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, the Lumière brothers used a machine they had developed called the “cinematograph” to publicly screen a piece of footage titled Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon, 1895). From today’s perspective we can really only call it a piece of footage, because it is so 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 kinds of states; a natural, realistic scene. These workers appear as ordinary as people today. But for audiences at the time, it was incredibly shocking, as if a door to a new world had opened—because they had never imagined that such ordinary scenes from daily life could one day come alive on a screen.

Immediately afterward, the Lumière brothers screened another film, titled Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat, 1896). The impact of this piece was even more dramatic. On the screen, a roaring train seemed as if it was going to burst out of the frame; audiences at the time thought they would truly be run over by the train and even scattered in panic. That day is regarded as the birth of cinema.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat is also commonly defined in mainstream accounts as the first film in the world. Of course, there is still controversy over which of these two “films” is in the strict sense the very first film, but that debate is of little real significance, especially from the perspective of editing. Because whichever you choose, neither contains any editing; in essence they are simply long takes, simple recordings, with no narrative or plot.

Just as the Lumière brothers were pioneering public film exhibition and enjoying great success in France, the following year, Robert Paul in Britain developed a camera called the “Animatograph” to rival the Lumière projection system. The surviving machine, known as “No. 1 Cinematograph Camera,” was the first camera with a reverse-drive mechanism, which 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 hint of narrative flavor (such as The Derby 1895 (1895), Footpads (1895), The Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race (1895), etc.). But the content likewise remained at the level of long takes and straightforward recording. Unlike the Lumières, Paul’s images were not only consciously “narrative” in nature but also showed more care in composition.

At the time, film exhibition undoubtedly set off a technological craze and quickly spread to various countries. But after a short while, the novelty wore off and audiences began to grow bored, questioning why they should pay to see images no different from what they could see in everyday life. This questioning, together with the stagnation of the long-take form, accelerated the emergence of editing.

In 1898, Paul shot Come Along Do! (1898), the first film in cinema history to use the joining of shots—that is, two shots linked together to tell a story.

In the first shot, an elderly couple are eating lunch outside an art exhibition and then follow others through the entrance. The second shot is a single view showing what they are doing inside. This foreshadows the arrival of film editing. Although there are only two shots, it reveals that the creator had begun to develop an awareness of “continuous narrative.” Paul’s use of a cut from one shot to another still image was highly avant-garde for its time.

Let’s rewind to the day Arrival of a Train was screened. Among the viewers in the audience, one man seemed to see far more creative potential in film. That man was Georges Méliès, later known as the first film director in the world.

Georges Méliès had a wide range of interests throughout his life. While working in the family factory, he never stopped pursuing 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 some simple renovations, Méliès formally embarked on his career as a magician. This identity as a magician would later, in an invisible way, 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 tried to buy one of their machines for 10,000 francs, as he felt his magic shows were in desperate need of such a device. Unsurprisingly, in order to monopolize projection technology and protect their patent, the Lumières refused. They likewise turned down even higher bids from a wax museum and a music hall in Paris. Méliès then began searching everywhere for a “projector.” One day, his mistress at the time—French actress Jehanne D’Alcy, who would later become his second wife—happened to mention that while touring in Britain she had seen Robert Paul’s “Animatograph” camera. Méliès immediately rushed to London, found Paul, and bought a machine. Along with it, he also purchased an 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 officially began his own film-making career.

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

On the left is the cinematograph camera invented by the Lumière brothers; on the right is the No. 1 Animatograph camera developed by Robert Paul.

In the autumn of 1896, Méliès was filming a bus emerging from a tunnel in Paris when the camera suddenly jammed. When he started it again, the bus had long since disappeared and had been replaced by a hearse. Méliès discovered that this kind of “stop-camera and restart” technique could be used to create “special effects.” Today we might call this similar to a “jump cut.” It was precisely the kind of trickery that magic performances needed. Méliès immediately put this discovery into practice, using it frequently in his films—keeping the camera fixed while changing what appears in the frame, creating magical scenes in which objects vanish or transform. Because Méliès was a magician by profession, his film creations were almost all conceived on the basis of magic tricks. Later he also invented rudimentary visual transition techniques such as fade-outs, fade-ins, and dissolves.

However, because Méliès’s mindset was rooted in stage performance, all his scenes were shot from a single fixed camera position. No matter how many shots he filmed or how many cuts he made in post-production, the angle never changed; the concept of different shot scales and camera positions simply did not exist at the time. Even more intriguing is that in the more than 500 films Méliès made in his lifetime, he never once moved the camera. This again shows just how confined his creative thinking was 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 energy to designing the sets and changing the positions of elements within the frame, but never considered moving the camera and then editing the resulting shots. From today’s perspective, the latter would obviously have been far more efficient and effective.

Even though Méliès continually used editing-based special effects to push cinema forward, these works did not yet contain complete narratives; they were primarily visual pieces. While Méliès was adding bricks and mortar to the visual side of film editing, the Brighton School in England was gradually refining an awareness of continuity editing—that is, narrative consciousness. Two important figures here were George Albert Smith and James Williamson.

In 1900, Smith shot As Seen Through a Telescope (1900). The main shot is a street scene: an old man watches through a telescope as a young man in the distance ties his girlfriend’s shoelaces. We then cut to a close-up of the girl’s foot within a circular black masking frame, and then back to a continuation of the original scene. In this film, editing begins to feature changes in shot scale, and a storyboard-like awareness of separate shots emerges.

The slightly mysterious voyeuristic element in As Seen Through a Telescope and the appearance of the close-up were later absorbed into Alfred Hitchcock’s creative thinking.

Even more noteworthy is James Williamson’s Attack on a China Mission (1900), shot at roughly the same time in 1900. The story depicts a British naval landing party in a garden defeating the Boxers and rescuing a missionary’s family.

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

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 extreme close-ups and editing tricks to enhance narrative power.

In The Big Swallow, Williamson experiments with the impact of close-ups and extreme close-ups on storytelling; this extreme use of shot scale reveals a highly avant-garde editing consciousness.

Thus the Brighton School’s continual exploration of how editing and shot scale affect narrative makes them key figures in advancing the development of editing.

— Across the Atlantic, another crucial figure was also beginning to push editing forward: American director Edwin S. Porter. With Porter’s arrival, editing formally entered the narrative stage.