Theories of Film Editing - Montage Mis-en-scene And beyond Essay

Theories of Film Editing - Montage Mis-en-scene And beyond - Essay Example Cinema is an art that developed from man’s incorrigible wish to record the movement and the moving objects because it was the moving and not static objects that interested him. The first film show, the Lumiere Show was just a shot of a train coming into the railway platform. Thus in the beginning Cinema was just only a recording medium and the movie camera only a recording machine. It functionally started as a medium to record theatre performances. The tragedy of the theatre is that every great performance by any actor goes into thin air just when the curtain is down. There is no record left. Cinema filled up this gap between the performance and the record for the posterity. As a recording machine, the camera stayed static, taking the position of a static audience in the theatre watching a play. Thus the recorded footage demanded no editing as the whole recording process was continuous. PARALLEL MONTAGE: It was the American film makers D .W Griffith, Edwin Porter who made the static camera vibrant. They invented what we call today the â€Å"close up†. A famous close-up shot of Griffith is Mae Marsh’s clasped hands in the trial episode of Intolerance, one of Griffith’s classics. The close up here adds on to the emotional tone of the film’s narrative. According to Siegfried Kracauer â€Å" It almost looks as if her huge hands with convulsively moving fingers were inserted for the sole purpose of illustrating eloquently her anguish at the most crucial moment of the trail.