- Early years, 1830–1910
- The silent years, 1910–27
- The pre-World War II sound era
- The war years and post-World War II trends
- Transition to the 21st century
Méliès and Porter
The shift in consciousness away from films as animated photographs to films as stories, or narratives, began to take place about the turn of the century and is most evident in the work of the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Méliès was a professional magician who had become interested in the illusionist possibilities of the cinématographe; when the Lumières refused to sell him one, he bought an animatograph projector from Paul in 1896 and reversed its mechanical principles to design his own camera. The following year he organized the Star Film company and constructed a small glass-enclosed studio on the grounds of his house at Montreuil, where he produced, directed, photographed, and acted in more than 500 films between 1896 and 1913.
Initially Méliès used stop-motion photography (the camera and action are stopped while something is added to or removed from the scene; then filming and action are continued) to make one-shot “trick” films in which objects disappeared and reappeared or transformed themselves into other objects entirely. These films were widely imitated by producers in England and the United States. Soon, however, Méliès began to experiment with brief multiscene films, such as L’Affaire Dreyfus (The Dreyfus Affair, 1899), his first, which followed the logic of linear temporality to establish causal sequences and tell simple stories. By 1902 he had produced the influential 30-scene narrative Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon). Adapted from a novel by Jules Verne, it was nearly one reel in length (about 825 feet [251 metres], or 14 minutes).
The first film to achieve international distribution (mainly through piracy), Le Voyage dans la lune was an enormous popular success. It helped to make Star Film one of the world’s largest producers (an American branch was opened in 1903) and to establish the fiction film as the cinema’s mainstream product. In both respects Méliès dethroned the Lumières’ cinema of actuality. Despite his innovations, Méliès’s productions remained essentially filmed stage plays. He conceived them quite literally as successions of living pictures or, as he termed them, “artificially arranged scenes.” From his earliest trick films through his last successful fantasy, La Conquête du pole (“The Conquest of the Pole,” 1912), Méliès treated the frame of the film as the proscenium arch of a theatre stage, never once moving his camera or changing its position within a scene. He ultimately lost his audience in the late 1910s to filmmakers with more sophisticated narrative techniques.
The origination of many such techniques is closely associated with the work of Edwin S. Porter, a freelance projectionist and engineer who joined the Edison Company in 1900 as production head of its new skylight studio on East 21st Street in New York City. For the next few years, he served as director-cameraman for much of Edison’s output, starting with simple one-shot films (Kansas Saloon Smashers, 1901) and progressing rapidly to trick films (The Finish of Bridget McKeen, 1901) and short multiscene narratives based on political cartoons and contemporary events (Sampson-Schley Controversy, 1901; Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison, 1901). Porter also filmed the extraordinary Pan-American Exposition by Night (1901), which used time-lapse photography to produce a circular panorama of the exposition’s electrical illumination, and the 10-scene Jack and the Beanstalk (1902), a narrative that simulates the sequencing of lantern slides to achieve a logical, if elliptical, spatial continuity.
It was probably Porter’s experience as a projectionist at the Eden Musée theatre in 1898 that ultimately led him in the early 1900s to the practice of continuity editing. The process of selecting one-shot films and arranging them into a 15-minute program for screen presentation was very much like that of constructing a single film out of a series of separate shots. Porter, by his own admission, was also influenced by other filmmakers—especially Méliès, whose Le Voyage dans la lune he came to know well in the process of duplicating it for illegal distribution by Edison in October 1902. Years later Porter claimed that the Méliès film had given him the notion of “telling a story in continuity form,” which resulted in The Life of an American Fireman (about 400 feet [122 metres], or six minutes, produced in late 1902 and released in January 1903). This film, which was also influenced by James Williamson’s Fire!, combined archival footage with staged scenes to create a nine-shot narrative of a dramatic rescue from a burning building. It was for years the subject of controversy because in a later version the last two scenes were intercut, or crosscut, into a 14-shot parallel sequence. It is now generally believed that in the earliest version of the film these scenes, which repeat the same rescue operation from an interior and exterior point of view, were shown in their entirety, one after the other. This repetition, or overlapping continuity, which owes much to magic lantern shows, clearly defines the spatial relationships between scenes but leaves temporal relationships underdeveloped and, to modern sensibilities, confused. Contemporary audiences, however, were conditioned by lantern slide projections and even comic strips; they understood a sequence of motion-picture shots to be a series of individual moving photographs, each of which was self-contained within its frame. Spatial relationships were clear in such earlier narrative forms because their only medium was space.
Motion pictures, however, exist in time as well as space, and the major problem for early filmmakers was the establishment of temporal continuity from one shot to the next. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) is widely acknowledged to be the first narrative film to have achieved such continuity of action. Comprising 14 separate shots of noncontinuous, nonoverlapping action, the film contains an early example of parallel editing, two credible back, or rear, projections (the projection from the rear of previously filmed action or scenery onto a translucent screen to provide the background for new action filmed in front of the screen), two camera pans, and several shots composed diagonally and staged in depth—a major departure from the frontally composed, theatrical staging of Méliès.
The industry’s first spectacular box-office success, The Great Train Robbery is credited with establishing the realistic narrative, as opposed to Méliès-style fantasy, as the commercial cinema’s dominant form. The film’s popularity encouraged investors and led to the establishment of the first permanent film theatres, or nickelodeons, across the country. Running about 12 minutes, it also helped to boost standard film length toward one reel, or 1,000 feet (305 metres [about 16 minutes at the average silent speed]). Despite the film’s success, Porter continued to practice overlapping action in such conventional narratives as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) and the social justice dramas The Ex-Convict (1904) and The Kleptomaniac (1905). He experimented with model animation in The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906) and The Teddy Bears (1907) but lost interest in the creative aspects of filmmaking as the process became increasingly industrialized. He left Edison in 1909 to pursue a career as a producer and equipment manufacturer. Porter, like Méliès, could not adapt to the linear narrative modes and assembly-line production systems that were developing.