Joining - Text 5
To join pieces of film and make them hold together, those manufacturers of pictures who were also manufacturers of film equipment very early on designed and marketed the instruments they needed. This was the case with film cement, which they improved in order to obtain joins as strong as possible and to limit the number of new breakages in the film.
This was also true of the film repairer, whose board with pegs was incorporated into “joining presses” at least as early as 1901, and whose major innovation consisted in the addition of “lids” to hold the two pieces of film flat on the base of the device, which also facilitated the scraping operation. The use of instruments such as these made possible greater precision than joins made by hand and was likely to make the join less visible when the film was projected. Over time these instruments would change, as the needs of film editors became more numerous and more pressing. In particular, it would soon be necessary to see clearly the content of the blocks of images one wanted or had to match up in order to edit the film.