Chronicles of Editing (I): The Birth of Cinema and Editing (Georges Méliès and the Brighton School)

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

In Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, the image shows a group of workers getting off work and walking out from the factory gate—some riding bicycles, some walking—various states of workers, a natural and realistic scene. These workers look as ordinary as people today. But for audiences at the time, it was utterly astonishing, as if a door to a new world had been opened—because they had never imagined that such ordinary scenes from everyday life could one day come alive on a screen.

Immediately afterward, the Lumière brothers screened another film titled The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat, 1896). The shock this film produced was even more dramatic than the first. On the screen, the train roared past as if it were really about to burst out of the frame; audiences at the time thought they would actually be run over by the train and even panicked and scattered in fright. This day is considered the birthday of cinema.

The Arrival of a Train is also defined in mainstream sources today as the first film in the world. Of course, there is still debate over which of these two “films” is truly the first film in the strict sense. But this debate is not especially meaningful, especially in terms of editing, because neither of these films involves editing. In essence they are simply single long takes, mere recordings, without narrative or plot.

While the Lumière brothers were having great success pioneering public film screenings in France, the following year in Britain Robert W. Paul developed a camera called the “Animatograph,” which was positioned as a counterpart to the Lumière projection system. The machine that survives, known as the “No. 1 film camera,” was the first camera capable of reverse movement, allowing the same strip of film to be exposed multiple times. In fact, as early as April 1895, Robert Paul had already consciously begun making “films” with a hint of “narrative” color (such as The Derby 1895 (1895), Footpad (1895), The Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race (1895), etc.). But the content similarly remained at the level of long takes and pure recording. Unlike the Lumière brothers, Paul’s images were not only consciously “narrative” but also more considered in their composition.

At that time, film exhibition undoubtedly sparked a technological craze and quickly spread to many countries. But the novelty soon faded and audiences began to grow bored, questioning why they should pay to watch images they could see in everyday life. This doubt, together with the stagnation of the single long-take form, accelerated the emergence of editing.

In 1898, Paul shot the film Come Along Do! (1898), which marks the first time in film history that shots were spliced together—that is, two shots were connected to form a narrative.

In the first shot, an elderly couple are eating lunch outside an art exhibition and then follow others through the entrance. The second shot is an image showing what they are doing inside. This is a harbinger of film editing. Although it consists of only two shots, it shows that the creator had begun to develop a consciousness of “continuity narration.” Paul’s use of splicing via the inserted image 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, one person seemed to perceive many more creative possibilities in cinema. That person was Georges Méliès, often called the first film director in the world.

Georges Méliès had a wide range of interests in his life. While working at his family’s factory, he never gave up his passion for stage magic. After his father retired, Méliès sold his share in the family factory to his two brothers, and used the money together with his wife’s dowry to buy the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. After some simple renovation, Méliès officially began his career as a magician. His identity as a magician would later invisibly help him transform film editing from a mere technique into a true art.

After watching the Lumière brothers’ premiere from the audience, Méliès wanted to buy one of their machines for 10,000 francs, believing that such a machine was urgently needed for his magic performances. Clearly, in order to monopolize projection technology and protect their patent, the Lumière brothers refused him. They similarly turned down even higher offers from a wax museum and a cabaret in Paris. Méliès then began searching everywhere for a “projector.”

One day, Jehanne d’Alcy, at the time Méliès’s mistress and later his second wife, a French actress, casually mentioned that she had seen Robert Paul’s “Animatograph” camera while on tour in Britain. Méliès immediately rushed to London, found Paul, and bought a machine from him. Along the way, he also bought an animated film and several shorts from Paul. Thereafter, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin made “film screenings” a part of its regular performance program, and Méliès formally embarked on his own film creations.

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

On the left is the cinematograph camera invented by the Lumière brothers; on the right is Robert Paul’s Animatograph No. 1 camera.

In the autumn of 1896, Méliès was in Paris filming a bus coming out of a tunnel when the camera suddenly jammed. When he started it again, the bus had long since disappeared, replaced by a hearse. Méliès discovered that this “stop-camera and restart” technique could create a “special effect.” Today we might liken it to a kind of “jump cut.” It was precisely the sort of effect needed for magic performance.

Méliès immediately put this discovery into practice and frequently used it in his films: by keeping the camera fixed and changing the objects in the frame, he created wondrous scenes of objects vanishing or transforming. Because his profession at the time was that of a magician, his film creations were almost all conceived on the basis of magic. Méliès later also invented foundational visual transition techniques such as fade-outs, fade-ins, and dissolves.

However, because Méliès’s thinking was rooted in stage performance, all of his narratives were shot from a single fixed angle. No matter how many shots he filmed or how many he joined in post-production, the camera angle remained the same, because the concept of shot scale did not yet exist. Interestingly, in the more than 500 films Méliès made in his life, he never once moved the position of the camera. This again shows how thoroughly his creative thinking was constrained by stage conventions.

For example, in A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune, 1902), the pioneering science-fiction film he created in 1902, Méliès poured huge effort into the sets and the changes of position within the frame. He never considered moving the camera and then editing the resulting shots. From today’s standpoint, the latter would obviously have been far more efficient.

Even though Méliès continually advanced cinema through his use of editing-based special effects, these works did not yet contain fully developed narratives; they were essentially visual pieces. While Méliès was laying the groundwork for visual editing in film, the Brighton School in England gradually advanced the idea of continuity in editing—in other words, narrative consciousness. Two important figures here were George Albert Smith and James Williamson.

In 1900, Smith shot As Seen Through a Telescope (1900). The main shot shows a street scene: an old man observes through a telescope a young man in the distance tying his girlfriend’s shoelaces. Then we see, within a black circular mask, a close-up of the girl’s feet. This is followed by a return to the continuation of the original scene. In this film, editing introduces changes in shot scale and reveals an emerging awareness of shot breakdown.

The slightly mysterious voyeuristic element in As Seen Through a Telescope and the appearance of the close-up would later be embedded in Alfred Hitchcock’s creative thinking.

Even more noteworthy is Attack on a China Mission (1900), which James Williamson shot at roughly the same time in 1900. The story depicts an armed group of British sailors in a garden defeating the Boxers and rescuing the missionary’s family.

In film history, this is the first work to feature shot–reverse-shot editing. At the same time, the 180-degree axis rule began to attract attention.

In 1901, Williamson’s two films Stop Thief! (1901) and Fire! (1901) already show more obvious traces of editing. In The Big Swallow (1901), he even experimented with extreme close-ups and used editing tricks to enhance narrativity.

In The Big Swallow, Williamson experimented with close-ups and extreme close-ups and their impact on narrative; this extreme use of shot scale reflects a highly pioneering editing consciousness.

Thus the Brighton School, through continual exploration of how editing affects narrative and how shot scale is used, became an important force in the development of editing.

— Across the Atlantic, another key figure was also beginning to advance editing: the American director Edwin S. Porter. Porter’s emergence marks the point at which editing formally entered the narrative stage.