The wipe, first deployed in film by Robert Paul in 1901 on Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost, is a transitional effect in which a moving boundary line or shape replaces one shot with a second shot. Paul’s effect emulated a curtain dropping in the theater, a horizontal line wiping from top to bottom of the frame. Wipes vary in the size and direction of the line or shape wiping the screen. The most common wipe, the lateral wipe, uses a vertical line; Fassbinder used it in Veronika Voss (1982), for instance, to emulate the glamor of Hollywood’s Golden Age silent films while accelerating the pace of the action. And as recently as 2006, Martin Scorcese employed a telescoping iris wipe in The Departed.
In the early days of celluloid, wipes were more expensive than dissolves or cuts, because they had to be executed at the lab. By the 1930s, the studios acquired their own optical printers, and wipes became more widely used, especially at Warner Brothers. Since the advent of non-linear digital editing systems, the use of wipes and other effects-transitions has waned in feature films as these transitions proliferated in low-end video production.
Hoping to recall that era, the director George Roy Hill revived the wipe/split-screen effect in his nostalgic 1973 film, The Sting.