ABSTRACT
The first movies were single, static shots of everyday events. The Lumière brothers’ screening in Paris of a train pulling into the La Ciotat train station caused a sensation. Shot in black and white, and silent, it nevertheless conveyed a gripping reality for the audience. People leaped from their seats to avoid the approaching steam locomotive. The brothers followed this with a staged comic scene. Georges Méliès expanded on this by staging complex tableaux that told a story. It wasn’t until Edwin H. Porter and D. W. Griffith in the United States discovered the process of editing one shot next to another that movies were really born. Porter also invented the close-up, which was used to emphasize climactic moments. Wide shots were used to establish location and context. Griffith introduced such innovations as the flashback, the first real use of film to manipulate time. Parallel action was introduced, and other story devices were born, but the real discovery was that the shot was the fundamental building block of film and that the film is built one shot at a time, one after the other. It soon became apparent that the impact of storytelling lies in the order of the shots.
