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, the Lumière brothers publicly screened a piece of moving images called 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 clip of footage, because it is far too short—just over one minute long.

In Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, we see a group of workers getting off work and walking out of the factory gate—some on bicycles, some on foot, various states of ordinary workers. It’s a naturally realistic scene, and these workers look as ordinary as people today. But for the audience at that time, it was overwhelmingly shocking, as if a door to a new world had opened—because they had never imagined that such everyday images they were used to seeing could one day appear, vividly alive, on a screen.

Immediately afterward, the Lumière brothers screened another film, L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (1896). The impact of this film was even more dramatic. On the screen, the train roars forward as if it is about to burst out of the frame. Audiences at the time thought they were really going to be run over by the train, and some were frightened into panicked flight. That day is considered the birthday of cinema.

L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat is also defined in mainstream accounts 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 doesn’t really matter much—especially in terms of editing—because neither of these works involves editing. In essence, they are just single long takes, mere recordings, with no narrative or plot.

While the Lumière brothers were pioneering public film screenings in France to great success, the very next year, in Britain, Robert Paul developed a camera called the “Animatograph,” a system designed to rival the Lumières’ projector. The surviving device, known as the “No. 1 Motion Picture Camera,” was the first camera capable of running film backward. This allowed the same strip of film to be exposed multiple times.

In fact, as early as April 1895, Robert Paul had already begun consciously producing “films” with a hint of narrative, such as The Derby (1895), Footpads (1895), and The Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race (1895), among others. However, the content still remained at the level of long takes and simple recording. Unlike the Lumière brothers, Paul’s images were more deliberately “narrative” and more carefully composed.

At the time, film screenings undoubtedly triggered a technological frenzy and quickly spread to many countries. But before long, the novelty wore off and audiences began to grow tired. They started to question: why pay money to see images you can already see in everyday life? This skepticism, combined with the stagnation of the single-long-take form, accelerated the emergence of editing.

In 1898, Paul shot Come Along Do! (1898), the first film in cinema history to feature the joining of two shots—two shots connected to tell a story.

In the first shot, an elderly couple eats lunch outside an art exhibition and then follows others through the entrance. The second shot is a single image showing what they are doing inside. This is a precursor to film editing: despite having only two shots, it reveals that the creator had already begun to develop a sense of “continuous narrative.” Paul’s use of a still picture as a cut-in is highly avant-garde.

Let’s rewind to the day L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat was first shown. Among the audience watching the film was someone who seemed to perceive further creative possibilities for cinema. That person was Georges Méliès, often called the world’s first film director.

Georges Méliès had wide-ranging interests throughout his life. While working in his family’s factory, he never abandoned 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 officially began his career as a magician. His identity as a magician would later, almost invisibly, help him elevate film editing from a mere technical process into a genuine art form.

After watching the Lumière brothers’ premiere from the audience, Méliès immediately attempted to purchase one of their machines for 10,000 francs, believing that his magic shows badly needed such a device. Unsurprisingly, in order to monopolize projection technology and protect their patent, the Lumières refused his offer. They likewise turned down even higher bids from a wax museum and a cabaret in Paris. Méliès then began searching everywhere for a “projector.” One day, his mistress at the time—French actress Jehanne d’Alcy, who later became his second wife—casually mentioned that she had seen Robert Paul’s “Animatograph” camera during a tour in England. Méliès immediately rushed to London, found Paul, and bought a machine from him. He also purchased an animated film and several shorts from Paul. From then on, the Robert-Houdin Theatre made “film screenings” a regular part of its program, and Méliès officially embarked on his own film-making career.

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

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

In the autumn of 1896, Méliès was filming a bus coming out of a tunnel in Paris when the camera suddenly jammed. When he started it again, the bus was long gone and had been replaced by a hearse. Méliès discovered that this kind of “stop-camera and restart” technique could produce “special effects.” Today we might call it something akin to a jump cut. It was exactly the sort of trick visual effect needed in magic shows.

Méliès immediately put this discovery into practice. In his films, he often kept the camera locked off while changing the objects within the frame, creating marvellous scenes of things disappearing or transforming. Since he was a magician by profession, his film work was almost entirely developed from magical concepts. Later, Méliès also invented early versions of visual transitions such as the fade-out, fade-in, and dissolve.

However, because his thinking was rooted in stage performance, all his narratives were shot from a single fixed viewpoint. No matter how many shots he filmed or how many he cut together in post-production, the camera angle never changed—there was still no concept of shot scale. Interestingly, in the more than 500 films Méliès made over his lifetime, he never once moved the position of the camera. This again shows how thoroughly his creative thinking was confined by stage aesthetics.

Take his pioneering science fiction film Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902) as an example. Méliès devoted enormous effort to designing sets and staging movements within the frame, yet he never considered moving the camera or editing shots from different positions—something that, from today’s point of view, would have achieved better results with less effort.

Even though Méliès continually pushed film forward through special-effects editing, his works lacked complete narratives and remained primarily visual spectacles. While Méliès was enriching the visual dimension of editing, the Brighton School in England was gradually refining the idea of continuity in editing—the notion of narrative continuity. Two key figures here were George Albert Smith and James Williamson.

In 1900, Smith made As Seen Through a Telescope (1900). The main shot shows a street scene; an old man is watching through a telescope as a young man in the distance ties his girlfriend’s shoelace. Then we see a close-up of the girl’s foot framed within a black circular mask, followed by a return to the original scene. In this film, editing begins to show changes in shot scale and an emerging awareness of shot breakdown.

The slightly voyeuristic episode in As Seen Through a Telescope and the use of close-ups would later become embedded in Alfred Hitchcock’s creative mindset.

Even more striking is Attack on a China Mission (1900), shot at roughly the same time by James Williamson. The story depicts a squad of armed 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, and the 180-degree rule began to draw attention as well.

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

In The Big Swallow, Williamson experimented with how close-ups and extreme close-ups influence storytelling; this radical use of shot scale demonstrates a highly pioneering sense of editing.

Thus, the Brighton School, through their relentless exploration of how editing affects narrative and how shot scales can be used, became an important driving 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. With Porter’s emergence, editing entered the stage of fully serving narrative.