Edwin S. Porter

Edwin S. Porter was an American filmmaker active in the first decades of motion pictures, working as a producer, director, studio manager and cinematographer for the Edison Manufacturing Company before later working for the Famous Players Film Company. He is remembered chiefly for The Great Train Robbery, a 1903 Western that used cross-cutting and close-up shots to tell a continuous story across multiple locations, a structural approach that helped move American film away from single-shot novelty footage and toward narrative storytelling as a commercial form of entertainment. His editing techniques on that film are widely credited with shaping how later directors assembled scenes into a coherent story.