1894 Fred Ott's Sneeze, the first complete film on record, consists of only one shot.

1899 Georges Méliès's Cinderella (Cendrillon) is one of the earliest films to use editing as an aid to narrative. It consists of twenty shots joined by straight cuts and intertitles.

1903 Edwin S. Porter's Life of an American Fireman is released in two different versions, one with nine shots and another with twenty. Another of Porter's films, The Great Train Robbery, is the first major use of parallel editing, cross-cutting between two actions occurring at the same time but in different places.

1919 Lev Kuleshov begins an influential experiment in which he places an identical shot of an expressionless actor after each of three different shots (a dead woman, a child, and a plate of soup). After seeing the film, Kuleshov's students believe that the actor responds differently to each stimulus. Kuleshov thus shows how vital editing is to a performance.

1920 D. W. Griffith's Way Down East provides an early example of parallel editing and cinematic patterns. To heighten the drama in the climactic ice-break sequence, Griffith cuts between three different shots (the hero, the damsel in distress, and the peril) in an A B C A C B C A B C A C B C pattern. While continuity editing is one of Griffith's major contributions to the language of cinema, other filmmakers-Vsevolod Pudovkin, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and Luis Buñuel prominent among them-shift away from creating logical, continuous relationships among elements within stories and instead create discontinuous (or nonlinear) relationships.

1924 The Moviola, a portable upright editing tool operated by foot pedals, is introduced. Complete with a built-in viewing screen, it allows sound and video to be edited, separately or together.

1926 The advent of sound movies profoundly affects all aspects of film production, including editing.

1927 Abel Gance introduces Polyvision, a process that uses three cameras and three projectors to show up to three events at the same time or display an ultrawide composition across three screens. He pioneers this technique, which predates widescreen by more than twenty-five years, in his film Napoléon.

1941 Orson Welles's Citizen Kane makes narrative use of discontinuity editing; the progression of Kane's life is shown multiple times but with different key events each time, presenting the audience with a scattered, nonchronological view.

1946 Establishing shots in Vincente Minelli's Meet Me in St. Louis use dissolves as transitions between prop photographs of locations and the "real" places.

1950 ACE, American Cinema Editors, an honorary society of motion picture editors, is founded. Film editors are voted into membership on the basis of their professional achievements, their dedication to the education of others, and their commitment to the craft of editing, and are thus entitled to place the honorific letters A.C.E. after their names in movie credits, just as cinematographers elected to the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), place the letters A.S.C. after their names.

1954 Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window—about a man who, while watching his neighbors through his window, sees signs of a murder being committed—uses point of view shots and eyeline-match cuts.

1955 Ishiro Honda's Godzilla is reedited before its American release. New scenes are filmed and added with American actor Raymond Burr, including some that give the appearance of Burr interacting with characters from the Japanese portions (although none of the Japanese actors were present for the reshoots).

1968 The now-famous sequence in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in which a prehistoric human's bone weapon spinning in the air transforms into a space station rotating in space is perhaps the most audacious example of a match-on-action cut.

1977 George Lucas's Star Wars frequently uses wipes for transitions between scenes—an homage to classic science fiction movie serials such as Flash Gordon .

1979 In one of the greatest challenges to film editing in history, Francis Ford Coppola shoots 370 hours of footage for Apocalypse Now. Editors (supervised by Richard Marks) shape that footage into the initial release, which runs 153 mins., a ratio of 145 minutes shot for every minute used.

1982 Carl Reiner's Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, a tribute to 1940s film noir, intercuts shots from other films to give the appearance of the main character speaking to actors from forty years before.

1989 Avid introduces the Media Composer, a computerized device for nonlinear editing.

1994 Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction uses discontinuity editing for its overall narrative structure; the major events of the film occur out of sequence, so that the end of the story is actually in the middle of the film.

1998 In Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (Lola rennt), the rhythms of the editing match the energetic music, creating a hyperkinetic feel. Animation, live action, time-lapse cinematography, slow- and fast-motion, various camera angles and positions, and so on, are cut together, using varying techniques (hard cuts, dissolves, jump cuts, and ellipses).

Alex Proyas's Dark City, with an average shot length of 1.8 seconds, is one of the fastest-paced movies ever made.

2000 Christopher Nolan's Memento runs part of its story backward in color sequences and part of it forward in black-and-white sequences, creating a unique cinematic puzzle.

2001 With the aid of editor Walter Murch, Francis Ford Coppola recuts his 1979 film Apocalypse Now, adding forty-nine minutes of original footage along with new music. The new version, Apocalypse Now Redux, is truer to the filmmakers' original intentions.

2002 Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark (Russkij kovcheg), which consists entirely of the longest take in film history (ninety-six minutes), is a tour de force of planning, choreography, and Steadicam camera movement.

2003 Virtually all filmmaking, from commercial features to student productions, now depends on nonlinear editing with digital equipment.