Chronicle of Editing (I): The Birth of Film and Editing (Georges Méliès and the Brighton School)

Chronicle of Editing (I): The Birth of Film and Editing (Georges Méliès and the Brighton School) – Video Version >

On December 28, 1895, at the Grand Café in Paris, France, the Lumière brothers publicly screened an image called Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon, 1895) using a machine they had developed called the “cinematograph.” From today’s perspective, we can only call it a clip, because it is far too short—just over one minute.

In Workers Leaving the Factory, the image shows a group of workers getting off work and walking out of the factory gate—some on bicycles, some walking, all kinds of ordinary workers, a natural and realistic scene. These workers look as ordinary as people do today. But for audiences at the time, this was unimaginably shocking, as if a door to a new world had been opened—because they had never imagined that such ordinary sights from everyday life could one day move and come alive on a screen.

Immediately afterward, the Lumière brothers screened another piece of footage called The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat, 1896). The impact of this film was even more dramatic. On screen, the roaring train looked as if it was about to burst out of the frame. Audiences at the time thought they were really going to be run over by the train and were so frightened that they scattered in panic. This day is regarded as the birthday of cinema.

The Arrival of a Train is also widely defined in mainstream sources as the first film in the world. Of course, there is still debate today over which of these two “films” is truly the first film in the strict sense. But this debate is actually not very meaningful, especially from the perspective of editing, because neither of these films involves editing. In essence, they are just long takes, mere recordings, with no narrative or plot.

While the Lumière brothers were pioneering film projection in France and enjoying great success, the very next year a British inventor, Robert W. Paul, developed a camera called the “Animatograph” to compete with the Lumières’ projection system. The machine that has been preserved, known as the “No. 1 Film Camera,” was the first camera with a reverse-motion function, which allowed multiple exposures on the same strip of film. In fact, as early as April 1895, Robert Paul had already consciously begun to make “films” with a sense of “narrative”: (such as The Derby 1895 (1895), The Footpad (1895), The Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race (1895), etc.). Still, their content remained at the level of long takes and pure recording. Unlike the Lumière brothers, however, Paul’s images showed a deliberate intention to “tell a story,” and his compositions were more carefully considered. At the time, film projection undoubtedly triggered a technological craze and began to spread to various countries. But the novelty quickly faded, and audiences began to grow bored. They started to question why they should pay money to watch images they could see in everyday life anyway. This skepticism, combined with the stagnation of the single long-take format, accelerated the emergence of editing.

In 1898, Paul made the film Come Along Do! (1898), which is the first work in film history to feature the splicing of shots—that is, two shots connected to tell a story.

In the first shot, an elderly couple eat lunch outside an art exhibition and then follow the other people inside. The second shot is like a photographic “insert” that shows what they do once they are inside. This is an early precursor to film editing. Although there are only two shots, it shows that the creator had begun to develop an awareness of “continuous narrative.” Paul’s use of a kind of “still-image splice” here is highly avant-garde.

Let’s rewind to the day The Arrival of a Train was screened. Among the audience members watching the film, there was one person who seemed to see greater potential for film as a creative medium. That person was Georges Méliès, often called the first film director in the world.

Georges Méliès had a wide range of interests throughout his life. While working in his family’s factory, he never lost his passion for stage magic. After his father retired, Méliès sold his shares in the family business to his two brothers and used the proceeds, along with his wife’s dowry, to buy the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. After a simple renovation, Méliès officially began his career as a magician. His identity as a magician would later help him transform film editing from a mere technology into a genuine art form.

