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

Video version of Chronicles of Editing (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 image using a machine they had developed called the “cinematograph.” The film was 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 “clip” because it was too short—just over one minute.

In Workers Leaving the Factory, the image shows a group of workers getting off work and walking out of the factory gate—some on bicycles, some on foot, in all sorts of states. It’s a natural, realistic scene, and 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 opened—because they had never imagined that such everyday images could one day come to life on a screen.

Immediately afterward, the Lumière brothers showed another film, titled 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 first. On the screen, a roaring train seemed to be about to burst out of the frame; audiences at the time thought they would actually be run over by it and scattered in panic. This day is considered the birth of cinema.

The Arrival of a Train is defined in most modern sources as the first film in the world. Of course, there is still debate over which of these two “films” is the first true movie in the strict sense, but that debate is not very meaningful—especially in relation to editing. Neither of these films contains any editing: in essence they are single long takes, pure recordings, with no narrative or plot.

While the Lumière brothers were pioneering public film screenings in France with great success, the very next year, in Britain, Robert Paul developed a camera called the “Animatograph,” designed to rival the Lumière projection system. The surviving machine, called the “No. 1 cinematograph camera,” was the first camera capable of reverse movement; it allowed multiple exposures on the same strip of film. In fact, as early as April 1895, Robert Paul had already consciously begun making “films” with a narrative flavor (such as The Derby 1895 (1895), The Footpad (1895), The Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race (1895), etc.). But these works were still just long takes and simple recordings. Unlike the Lumières, however, Paul was consciously “telling a story,” and his compositions were more deliberate.

At the time, film exhibition undeniably triggered a technological craze and began to spread gradually to other countries. But the novelty soon wore off, and audiences began to grow tired. They started to question: why pay money to watch images they could see every day in real life? This doubt, combined with the stagnation of the single long-take format, accelerated the emergence of editing.

In 1898, Paul shot Come Along Do! (1898), which is the first instance in film history of shots being joined together—that is, two separate shots being cut together to form a narrative.

In the first shot, an elderly couple sits outside an art exhibition eating lunch, then follows others through the entrance. The second shot is like a “photograph” 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 acquired a sense of “continuous narrative.” Paul’s use of this photo-like cut was highly avant-garde.

Let’s rewind to the day The Arrival of a Train was screened. Among the spectators watching that film, there was one person who seemed to glimpse more potential in film creation. That man was Georges Méliès, often called 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 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—along with his wife’s dowry—to purchase the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. After a simple renovation, Méliès officially began his career as a magician. This identity as a magician would later, in an intangible way, help him transform film editing from a 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 that his magic shows urgently needed such a device. Obviously, intending to monopolize projection technology at the time and protect their patent, the Lumières refused. They also turned down even higher offers from a wax museum and a music hall in Paris. Méliès then started searching everywhere for a “projector.”

One day, Jehanne D’Alcy—at the time Méliès’s mistress and later his second wife, a French actress—happened to mention that she had seen Robert Paul’s “Animatograph” projector 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. After that, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin incorporated “film screenings” as a regular part of its program, and Méliès officially embarked on his filmmaking career.

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

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

In the autumn of 1896, while shooting a bus emerging from a tunnel in Paris, Méliès’s camera suddenly jammed. When he restarted it, the bus was gone and had been replaced by a hearse. Méliès realized that this “stop-camera substitution” could create a “special effect.” Today we might call it a kind of “jump cut” technique—exactly the sort of thing needed in a magic performance. Méliès immediately put this discovery into practice, using it frequently in his films. By keeping the camera fixed and changing only the objects in the frame, he could create wonderful images of things disappearing or transforming.

Because Méliès’s profession was that of a magician, almost all of his film creations were conceived on the basis of magic tricks. Later, he also invented foundational visual transition techniques such as fade-out, fade-in, and dissolve. However, Méliès’s thinking was deeply rooted in stage performance, so all his narratives were shot from the same fixed camera angle. No matter how many shots he filmed or how many cuts he made in post-production, the viewpoint remained unchanged. At that time there was no concept of different shot scales.

Even more interesting, in all of the more than 500 films Méliès made in his lifetime, he never once moved the camera. This again shows how completely his creative thinking was constrained by stage conventions. For example, in his pioneering 1902 science fiction film A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune, 1902), Méliès devoted enormous effort to the sets and the blocking within the frame, but never considered moving the camera and using editing in that way—something that, from today’s perspective, would have achieved twice the result with half the effort.

Even though Méliès used editing effects to advance the development of cinema, these works did not contain fully developed narratives; they were visually oriented pieces. While Méliès was laying the groundwork for visual editing, the Brighton School in England was gradually refining the idea of continuity editing—what we now call 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 watches through a telescope as a young man in the distance ties his girlfriend’s shoelaces. Then we cut to a close-up of the girl’s feet, framed within a black circular mask, before returning to the continuation of the original scene. In this film, editing introduces changes of shot scale and reveals an awareness of shot breakdown.

The slightly voyeuristic, mysterious element of As Seen Through a Telescope and the appearance of the close-up became embedded in the creative thinking of Hitchcock many years later.

Even more noteworthy is James Williamson’s Attack on a China Mission (1900), made around the same time in 1900. The story takes place in a garden, where a British naval landing party defeats the Boxers and rescues the family of a missionary.

In film history, this is the first work to feature “shot–reverse shot” editing. At the same time, the 180-degree rule began to attract attention.

In 1901, Williamson’s films Stop Thief! (1901) and Fire! (1901) show even more evident signs 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; his bold use of shot scale reveals a highly avant-garde sense of editing.

Thus the Brighton School, through its continuous 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: the American director Edwin S. Porter. With Porter’s emergence, editing formally entered the narrative stage.