Crosscutting Revisited : The Impact of Historical Research into Early Cinema on A Key Element of Classical

According to traditional film histories, crosscutting is the cornerstone of the classical aesthetic in cinema. Numerous scholarly studies have been carried out on this crucial aspect of classical narrative film language. It is maintained that crosscutting’s “multiple lines of action” must take place in “widely separated locales” (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, 1985: 48). The use of such ambiguous expressions as “widely separated locales” and “multiple lines of action” creates serious problems when applied to the development of alternating editing techniques in early cinema. Without new theoretical tools, it becomes very difficult to elaborate a theory to explain the development of these editing techniques, even if some traditional historians had tried to do so in the past. In addition, it is practically impossible to establish a classification schema for the various forms of alternating editing techniques, since the current typology takes into account only a small percentage of these forms, namely pseudo-alternation, parallel editing and crosscutting. In this paper, I want, first of all, to illustrate how traditional historians gave exaggerated importance to the issue of crosscutting to the detriment of rigorous historical research, leaving certain essential questions around the definition of this alternation’s configuration unraised. This historical digression will be done around the film Attack on a China Mission, made at the turn of the century by the British filmmaker James Williamson, which is often referred to as the first film to use crosscutting. Generally speaking, what will be under discussion here are the traditional historian’s orientation and the degree of his or her interest in events in the past. Afterwards, building on precisions on space and the multiple lines of action, I will attempt to clear up the confusion the actual definition of crosscutting has given rise to around this film. My ultimate goal will be to highlight the theoretical connection, despite their differences, between the paradigms “early cinema” and “institutional cinema” by demonstrating precisely how the study of crosscutting in early cinema not only made it possible to reveal the ambiguity of this key element, which had for a long time been theorised in relation to classical narrative cinema, but also will enable us to elaborate a typology which takes into account a broader range of the various forms of alternating editing techniques found in one or the other of these two paradigms.