Chronicle of Editing (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 publicly screened a piece of moving image 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 long.

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 everyday states; a natural, realistic scene. These workers look as ordinary as people today. Yet for audiences at that time it was incredibly shocking, as if a door to a new world had been opened—because they had never imagined that such ordinary scenes from daily life could one day come alive on a screen.

Right afterward, the Lumière brothers showed 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 than the previous one. On screen, a roaring train seemed to be charging straight out of the frame; audiences at the time thought they were really going to be run over, and some were so terrified that they fled in panic. This day would later be remembered as the birth of cinema.

The Arrival of a Train is now widely regarded in mainstream accounts as the first film in the world. Of course, there is still debate over which of these two “films” can be considered the first true film in the strict sense. But this debate doesn’t matter much—especially from the perspective of editing—because neither of them involves editing at all. In essence, they are just single long takes, mere recordings, with no narrative or plot.

While the Lumière brothers were pioneering public film exhibition in France and achieving huge success, the very next year in Britain, Robert W. Paul developed a camera called the Animatograph, designed to compete with the Lumière projection system. The surviving device, known as “No. 1 Camera,” was the first motion picture camera capable of reverse movement. It allowed the same strip of film to be exposed multiple times. In fact, as early as April 1895, Robert Paul had already begun consciously 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 their content still consisted of long takes and simple recording. Unlike the Lumières, however, Paul’s images not only showed a deliberate attempt at “narration,” but also featured more considered composition.

At the time, film exhibition undoubtedly triggered a technological craze and began to spread to various countries. But the novelty soon wore off, and audiences started to grow tired. They began to question why they should pay money to watch images that they could see in everyday life anyway. This questioning, together with the stagnation of the single long-take format, accelerated the emergence of editing.

In 1898, Paul made the film Come Along Do! (1898), which marks the first time in film history that shots were spliced—i.e., two shots were connected to tell a continuous 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 like a still picture showing what they are doing inside. This was a precursor to the emergence of film editing. Although it consists of only two shots, it shows that the creator had begun to develop a sense of “continuous narration.” Paul’s use of this sort of “photo-like” splice was highly avant-garde at the time.

Let’s rewind to the day The Arrival of a Train was shown. Among the audience members watching the film, one viewer seemed to perceive far more potential in film creation. This person was Georges Méliès, later known as the first film director in world cinema.

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

After watching the Lumière brothers’ premiere from the audience, Méliès immediately tried to buy one of their machines for 10,000 francs, as he felt his magic performances urgently needed such a device. Naturally, in order to monopolize the projection technology of the time and protect their patent, the Lumières 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, then his mistress and later his second wife, a French actress, casually mentioned that she had seen Robert Paul’s Animatograph camera while touring in England. Méliès immediately rushed to London, found Paul, and bought a machine. He also purchased an animated film and several shorts from Paul. Thereafter, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin made “film projection” part of its daily program, and Méliès officially began his own film productions.

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: Robert Paul’s first Animatograph camera

In the autumn of 1896, Méliès was filming a bus emerging from a tunnel in Paris when the camera suddenly jammed. When he restarted it, the bus had long since disappeared and had been replaced in the frame by a hearse. Méliès discovered that this “stop-camera substitution” could create a special-effect-like illusion. Today, we might describe it as a kind of “jump cut.” It was exactly what magic performance needed. Méliès immediately put this discovery into practice, often using it in his films: keeping the camera fixed while changing the objects in the frame to create marvelous scenes of things vanishing or transforming.

Because Méliès’s profession at the time was that of a magician, his film creations were almost entirely based on magical concepts. He later also pioneered visual transition techniques such as fade-out/fade-in and dissolve—proto-forms of what we use today. However, because his thinking was rooted in stage performance, all of his storytelling used a single fixed camera angle. No matter how many shots he filmed or how many cuts he made in post-production, the camera angle was always the same—there was no concept of different shot scales. Interestingly, across the more than 500 films Méliès created in his lifetime, he never once moved the position of the camera. This again shows how thoroughly his creative thinking was constrained by stage conventions.

Take for example A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune (1902)), the pioneering science fiction film he made in 1902. Méliès devoted enormous energy to designing sets and staging changes within the frame, but never considered moving the camera to enable more dynamic editing. From today’s standpoint, the latter would obviously be far more efficient.

Even though Méliès kept pushing cinema forward through special-effect editing, his works did not yet contain fully developed narratives; they were essentially visual pieces. While Méliès was laying the groundwork for visual editing, the Brighton School in England was gradually refining the concept of continuity editing—that is, narrative awareness. Two important figures here were George Albert Smith and James Williamson.

In 1900, Smith made the film As Seen Through a Telescope (1900). The main shot is a street scene: an old man watches, through a telescope, a young man in the distance tying his girlfriend’s shoelaces. We then cut to a close-up of the girl’s foot framed within a black circular mask, and then back to the continuation of the original scene. In this film, editing introduces changes of shot scale and reveals an emerging awareness of shot breakdown.

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

Even more remarkable is Attack on a China Mission (1900), shot by James Williamson around the same time. The story depicts a unit 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. At the same time, the 180-degree rule also began to draw people’s attention.

In 1901, Williamson’s films Stop Thief! (1901) and Fire! (1901) already showed even clearer traces of editing. In The Big Swallow (1901), he even experimented with extreme close-ups, using editing tricks to enhance narrative power.

In The Big Swallow, Williamson experimented with close-ups and extreme close-ups to test their impact on storytelling. The use of such extreme shot scales demonstrated a highly avant-garde editing sensibility.

Thus, the Brighton School’s ongoing exploration of how editing affects narrative and how to use different shot scales makes them key figures in the development of film editing.

— Across the Atlantic, another crucial figure was beginning to push editing forward: American director Edwin S. Porter. With Porter’s emergence, editing would formally enter the stage of serving narrative cinema.