Long before film technology was invented, people used images to tell stories. These images ranged from cave paintings to religious triptychs to comic strips. In the late nineteenth century, illustrated lectures using photographic slides became popular.

Films quickly evolved from the use of single shots to the use of multiple images to tell a story. Early filmmaker Georges Méliès used stop-motion photography, and later editing, to create delightful visual effects. By 1906, the period now known as “early cinema” gave way to narrative-driven cinema, a transition facilitated by more codified practices of editing. While not the first filmmaker to use it, D. W. Griffith helped pioneer the editing technique of crosscutting, or parallel editing, which involves alternating among multiple strands of simultaneous story action.

The concept of editing as montage is closely associated with Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. While montage is simply the French word for editing, the term has come to designate a theory of editing that emphasizes the breaks and contrasts between images joined by a cut.

The introduction of sound technology in the late 1920s solidified Hollywood’s commitment to continuity editing, an approach that emphasizes spatial and temporal clarity in order to present a story to an audience in a logical and coherent manner. Beginning in the 1940s, cinematic realism became established as one of the primary aesthetic principles in film editing, influenced in part by Italian neorealism and documentary filmmaking practices.

In the post–World War II period, alternative editing styles emerged and aimed to fracture classical editing’s illusion of realism. Various strategies of disjunctive editing, such as jump cuts, were utilized in the artistic cinema of directors like Jean-Luc Godard, who sought to provide an alternative aesthetic to Hollywood. However, these avant-garde practices were later assimilated into the mainstream aesthetics of fast-paced editing and frenetic camera work, like that seen in commercials, music videos, and Hollywood action films.

One of the most significant changes to film editing was the emergence of digital editing in the later part of the twentieth century. Computer-based digital editing systems allow immediate access to footage and unprecedented opportunities to manipulate and combine images in new ways. Although one effect of the ease and affordability of digital editing seems to be a more rapid pace of editing, digital filmmaking can also embrace the opposite aesthetic effect. Another significant benefit of digital editing is longer shot length. On film, the length of a single take was limited by how much stock the camera could hold; on digital video, the duration of a shot is virtually limitless.