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24 CINEMONTAGE / Q2 2019 for years. After completing that groundbreaking project, Méliès immediately took another step toward editing the arrangement of images to tell complex stories. Inspired by a pantomime staged by the Troupe Raymond at his theatre in 1897, the filmmaker shot Cendrillon (Cinderella), described in his studio's film catalogue as "une grande féerie extraordinaire" (an extraordinary grand fantasy). Running about six minutes, this version of the classic fairy tale was shot on one reel in continuity on four different sets prepared consecutively on the main Montreuil studio stage. Méliès created in- camera lap dissolves as transitions between the four sets: Cinderella's kitchen, the Royal Palace ballroom, Cinderella's room and the church exterior where she and the prince are wed. Within the separate tableaux, the filmmaker also used a few shorter dissolves to suggest passage of time, as well as stop motion for the story's magical transformations. Premiering at Théâtre Robert-Houdin in October 1899, Cinderella was an immediate success, opening on Broadway in New York two months later on Christmas Day. The acclaim the film received encouraged Méliès to make longer, more elaborate films, using "all that I have learned by the seat of my pants during long years of constant labor," as he stated in his 1907 lecture. Among his most popular later films were the 10-minute historic spectacle Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc), 1900, as well as the science fiction fantasies Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), 1902, 13 minutes, and Voyage à Travers l'Impossible (An Impossible Voyage), 1904, 24 minutes. Except for cutting and gluing together the scenes of The Dreyfus Affair, all of Méliès' editing until 1903 was done in-camera before he developed his negative. POST MÉLIÈS In 1900, English film pioneer George Albert Smith made two short films that required actual cutting. That September, his one-minute As Seen Through the Telescope inserts a close shot of a woman's ankle to show what an old man is viewing in the master shot. And that November, in Grandma's Reading Glass, a medium-long shot of a woman and her grandson is intercut with POV close-ups of objects the boy looks at through his grandmother's magnifying glass. In the same month, another British filmmaker, James Williamson, intercut reverse angle shots in Attack on a Chinese Mission, portraying an incident from the Boxer Rebellion. Working for the Edison Company in the US, Edwin S. Porter firmly laid the editing foundation of movie storytelling in 1903 with Life of the American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery. With sequences constructed from images shot from a greater variety of camera distances and angles, and parallel action and cross-cutting used more extensively, these story films were instantly popular and were exhibited more widely and longer than any previous productions. In 1914, Porter told the early trade journal The Moving Picture World that, motivated by this success, "We devoted all our resources to the production of stories [italics Porter's], instead of disconnected and unrelated scenes." With increasing public demand for movie stories, most production companies did the same. Between 1905 and 1908, over 10,000 nickelodeons and other theatres had been established in the US exclusively for film exhibition. Prior to this, however, sometime between 1900 and 1905, the splicer — the first mechanical apparatus invented specifically to facilitate the cutting and joining of segments of film — had appeared. Actually, exhibitors were the first to construct hand-tooled splicers to join together the separate, single-shot views, images and short movies they rented or bought to screen them for audiences as one continuous program. From 1905 on, filmmakers began seeing themselves as storytellers and took decisive control of the arrangement of shots in their work. By 1910, the standardized manufacture of splicers expressly for film editing and post-production had been introduced to the growing motion picture industry. In all likelihood, Méliès himself used a splicer before his film career ended in 1913, with over 500 movies to his credit. f THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY CONTINUED FROM PAGE 22 Grandma's Reading Glass, 1900. George Albert Smith Films