Cutting - Text 3
Trick films indisputably contributed to the process of making cutting and assembly techniques more complex. But it was in another field that these techniques saw greater development. A few decades after The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (Edison, 1895), in the latter half of the 1920s, the notion of the match, which had not been absent from the thinking of the earliest kinematographers, gradually changed to refer to the production of an impression of continuity by attenuating the gap created by linking two hetero-frame shots. Although this was already foreseen on set by the script assistant (or continuity clerk), tasked with noting the differences between takes and the changes made to the continuity script while filming, identifying the optimum place to cut now became central to the assembly phase of production. This identification was also facilitated, after 1925 or so, by the use of film viewers such as the Moviola or the Lyta.
The pruning was most often carried out on a positive print, obtained after the negative was cut to rid it of less satisfactory takes. Cuts were then made to the positive print, not to takes not being used, but to tableaux and portions of tableaux in order to create an initial version: the “initial positive print.” On the basis of this master positive, the “first negative assembly” was made, making it conform to the definitive form given to the initial positive print. There next came a kind of “disassembly,” or the “assembly of the negative for printing,” which involved a new series of cuts serving to bring together those tableaux which could be printed together, meaning those which required the same exposure time.