Joining - Text 2
In fact the repair principle was crucial to the advent of editing, both for the definition of certain technemes underlying the operations involved and for the invention of relatively precise instruments.
Mending joins whose causes were accidental was done in the same place where the film was shown. For the first few years of film exhibition, film repairers were also used by exhibitors to join one after the other entire pictures (albeit these were short: about twenty metres, lasting less than a minute) in order to be able to project without interruption the dozen or so strips of film that usually made up a program. In these cases, joins were quite clearly done deliberately.
The film repairer was used to carry out what we will call the abutting of pictures, a procedure which quickly became necessary for the projectionist, who simply attached end to end the series of usually autonomous pictures making up a program, which was the only way to spare viewers tedious waits while the projection stopped and started between pictures (something people sometimes complained about in those days).