines like the Moviola and the flatbed made cutting precise, rebels like Godard broke the rules on purpose, and computers finally let editors change any cut in seconds.
1900
Close-ups cut into a scene
George Albert Smith, England
1909
Cross-cutting for suspense
D. W. Griffith, USA
1924
Upright editing machine (Moviola)
Iwan Serrurier, USA
1971
Non-linear editor (CMX 600)
CMX Systems, USA
1997
Digital edit to win the editing Oscar
Walter Murch, The English Patient
2003
Major Hollywood film cut on Final Cut Pro
Walter Murch, Cold Mountain
1895 – 1917
Film-makers learn that shots can be joined: close-ups, dissolves, action across cuts and cross-cutting for suspense.
1896
c. 1896
Méliès said his camera jammed while filming a Paris street. When he projected the film, a bus seemed to turn into a hearse. He began stopping the camera and splicing film on purpose to make things appear and vanish.
Why it mattered. It showed that film could be cut and joined to change what the audience believes they saw.
1900
In Grandma's Reading Glass, a boy looks through a magnifying glass, and Smith cuts to big circular close-ups of what he sees: a watch, a canary, his grandmother's eye.
Why it mattered. It is one of the earliest films to cut between a wide shot and close-ups from a character's point of view.
1901
Fire! follows a fire from the street to a burning bedroom and back outside, across several shots. A firefighter carries a rescued person out of one shot and into the next.
Why it mattered. It showed how action can carry on across a cut, the seed of continuity editing.
1902
A Trip to the Moon links its scenes with dissolves, one picture melting into the next, as its scientists fly to the Moon and back.
Why it mattered. It made the dissolve part of cinema's grammar long before editing machines existed.
1903
December 1903
Porter's 12-minute western tells its story in about 14 shots, cutting between the robbers, the train and the telegraph office. It was a huge hit in the new nickelodeon theatres.
Why it mattered. Cutting between places that are far apart helped audiences learn to follow a story told in separate shots.
1909
In The Lonely Villa, robbers break into a house while the father races home. Griffith cuts back and forth between them, faster and faster, until the rescue.
Why it mattered. Cross-cutting between two lines of action became one of the most powerful tools for suspense.
1916
Intolerance cuts between four stories set in ancient Babylon, the time of Jesus, 16th-century France and modern America, building all four towards their climaxes together.
Why it mattered. It pushed cross-cutting further than anyone before and deeply influenced Soviet film-makers.
1918 – 1929
Soviet film-makers turn editing into a theory of meaning, while Hollywood gets its first editing machine.
1920
c. 1918–1921
Kuleshov is said to have cut the same expressionless close-up next to shots of a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin and a woman on a divan. As Pudovkin told it, viewers praised the actor's hunger, grief and desire. No footage survives.
Why it mattered. It suggested that meaning comes from how shots are joined, not only from what is in them. Modern studies find a real but modest effect.
1924
Serrurier turned his home movie projector into an upright editing machine with a small viewer. The first one went to Douglas Fairbanks's studio.
Why it mattered. Editors could now watch film at any speed and find the exact frame to cut. Moviolas stayed the Hollywood standard until the 1970s.
1925
December 1925
Eisenstein's film about a 1905 naval mutiny cuts together hundreds of short shots. In the Odessa Steps sequence, soldiers march down a long flight of steps into a fleeing crowd, and the editing stretches a few moments of terror into minutes.
Why it mattered. It became the most studied example of montage: meaning and emotion made by shots colliding.
1927
Shub searched archives for old newsreels and home movies of the Russian royal family and edited them into The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty.
Why it mattered. She showed that an editor can create a new story from footage shot by others, the root of the compilation documentary.
1929
A city symphony with no story and no actors, built from thousands of shots, with fast cutting, split screens and freeze frames. Svilova, the editor, even appears in the film at her editing bench.
Why it mattered. It shows off almost every editing trick of the silent era in one film.
1930 – 1959
Sound films and studio systems perfect continuity editing, cut on Moviolas and flatbed tables.
1935
1930s
German companies built editing tables that lay the film flat on spinning plates, with a screen and separate picture and sound tracks. They came into wide use in the United States in the 1970s.
Why it mattered. Flatbeds made it easy to run picture and sound together, forwards and back, and became the classic editing bench.
