Film Editing by D.Fairservice

Film editing : history, theory and practice
Looking at the invisible

The Illustration Video

A book that sets out to explore how films have been
structured and edited from the very beginning of cinema
ideally needs the support of actual illustrations, excerpts,
taken from the films being discussed in the text. Publishing
a video linked to the sale of a book is somewhat unusual
and certainly unprecedented; something that has to be
arranged independently from the books publication.

A two-hour videotape (eventually also to be available on
DVD) containing sections from forty-three of the films
analysed in the text, accompanied by a spoken
commentary, is currently in production. Excerpts are
mostly from rare films made between 1895 and 1930 -
from Lumière to Dovzhenko - and relate to the first eleven
chapters of the eighteen chapter book. The tape will be
produced in both PAL and NTSC versions.

In order to assess the extent of interest in this illustration
videotape, potential customers are invited to
e-mail: movies@filmeditbookvideo.co.uk
You will then be contacted and kept informed of progress.

The Illustration Video will contain the following :

1895	Seven Lumière actualités: Sortie d'usine; Le Repas de bébé; Partie d'écarte; Démolition d'un mur; Arrivé d'un train a la Ciotat; Barque sortant du port and L'Arroseur arrosé.
1899	Two versions of The Kiss in the Tunnel; G. A. Smith's original, and the three-shot version from the Bamforth Company.
1900	James Bamforth's, Ladies Skirts Nailed to a Fence; G. A. Smith's Grandma's Reading Glass and As Seen Through a Telescope, and James Williamson's, Attack on a China Mission.
1901	Part of James Williamson's, Stop Thief; and all of Fire!, and excerpts from Ferdinand Zecca's, Histoire d'un crime.
1903	Edwin Porter's, Life of An American Fireman; G. A. Smith's, Mary Jane's Mishap, and most of William Haggar's, Desperate Poaching Affray.
1904	Robert Paul's, Buy Your own Cherries.
1905	Rescued by Rover, directed by Lewis Fitzhamon for the Hepworth Manufacturing Company.
1907	Key excerpts from Pathé's, Le cheval emballé.
1908	Pathé's, The Physician of the Castle, and D. W. Griffith's slightly later version that was based on it, Lonely Villa.
1912	Part of The Invaders, Francis Ford's first Western produced by Thomas H. Ince.
1913	The brothel raid, from George Loane Tucker's, Traffic in Souls.
1914	The Moloch sacrifice scene from Cabiria, Giovanni Pastrone's epic story of the Second Punic War, and a scene from The Bargain, William S. Hart's first feature directed by Reginald Barker for Thomas Ince.
1915	The opening scene from The Italian, another Barker film made for Thomas Ince. Two scenes from Cecil B. DeMille's, The Cheat, and two scenes from D. W. Griffith's, The Birth of a Nation.
1917	Scenes from Chaplin's, Easy Street, The Cure, and The Adventurer, and the opening from Victor Sjöström's, The Outlaw and his Wife.
1922	A key scene from F. W. Murnau's, Nosferatu.
1924	A key scene from Eric von Stroheim's notorious, Greed.
1925	Two scenes from Eisenstein's, Battleship Potemkin.
1926	A scene from Pudovkin's, Mother, with Vera Baranovskaya.
1927	The opening sequence from Pudovkin's, End of St. Petersburg, and a later scene demonstrating Eisenstein's 'montage of collisions' theory.
1928	The opening sequence from Eisenstein's, October.
1929	An early sequence from Alexander Dovzhenko's, Arsenal.

1930	The harvest sequence from Dovzhenko's masterpiece, Earth.
Should there be sufficient interest in this videotape, subsequent editions could be made available that include later silent, and some sound films. Copyright constraints limit availability of significant American material made after 1926. Some, however, did slip through the copyright net, including interestingly, Frank Capra's, It's a Wonderful Life, edited by the legendary William Hornbeck.