Ben Hur and the History of “Analog” Editing’s Technology - Text 1
If the recent incorporation of digital technologies into the apparatus of editing, and its supposed formal consequences, can be seen as the most profound changes to the cinema to date, several significant changes in editing technology had already taken place over the course of the history of cinema. The moments of change can be more or less clearly demarcated as the original establishment of the basic conventions of editing itself, and the subsequent introduction of three editing systems – the moviola, introduced in 1924; flatbed systems like the Steenbeck, that became prominent mid-century; and, most recently, digital systems.
Each innovation brought changes in working patterns and structures, in the division of labor, and in the nature of collaboration. New possibilities were created, but existing conventions were also often further entrenched, as the technical changes often reflected, or were based in, editing patterns and strategies developed with an earlier technology, whose protocols were incorporated into, or are made easier with, the new technology. As each of its film versions was released during a different era in the history of editing technology, the question of the significance of technological change to the apparatus of editing can be presented by comparing the various adaptations of Lew Wallace’s nineteenth-century Christian novel Ben-Hur.
Its first adaptation, Ben Hur, directed by Frank Oakes Rose and Sidney Olcott, was released in 1907 by the Kalem Film Company. It exemplifies the style that had been developed before what Charlie Keil has called the “transitional era” in film history, when films became longer and narrative and representational techniques more complex and powerfully expressive.
