Joining - Text 4
Picture manufacturers (who also made repair joins necessitated by accidental breakages which could occur in the workshop) soon began to offer, under their own control, pre-abutted films assembled in the workshop. We can thus say, somewhat figuratively, that control over “editing” shifted from the projection booth to the editing room, a room which, moreover, would take on this name only at a quite late date (in the 1920s) after having first been seen, mostly in France, as an inspecting room (a salle de vérification), and in the United States, by the late 1910s, more often as a cutting room (or assembly room).
Mending and abutting procedures, although rudimentary – by definition, abutting required no precision work and was carried out blind, so to speak, without even having to pay attention to the materiality of the images – thus contributed to laying the groundwork for the development of editing practices, even before editing became a notion, meaning when the idea of editing was discussed and theorised in the world of cinema. In the early years, undoubtedly, the person responsible for the assembly did not act upon the body of the pictures being abutted. They limited themselves to lining up, one after the other, two blocks of images which came from two different film strips with no relation to each other and which didn’t even touch. In the beginning, abutting involved no intention of establishing a connection between the segments being brought together. In its most elementary form, it was a simple coupling of pictures, by attaching and joining them, whose subjects were not connected and were independent: in this way, abutting was carried out without seeking to create an effect of continuity and without any transfer of information from one segment to the next (each segment being in a sense a finished product and a complete and autonomous entity). Usually, the pictures brought together in this way were not joined end to end but rather were separated from one another by an insert (most often a piece of film stock with no emulsion, or sometimes an intertitle).