1953
Mukherjee edited Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin, a landmark of Indian realist cinema, before going on to direct films such as Anand.
Why it mattered. Indian cinema has long drawn directors from the editing room, where they learn how scenes really work.
1960 – 1988
New waves make cuts visible on purpose, and the first computer editors appear.
1960
March 1960
Godard's first feature cut chunks out of continuous shots, so the characters seem to jump forward in time. Mainstream editors had worked hard to hide such cuts.
Why it mattered. It made the jump cut a deliberate style. Today it is everywhere, from music videos to vlogs.
1962
In Lawrence of Arabia, Lawrence blows out a match and the film cuts straight to the sun rising over the desert. Coates won the Academy Award for editing.
Why it mattered. It became one of the most admired match cuts in film.
1968
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, an early human throws a bone into the air, and a match cut turns it into a satellite in orbit, jumping millions of years in one frame.
Why it mattered. It showed how a single match cut can carry a huge leap in time and meaning.
1971
The CMX 600 stored video on disk drives the size of washing machines, holding about half an hour of footage, and let editors jump to any shot instantly.
Why it mattered. It was the first step towards editing on computers, where you can change any cut without re-splicing everything after it.
1989 – today
Avid, Premiere, Final Cut and others replace film benches, and editing reaches every laptop and phone.
1989
Avid showed its computer editing system in 1989. Editors could cut with digitised copies of the footage, then send a list of their decisions to finish the film.
Why it mattered. Media Composer became the standard for feature films and TV, and it still is in many cutting rooms.
1989
for Parinda (1989)
Saluja, a Film and Television Institute of India graduate, won the National Film Award for editing for Parinda, then again for Dharavi, Sardar and Godmother. She also cut Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro and 1942: A Love Story.
Why it mattered. She became one of Indian cinema's most respected editors when the job was mostly done by men. An editing award is now named after her.
1991
December 1991
Adobe Premiere let people edit video on an ordinary Apple Macintosh computer. Today's Premiere Pro is used for everything from YouTube videos to feature films.
Why it mattered. Editing software stopped being only for studios.
1995
Murch's short book on editing asks why cuts work at all, and sets out his Rule of Six: emotion 51%, story 23%, rhythm 10%, eye-trace 7%, the screen's 2D plane 5% and 3D space 4%.
Why it mattered. It is still one of the most read books on editing.
2003
Murch and his assistant edited 597,000 feet of film for Cold Mountain on Final Cut Pro, the first major Hollywood feature cut on it.
Why it mattered. It proved that affordable desktop software could handle a big studio film.
2022
1989–2022
Prasad has won National Awards for editing many times since 1989 and has cut films in 17 languages, from Dil Chahta Hai and Kannathil Muthamittal to RRR (2022).
Why it mattered. His career shows how one editor can shape films across India's many languages.
By the numbers
Average shot duration in English-language popular films, by period, from James Cutting's 2016 study. Films now cut more than twice as often as in the early sound era.
Did you know?
In Kuleshov's experiment the actor's face was the same shot every time, yet viewers said he looked hungry, sad or loving.
Walter Murch's Rule of Six ranks emotion at 51%, far above keeping the 180-degree line, which gets just 5%.
Cold Mountain's editors worked through 597,000 feet of film, about 110 hours of footage at 24 frames a second.
At the pace of films from 1990 to 2015, about 4.3 seconds a shot, a two-hour film holds around 1,700 shots.
The people
1861 – 1938 · Magician and film-maker · France
Turned splicing and dissolves into movie magic.
1875 – 1948 · Director · USA
Made cross-cutting a tool for suspense.
1899 – 1970 · Film-maker and teacher · Russia
Showed that the cut itself can create meaning.
1898 – 1948 · Director and theorist · Latvia and Russia
Built a theory of montage as shots colliding.
1894 – 1959 · Editor and director · Russian Empire and USSR
Invented the compilation film from archive footage.
1925 – 2018 · Editor · England
Cut Lawrence of Arabia and won the Oscar.
born 1943 · Editor and sound designer · USA
Wrote In the Blink of an Eye and led editing onto computers.
1952 – 2000 · Editor · India
Four National Awards for editing, including Parinda.
born 1963 · Editor · India
Many National Awards, and films in 17 languages.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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