In this early Gaumont film from the first female director in history, Alice Guy, "Une Histoire Roulante" (a pun of a title translated as "A Story Well Spun"), the structure is similar to the chase comedies of the era, with an amusing incident--in this case, a man in a barrel is rolled down hill, resulting in people running out of the way or otherwise being knocked over--occurring across shots. These films were influential in the development of continuity editing. The eight shots here within two-and-a-half minutes is quite brisk, with an especially fast average shot length when one adjusts for the first shot taking up much of the runtime. Some of the editing seems a bit choppy nowadays, and the superimposition and stop-substitution trick effects are nothing special even for their day, but the continuation of figures across space and shots consistently follow the axis of action and other rules of continuity editing that films such as this one were inventing.
Review of Une histoire roulante
