Editing Chronicles (I): The Birth of Film 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 used a machine they had developed called the “cinematograph” to publicly screen a film titled Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon, 1895). From today’s perspective, we can only call it a piece of footage, because it is far too short—just over one minute long.

In Workers Leaving the Factory, we see a group of workers getting off work and walking out through the factory gate—some riding bicycles, some walking, each in their own ordinary state. It’s a natural, realistic scene; the workers look as unremarkable as those you’d see today. But for audiences at the time, it was overwhelmingly shocking, as if a door to a new world had opened—because they had never imagined that everyday scenes they were used to seeing in real life could one day animate a screen.

Immediately afterward, the Lumière brothers showed another film 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, a train roars past as if it is about to burst out of the screen. The audience at the time thought they were really going to be run over by the train, and some were so frightened that they scattered in panic. This day is regarded as the day cinema was born.

The Arrival of a Train is now commonly cited in mainstream accounts as the first film in the world. Of course, there is still debate as to which of these two “films” is truly the first film in the strict sense. But that debate is actually not very meaningful, especially from the perspective of editing, because neither of these films contains editing. In essence, they are just single long takes, mere recordings, without narrative or plot.

Just as the Lumière brothers were enjoying great success as pioneers of film exhibition in France, the very next year Robert W. Paul in Britain developed a camera called the “Animatograph” to compete with the Lumière projection system. The surviving machine, known as the “No. 1 movie camera,” was the first camera capable of reverse movement, which allowed multiple exposures on the same strip of film. In fact, as early as April 1895, Paul had already started consciously making “films” with a hint of “narrative” (such as The Derby 1895 (1895), Footpad (1895), The Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race (1895), and so on). But their content remained at the level of long takes and pure recording. Unlike the Lumière brothers, however, Paul’s images not only showed a nascent sense of “narration,” but were also more deliberate in their composition. At the time, film exhibition undoubtedly set off a technological craze that rapidly spread to many countries. But the novelty soon wore off, and audiences grew bored. They began to question why they should pay to watch images they could see in everyday life. This doubt, combined with the stagnation of the long-take format, accelerated the arrival of editing.

In 1898, Paul made Come Along Do! (1898), the first film in cinema history to feature the joining of separate shots—that is, two shots linked together to form a narrative.

In the first shot, an elderly couple are eating lunch outside an art exhibition and then follow other people inside. The second shot is a tableau that shows what they are doing inside. This marks the first sign of film editing: though it uses only two shots, it shows that the creator had begun to develop an awareness of “continuous narrative.” Paul’s use of a photographic tableau as a connecting device was 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 see far more potential in film as a creative medium. That person was Georges Méliès, later known as the first film director in the world.

Georges Méliès led a life of wide-ranging interests. While working at his family’s factory, he never lost his passion for stage magic. After his father retired, Méliès sold his share of the family business to his two brothers and used the money, together with his wife’s dowry, to purchase the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. After some simple renovations, Méliès formally embarked on his career as a magician. This identity as a magician would later, in an invisible way, help him transform film editing from a mere technology into a true art.

After watching the Lumière brothers’ premiere from the audience, Méliès immediately wanted to buy one of their machines, offering 10,000 francs, because he felt his magic shows desperately needed such a device. Understandably, the Lumière brothers refused, seeking to monopolize the projection technology of the time and protect their invention. They also turned down even 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—at that time his mistress and later his second wife, a French actress—casually mentioned that she had seen Robert Paul’s “Animatograph” camera while touring in Britain. Méliès immediately rushed to London, found Paul, and bought a machine. Along with it, he also purchased one animated film and several short films from Paul. After that, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin incorporated “film screenings” into its regular program, and Méliès officially began his own film production.

After studying the design of the Animatograph, Méliès modified the machine so that 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 No. 1 Animatograph camera.

In the autumn of 1896, Méliès was filming a bus coming out of a tunnel in Paris when the camera suddenly jammed. When he restarted it, the bus had already gone, and a hearse had taken its place. Méliès discovered that this “stop-camera” effect could be used to create “special effects.” Today we might call this something like a “jump cut.” It was exactly the kind of trickery that a magic performance required. Méliès immediately put this discovery into practice, frequently using it in his films: the camera position remained fixed while he changed the objects within the frame, creating marvelous images of things disappearing or transforming. Because Méliès’s day job at the time was as a magician, nearly all his film creations were conceived based on magic tricks. Later, Méliès also created the earliest versions of visual transition techniques such as fade-out, fade-in, and dissolve. Yet because his thinking was rooted in stage performance, all his storytelling took place from a single fixed camera position at the same angle. No matter how many shots he filmed or how many cuts he made in postproduction, the angle never changed, since the concept of shot scale did not yet exist. Interestingly, in more than 500 films Méliès made in his lifetime, he never once moved the camera. This again shows how his creative thinking was entirely constrained by stage performance. For example, take A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune, 1902), a groundbreaking work of science fiction cinema that Méliès made in 1902. He devoted enormous effort to studying the sets and the changes within the frame, without ever considering moving the camera and then editing later—a method that, from today’s standpoint, would obviously achieve twice the result with half the effort.

Even though Méliès used editing-based special effects to drive the development of cinema, his works still lacked complete narratives; they were primarily visual pieces. While Méliès was laying the groundwork for visual editing in film, the Brighton school in England was gradually refining the notion of continuity editing—that is, narrative consciousness. Two key figures in this movement 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. An old man looks through a telescope and sees a young man in the distance tying his girlfriend’s shoelaces. We then cut to a close-up framed by a black circular mask focused on the girl’s feet, and then cut back to the continuation of the original scene. In this film, editing introduces changes in shot scale and a conscious use of shot breakdown.

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

Even more noteworthy is Attack on a China Mission (1900), shot by James Williamson around the same time in 1900. The story depicts a garden in which an armed unit of British sailors defeats the Boxers and rescues a 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 also began to draw attention.

In 1901, Williamson’s films Stop Thief! (1901) and Fire! (1901) already displayed far more obvious traces of editing. In The Big Swallow (1901), he even experimented with extreme close-ups and editing tricks to strengthen the narrative.

In The Big Swallow, Williamson experimented with close-ups and extreme close-ups to explore their impact on storytelling; this extreme use of shot scale revealed a highly avant-garde sense of editing.

Thus, the Brighton school’s ongoing exploration of how editing influences narrative and how different shot scales can be used makes it a crucial force in the development of film editing.

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