Concepts
Continuity Editing
Film Technique
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The system of cutting that keeps screen space and time legible: matching action across cuts, the 180 degree line, shot and reverse shot, eyeline matches. Worked out in the 1910s, it is the invisible grammar of narrative film and television, so standard that audiences only notice it when it is broken.
Facts
Disputed
Formulated YearThe continuity system crystallized gradually through D.W. Griffith's Biograph years from 1908 and gained wide recognition with The Birth of a Nation in 1915; historians do not point to a single formulating date. Concept Domain Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
1. A History of Narrative Film
David A. Cook, W. W. Norton, 2016
2. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationD. W. Griffith, Legacy sectionQuote, D. W. Griffith, Legacy section
Griffith seems to have been one of the first to understand how certain film techniques could be used to create an expressive language; it gained popular recognition with the release of The Birth of a Nation (1915).
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