Cutting - Text 6
Cutting was thus a very widespread action: it was useful to many stages in the production-exhibition chain. The degree of precision varied from one agent to the next (specialised female manual worker, projectionist, etc.) and from one purpose to the next (plan a match, repair the film, etc.), particularly with respect to the degree of attention paid to choosing which photograms to cut. But the equipment remained the same: most often simply scissors. It is from this perspective that there appeared in the early 1920s the principal innovation with respect to cutting: not in the manufacturers’ workshops (where the definitive cutting and joining operations were separate), but amongst exhibitors. In 1922, the German company Ernemann introduced to the U.S. market a new “film patcher” for use by projectionists, the Cutanscrape, a device equipped with pegs and a blade, making it possible to cut with “mathematical precision,”[2] even in the case of projectionists with no prior knowledge of how to repair a film. Very gradually, when the editing process was no longer divided into several stages, the use of guillotine splicers became widespread in the manufacturing workshops.