Ben Hur and the History of “Analog” Editing’s Technology - Text 5
But as a result of using the widescreen format, the film could not be easily edited on existing systems designed for film widths of 35 mm or less. It had to be reduced to 35 mm in order to be edited on a Moviola, preventing the editor from seeing the entire widescreen image that would be projected, perhaps leading to some of the formal failures noted at the time.
The new flatbed systems that were then emerging did offer alternatives, but they were greeted with a general reluctance. Case in point, it is only in 1969, with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People, that a first U.S. feature film was entirely edited on a flatbed system. Their value had however become apparent to most before then. Dana Polan observes that they “offered several attractions,” like higher speeds, which quickened the pace of the editing process, and a viewing screen considerably larger than the Moviola, which allowed more people to watch at the same time and more visual detail to be seen during production. Also, more reels could be run at the same time, “each with its own picture head, so that editors could switch from one reel to another, checking out alternative versions in an anticipation of the nonlinear editing that would characterize the digital age.”[6]
Yet, on the whole, Polan says that “Technological change within the specific domain of editing made only a relatively minor contribution to [the] story of changes in patterns of postwar editing”[7] – that is, between 1945 and about 1967. Editors “tended to be technologically conservative”[8]: while there were significant technical developments, many continued using older devices and systems, or put new technology to traditional purposes, so there was little interest in developing further the formal and stylistic aspects of editing. The most notable technical change that editors were willing to accept were the alternatives to “the standard method of physically combining shots”,[9] as the use of glue or cement required scraping emulsion off the film, which meant the loss of some parts of the image. The preferred solution to this was tape splicing.[10]
As with the introduction of flatbed systems, these changes were accepted once editors were confident it wouldn’t jeopardize their conventional ways of working, or that it would solve enduring problems. Yet none of this was having a very dramatic effect in any immediately observable way on editing styles. For instance, as Kevin Brownlow argued, for many the 1925 Ben-Hur was far superior to the 1959 version – particularly for the inventiveness of its chariot scene, which, in Wyler’s version, lacked the spirit on vivid display in Niblo’s – partly the result of editing widescreen imagery on the Moviola.
While between 1925 and 1959 little had changed, at least in mainstream, Hollywood-style filmmaking, Wyler’s Ben-Hur depended more on the spectacular process of widescreen, which technically limited the editor’s work, and may have had a dampening effect formally and stylistically on its editing. The 1925 version “immersed” the spectator in the action by the complexity of its editing, allowing for a spectacular and perhaps unprecedented mobility of perspective, but the 1959 version offers a more flatly expansive immersion by the sheer size of the screen, perhaps making the director and editor less willing to construct a montage sequence comparable to, or more complex than, what had been achieved in 1925.
