Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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particularly concerning editing. By showing somebody looking, followed by a cut to
his/her point of view, a consistency of visual representation and image juxtaposition
facilitates the flow of the narrative. This is also demonstrated in As Seen Through a
Telescope (1900), which also employs the iris to accentuate the eye/camera, and
specifies the source of the iris through an establishing shot of a man looking through
a telescope. He proceeds to watch a man tying a woman’s shoe, lifting her skirt and
fondling her ankle. The illicit viewing of this contact anticipates the connection
between eye/camera and voyeurism, but uses this to also create a basis for the
comical use of eye/camera, as the ankle fondling is apparently inappropriate. The
same year, Hepworth Manufacturing Company released How it Feels to be Run
Over, where the eye/camera is used to show someone getting hit by a car. In this, the
people in the car acknowledge the camera as a person, and wave for it to move out of
the way. These films demonstrate that the eye/camera has roots very early in
cinema.
Although Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) does not contain
an eye/camera shot, it opened the narrative possibilities to the camera, past
unobtrusively capturing action. The closing shot confronts and challenges the
audience directly. The Great Train Robbery ends with a shot of a character, removed
from the setting of the film, pointing a revolver and firing it at the camera. This
cannot be referred to as an eye/camera shot because of the lack of an existing
character eye. This is different from the early Georges Méliès magic films such as
Escamotage d’Une Dame au Théâtre Robert-Houdin (1896; dir. Méliès), in that these
entertainment that used a series of image slides projected through a lantern which was developed in
the 17 th century, and still appearing in the 19 th century (see Gunning; 2005). Although Bottomore has
discovered uses of intra-scene cutting in cinema as early as 1899, he maintains that “The first genuine
cutting within a scene had to wait until 1901 or 1902.” (108-109)