54 Moving Images: Making Movies, Understanding Mediato launch himself as a true fi lm pioneer in Th e Kiss in the Tunnel (1899),
in which he created a sequence of three shots that began to establish a
sense of continuity in fi lm by starting with an exterior train shot entering
a tunnel and cutting to the interior of the train (for the kiss by a man
and woman on the train), followed by the exiting train. In Grandma’s
Reading Glass (1900), Smith used close-ups and developed basic point-of-
view shots as a boy looks at objects in close-up using his grandmother’s
magnifying glass.
Close-up framings and simple cuts between shots may seem like obvious
techniques to us now, but when watching the standard fi lms of 1895–1905, it
is important to recognize that the innovations that Méliès, Smith, and others
brought to fi lmmaking were simple yet also revolutionary. Th ey represent
the basic building blocks of fi lmmaking as we know it today.Director Edwin S. Porter
In the United States, Edwin S. Porter’s work shows advances in editing and
cinematic storytelling with Life of an American Fireman and Th e Great Train
Robbery. In Figure 2-18, you can follow the shots of Life of an American Fireman
of 1903. In the fi rst shot, seen in the two top left frames, you see a fi reman
daydreaming, which Porter shows through a visual eff ect that illustrates his
warm thoughts about his wife and child. Next, a fi re alarm is pulled, and
you can track the images that tell the story (each shot in the illustration is
shown as a pair of frames that proceed top to bottom in two columns) of a
fi re rescue of the wife and child from a burning building. Porter shows theFigure 2-17 The rocket
reaches the moon in Méliès’s
Trip to the Moon. (Courtesy
Star Film/Photofest)Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).