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

Video version of Editing Chronicles (I): The Birth of Film and Editing (Georges Méliès and the Brighton School) >

On December 28, 1895, at the Grand Café in Paris, France, the Lumière brothers publicly screened a moving picture 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 piece of footage, because it is far too short—just over one minute.

In Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, the image shows a group of workers getting off work and walking out of the factory gate—some on bicycles, some on foot, all kinds of workers in a natural and realistic scene. These workers look 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 these everyday images they often saw in real life could one day come alive on a screen.

Immediately afterward, the Lumière brothers showed another piece of footage, called 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 previous one. On the screen, the roaring train looked as if it were about to burst right out of it. The audience at the time thought they were actually going to be run over by the train and even panicked and scattered. This day is regarded as the birthday of cinema.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat is now widely regarded 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 of little real significance, especially from the perspective of editing, because regardless of which you choose, neither contains editing. In essence, they are both just single long takes, simple recordings, without narrative or plot.

Just as the Lumière brothers were enjoying great success in France by pioneering film projection, the very next year, Robert W. Paul in Britain developed a camera called the “Animatograph” as a rival to the Lumières’ projection system. The surviving device known as the “No. 1 film camera” was the first camera with a reverse-rotation 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 color (such as The Derby 1895 (1895), Footpad (1895), The Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race (1895), etc.), though their content likewise remained at the level of long takes and pure recording. Unlike the Lumière brothers, however, Paul’s images were not only consciously “narrative” in nature, but also more sophisticated in composition. At the time, film exhibition undoubtedly triggered a technological craze and began gradually spreading to various countries. But before long, the novelty wore off, and audiences grew bored, questioning why they should pay to watch images they could see in everyday life. These doubts, combined with the stagnation of the long-take approach, accelerated the emergence of editing.

In 1898, Paul shot Come Along Do! (1898), which marks the first time in film history that shots were joined together—that is, two shots linked in narrative sequence.

In the first shot, an elderly couple is eating lunch outside an art exhibition, then they follow others into the building. The second shot is a still photograph that shows what they do once inside. This was a harbinger of film editing. Although it consists of only two shots, it shows that the creator had begun to develop an awareness of “continuity narrative.” Paul’s use of a photographic insert as a splice was highly avant-garde.

Let’s rewind to the day Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat was screened. Among the audience watching the film, there was one person who seemed to see far greater creative potential in cinema. This was Georges Méliès, often called the world’s first film director.

Georges Méliès had a wide range of interests throughout his life. While working at his family’s factory, he never abandoned his passion for stage magic. After his father retired, Méliès sold his shares in the family factory to his two brothers, and with the money plus his wife’s dowry, he bought the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. After some simple renovations, Méliès officially began his career as a magician. His identity as a magician would later, in an intangible way, help him elevate film editing from a mere technical process into a true art form.

After watching the Lumière brothers’ premiere from the audience, Méliès immediately wanted to buy one of their machines for 10,000 francs, because he felt his magic shows desperately needed such a device. Clearly, in order to monopolize projection technology and protect their patent, the Lumière brothers refused. They also 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 that time Méliès’s mistress and later his second wife, a French actress—mentioned by chance that she had seen Robert Paul’s “Animatograph” camera while touring in the UK. Méliès immediately rushed to London to find Paul and bought a machine from him. Along the way, he also purchased one animated film and several shorts from Paul. From then on, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin made “film screenings” a regular part of its performances, 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.

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

In the autumn of 1896, Méliès was in Paris filming a bus emerging from a tunnel when the camera suddenly jammed. When he started it again, the bus had already gone, replaced in the frame by a hearse. Méliès discovered that this “stop-and-restart” technique could create a “special effect.” Today we might describe it as akin to a jump cut—a technique perfectly suited to magic performances. Méliès immediately put this discovery into practice. In his films, he often used a fixed camera position while changing the objects within the frame to create marvelous scenes in which things disappear or transform. Because Méliès’s profession at the time was magician, his film creations were almost entirely built on magical concepts. Later, he also created foundational visual transition techniques such as fade-out/fade-in and dissolve.

However, because Méliès’s thinking was rooted in stage performance, all his storytelling was done from a single fixed camera angle. No matter how many shots he filmed or spliced together in post-production, the viewpoint remained the same, because the concept of shot scale did not yet exist. Interestingly, over the course of the 500-plus films he made in his life, Méliès is said never to have moved the camera even once. This again shows how completely his creative mindset was confined by stage conventions. For example, in his pioneering science-fiction film A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune (1902)), Méliès devoted enormous effort to designing sets and changing positions within the frame, but never considered moving the camera to enhance post-production editing. From today’s perspective, the latter would obviously be far more efficient.

Even though Méliès was continually using editing-based special effects to drive the development of cinema, these works did not contain complete narratives; they were essentially visual pieces. While Méliès was laying the groundwork for the visual aspect of film editing, the Brighton School in England was gradually refining the concept of continuity editing—in other words, the notion of narrative. 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 looks through a telescope and sees a young man in the distance tying his girlfriend’s shoelaces. Then we cut to a close-up of the girl’s foot as seen within a circular black matte, followed by a return to the continuation of the original scene. In this film, editing begins to include changes in shot scale and shows an awareness of shot breakdown.

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

Even more noteworthy is James Williamson’s Attack on a China Mission (1900), shot around the same time in 1900. The story depicts a garden in which an armed unit of British sailors defeats the Boxers and rescues 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 films Stop Thief! (1901) and Fire! (1901) already show much more pronounced traces of editing. In The Big Swallow (1901), he even experimented with extremely tight close-ups, using editing tricks to enhance narrative power.

In The Big Swallow, Williamson experimented with close-ups and extreme close-ups and their impact on storytelling. This extreme use of shot scale reflects a highly avant-garde editing consciousness.

Thus, the Brighton School, with its continual exploration of how editing and shot scale affect narrative, became an important driving force in the development of film editing.

— Across the Atlantic, another key figure was also beginning to advance the art of editing: American director Edwin S. Porter. With Porter’s emergence, editing would formally enter the narrative stage.