III.

Early Cinema

The earliest films showed just one scene, which ran for about a minute, which was all that the standard lengths of film (65 or 80 ft/around 20 or 25 m) produced by Eastman Kodak or other manufacturers allowed. From the beginning, some of these films showed specially staged and acted scenes, such as the Edison Barbershop Scene and the L’Arroseur Arrosé (A Trick on the Gardener) by the Lumières. However, the majority of early films were simple records of real-life scenes or stage acts. Some of these showed different views of related places and actions, and, although sold separately, they were probably joined together in succession by the showmen who bought them and projected them. It seems that the step forward from this, to joining a number of staged scenes together to tell a longer story, was taken in 1898 by the Robert Paul company in Britain with Come Along Do! In this the action moves from a scene outside an art gallery to a scene inside by means of a cut. However, most of the early multi-shot films were made by Georges Méliès. In his films, well-known stories such as Cinderella (1899) were told in a series of disconnected scenes joined by dissolves (see Special Effects), as was done at the time with slides in a magic-lantern show. Méliès’s long story films with their trick effects were the most commercially successful of all in the first few years of cinema, and they led other film-makers towards producing longer films. However, Méliès’s films made no real contribution to the development of film construction as we know it.

The important figures in doing this were G. A. Smith and James Williamson, working independently in Brighton, East Sussex. Smith invented the basic technique of breaking a filmed scene down into a number of shots taken from different camera positions in his films Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900), As Seen Through a Telescope (1901), and The Little Doctors (1901). The first two of these introduced the view of things looked at through a magnifying glass and a telescope by one of the actors, by taking close shots inside a black circular mask. The Little Doctors used a close shot of a kitten being fed medicine that was cut into the middle of the shot showing the whole scene, and constitutes the first such use of a “close-up” cut into a scene. By 1903 Smith was making a conscious effort to get some sort of continuity matching in the actor’s position across the cut. Smith then gave up ordinary film-making in 1903 to produce a system of colour cinematography called Kinemacolor that was quite successful up to World War I.

James Williamson developed the movement of action through a series of shots taken in various locations in his films Attack on a Chinese Mission Station, Stop Thief!, and Fire!, all made in 1901. In these films the leading character was shown running out of one shot, then there would be a cut to another scene set somewhere else, and the character would then run into frame to continue the story. Méliès also used a similar technique on one occasion in the same year, but in this case the shots were joined with a dissolve rather than a cut.

Other film-makers in Britain took up these techniques in 1903, and developed longer films by having characters pursued through more and more different scenes. These were referred to as chase films. Afterwards, other less inventive film-makers in France and the United States such as Edwin S. Porter copied these techniques in various films, such as The Great Train Robbery. In France, Charles Pathé built a large company by ploughing back his profits to raise the production values of his films, and the film-makers he employed, led by Ferdinand Zecca, added extra polish to the continuity devices developed by the British. By building more studios and setting up multiple production teams, Pathé produced more films than any other firm in the world. A form of comedy unique to film began to develop, particularly at Pathé, by combining theatrical slapstick with the chase film.