After watching the Lumière brothers’ premiere from the audience, Méliès tried to buy one of their machines for 10,000 francs, because he felt his magic performances desperately needed such a device. Naturally, in order to monopolize projection technology and protect their patent, the Lumière brothers refused. They likewise turned down higher offers from a wax museum and a music hall in Paris. Méliès then began searching everywhere for a “projector.” One day, Jehanne D’Alcy, a French actress who was then his mistress and later became his second wife, happened to mention that she had seen Robert Paul’s “Animatograph” camera while touring in Britain. Méliès immediately went to London, found Paul, and bought a machine from him. Along the way, he also bought one animated film and several shorts from Paul. From then on, the Robert-Houdin Theatre made “film projection” a regular part of its performances, and Méliès formally embarked on his path as a filmmaker.

After studying the design of the Animatograph, Méliès modified the machine so it could be used as a motion picture camera.

Left: the cinematograph camera invented by the Lumière brothers; Right: the Animatograph No. 1 camera developed by Robert Paul

In the autumn of 1896, Méliès was filming a bus emerging from a tunnel in Paris when the camera suddenly jammed. When he started it again, the bus had already gone and had been replaced by a hearse. Méliès discovered that this “stop-camera and restart” trick could create a “special effect.” Today we might call this something like a “jump cut” technique, and it was exactly the kind of thing a magic performance needed. Méliès immediately put this discovery into practice and used it frequently in his films: by keeping the camera fixed while changing the objects in the frame, he created marvelous images of things disappearing or transforming. Because Méliès’s profession at the time was that of a magician, almost all of his film creations were conceived with stage magic in mind. Later he would also invent pioneering visual transitions such as fade-outs, fade-ins, and dissolves.

However, since Méliès’s thinking was rooted in stage performance, all of his narratives were shot from a single, fixed angle. No matter how many shots were taken or how many were cut together later, the viewpoint never changed—there was as yet no concept of different shot scales. Interestingly, among the more than 500 films Méliès made in his lifetime, he never once moved the camera from its position. This again shows that his creative thinking was completely constrained by stage convention. For example, in his foundational science fiction film A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune, 1902), Méliès devoted enormous effort to designing the sets and changing positions within the frame, but never considered moving the camera to facilitate editing afterward—something that, from today’s perspective, would clearly have achieved twice the result with half the effort.

Even though Méliès used editing-based special effects to push the medium of film forward, his works did not yet contain fully developed narratives; they were essentially visual spectacles. While Méliès was laying the groundwork for the visual side of film editing, England’s Brighton School was gradually developing a sense of continuity editing—what we might call a narrative consciousness. Two key figures here were George Albert Smith and James Williamson.

In 1900, Smith made the film As Seen Through a Telescope (1900). The main shot shows a street scene, where an old man watches a young man in the distance tying his girlfriend’s shoelaces through a telescope. We then cut to a close-up of the girl’s feet, shown through a circular black matte, and then back to the continuation of the original scene. In this film, editing begins to show variations in shot scale and displays an awareness of breaking the action into separate shots.

The slightly voyeuristic, mysterious element in As Seen Through a Telescope and the appearance of the close-up were later deeply embedded in Alfred Hitchcock’s creative mindset.

Even more striking is James Williamson’s Attack on a China Mission (1900), shot around the same time in 1900. The story shows a unit of armed British sailors in a garden who defeat the Boxers and rescue the family of a missionary.

In film history, this is the first work to employ “shot/reverse-shot” editing. At the same time, what we now call the 180-degree rule began to attract attention.

In 1901, two of Williamson’s films, Stop Thief! (1901) and Fire! (1901), already show much clearer signs of editing. In The Big Swallow (1901), he even experimented with extreme close-ups and used editing tricks to enhance the narrative.

In The Big Swallow, Williamson experimented with close-ups and extreme close-ups to see how shot scale affects storytelling. His bold use of extreme shot scales reveals a highly pioneering editing awareness.

Thus, the Brighton School’s continuous exploration of the relationship between editing and narrative and of the use of shot scales made them crucial figures in the development of film editing.

— Across the Atlantic, another key figure was also beginning to advance the development of editing: the American director Edwin S. Porter. With Porter’s emergence, editing entered the stage of fully fledged narrative cinema.