Edwin S. Porter

Porter contributed the concept of continuity editing to cinema, and he showed how shots were the basic building block of a film to drive the narrative. His films contained both cinematic and narrative elements, and in his early years, he was known for taking ideas already in existence and reworking them with carefully constructed scenes. His work was so significant because he used some of the first examples of modern film techniques, like the application of cross-cutting and matching action in his film, "Life of an American Fireman". Porter's most impressive film was "The Great Train Robbery", in which he relied on a narrative structure with temporal repetition to depict that different scenes were happening at the same time, although they were shown successively. This film is considered to be the first in the Western genre, and Porter ended it with an innovative use of a close-up to depict a bandit firing his gun at the audience, which was a revolutionary framing angle at the time.