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

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On December 28th, 1895, at the Grand Café in Paris, France, the Lumière brothers publicly screened a moving picture titled 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 very short—just over one minute.

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

Immediately afterward, the Lumière brothers screened another film, 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 the screen, a train roars past as though it is really going to burst out of the frame; the audience at the time thought the train would actually run them over and some fled in panic. That day is regarded as the birth of cinema.

The Arrival of a Train is defined in mainstream accounts today as the first film in the world. Of course, which of these two “films” is really the first film in the strict sense remains disputed, but the debate itself is not very meaningful, especially from the perspective of editing. Because whichever you take, neither contains editing. In essence they are just single long takes, mere records, with no narrative and no plot.

Just as the Lumière brothers were pioneering film screenings in France and achieving great success, the very next year a Briton, Robert W. Paul, developed a camera called the “Animatograph,” to compete with the Lumière projection system. The surviving machine, known as “No. 1 Cinematograph Camera,” was the first camera to have a reverse-cranking function, allowing the same strip of film to be exposed multiple times. In fact, as early as April 1895, Robert W. Paul had already consciously begun making “films” with a hint of “narrative” (such as The Derby 1895 (1895), Footpad (1895), The Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race (1895), etc.). But these works, too, remained at the level of long takes and pure recording. Unlike the Lumières, Paul’s images not only showed an awareness of “narration,” but were also more deliberate in composition.

At the time, film projection undoubtedly triggered a technical craze and began to spread to various countries. But before long, the novelty wore off and audiences became bored. They began to question why they should pay to watch images they could see in everyday life. This questioning, together with the stagnation of the single long-take format, hastened the emergence of editing.

In 1898, Paul shot Come Along Do! (1898). This is the first film in cinema history to feature the splicing of shots—that is, two shots connected to form a narrative.

In the first shot, an elderly couple are eating lunch outside an art exhibition and then follow others inside. The second shot is an image showing what they are doing inside. This is a precursor to film editing: although there are only two shots, it shows that the creator had begun to develop a sense of “continuous narration.” Paul’s use of the splice with a static image here was extremely avant-garde.

Let’s rewind to the day The Arrival of a Train was screened. Among the viewers of that film, one audience member seemed to see far greater creative potential for cinema. This person was Georges Méliès, who is often called the first film director in the world.

Georges Méliès led a very varied life. While working in the family factory, he never gave up his interest in stage magic. After his father retired, Méliès sold his shares in the family factory to his two brothers and used the money, along with his wife’s dowry, to buy the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. After some simple renovations, Méliès formally embarked on his career as a magician. His identity as a magician would later, invisibly, help him transform film editing from a mere technical process into a true art.

After watching the Lumière brothers’ premiere from the audience, Méliès immediately offered 10,000 francs to buy one of their machines, because he felt his magic performances badly needed such a device. Obviously, to monopolize projection technology and protect their patent, the Lumières refused. They likewise turned down even higher offers from a Paris wax museum and a music hall. Méliès then began looking everywhere for a “projector.”

One day, Jehanne D’Alcy—a French actress who was then Méliès’s mistress and later became his second wife—happened to mention that she had seen Robert W. Paul’s “Animatograph” camera while on tour in Britain. Méliès immediately rushed to London, found Paul, and bought a machine. Along the way, he also purchased an animated short and several live-action shorts from Paul. From then on, film screenings became a regular part of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin’s program, and Méliès officially began his own film production.

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

Image on the left: the cinematograph camera invented by the Lumière brothers;
image on the right: the Animatograph No. 1 camera developed by Robert W. Paul.

In the autumn of 1896 in Paris, Méliès was filming a bus emerging from a tunnel when the camera suddenly jammed. When he restarted it, the bus had already gone, replaced by a hearse. Méliès discovered that this “stop-camera” trick could create a special effect. Today we might call it something like a “jump cut.” This was exactly what was needed for magic performance. Méliès immediately put this discovery into practice in his films. He often kept the camera locked off while changing the objects within the frame to create marvelous scenes of things disappearing or transforming.

Because Méliès’s profession at the time was magician, almost all his film ideas were based on magic concepts. Later he also pioneered basic visual transition techniques such as fade-in, fade-out, and the dissolve. However, Méliès’s thinking was deeply rooted in stage performance, so all his scenes were shot from the same fixed camera position. No matter how many shots he filmed or cut together, they were always from a single angle, because the concept of “shot scale” did not yet exist.

Interestingly, in the more than 500 films Méliès made in his lifetime, he never once moved the camera position. This again shows how his creative thinking was completely constrained by stage practice. For example, in the foundational science-fiction film A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune, 1902), Méliès devoted enormous effort to designing sets and blocking within the frame, yet never considered moving the camera to achieve more efficient editing. From today’s perspective, the latter approach would have achieved twice the result with half the effort.

Even though Méliès constantly used editing-based special effects to advance cinema, his works did not feature 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 developing an awareness of continuity editing—that is, narrative editing. 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 uses a telescope to observe a young man in the distance tying his girlfriend’s shoelace. Then there is a close-up, framed in a circular black mask, of the girl’s foot, followed by a return to the original scene. In this film, editing begins to show changes in shot scale and an emerging storyboard awareness.

The slightly voyeuristic and mysterious flavor of As Seen Through a Telescope and its use of close-ups would later be embedded in Alfred Hitchcock’s creative thinking.

Even more noteworthy is Attack on a China Mission (1900), shot around the same time by James Williamson. The story shows a British naval detachment 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 rule began to be noticed.

In 1901, Williamson’s films Stop Thief! (1901) and Fire! (1901) displayed even more obvious traces of editing. In The Big Swallow (1901) he went so far as to experiment with extreme close-ups, using 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 narration. His use of such extreme framing reveals a highly avant-garde editing consciousness.

Thus, the Brighton School’s ongoing exploration of how editing and shot scale affect narrative made them important pioneers in the development of film editing.

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