T he Beginnings of Film Continuity

In making their earliest fi lms, the Lumi re brothers adopted a simple procedure: they chose a subject which they thought might be interesting to record, set up their camera in front of it, and went on shooting until the stock ran out. Any common event Baby at the Lunch Table , A Boat Leaving Harbour served their purpose, which was simply to record events in motion. They used the fi lm camera as a recording instrument whose sole advantage over the still camera was that it could capture the element of movement: indeed, the essence of a fi lm like A Boat Leaving Harbour could have been equally conveyed in a still photograph. Although most of the Lumi re fi lms were records of simple unrehearsed events, one of the earliest already shows a conscious control of the material being shot. In Watering the Gardener the Lumi res recorded for the fi rst time a prearranged comic scene in which they exercised conscious control over their material: a small boy steps on the hose with which a gardener is watering his fl owers; the gardener is puzzled when the fl ow stops, looks at the nozzle; the boy takes his foot off the hose and the gardener is drenched with water. The action itself, as well as the fact that it moved, was designed to capture the spectators interest. The fi lms of George M li s are to-day mainly remembered for the ingenuity of their trick-work and for their primitive charm. At the time of production, however, they marked an important advance on previous work in that they enlarged the scope of fi lm story-telling beyond the single shot. Cinderella (1899), M li s second long fi lm, ran 410 feet (where the Lumi re fi lms had been around 50 feet) and told its story in twenty motion tableaux: (1) Cinderella in Her Kitchen; (2) The Fairy, Mice and Lackeys; (3) The Transformation of the Rat; . . . (20) The Triumph of Cinderella. 2 Each tableau was similar in kind to the Lumi res Watering the Gardener in that a relatively simple incident was prearranged and then recorded onto a single continuous strip of fi lm. But whereas the Lumi res had confi ned themselves to recording short single-incident events, M li s here attempted to tell a story of several episodes. The continuity of Cinderella established a connection between separate shots. The twenty tableaux presented rather like a series of lecture-slides acquired an elementary kind of unity by virtue of revolving around a central character: seen together, they told a story of greater complexity than was possible in the single shot fi lm. The limitations of Cinderella , as of most of M li s subsequent fi lms, are the limitations