In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Edison Company released its first films. Most movies of the time were extremely short because they usually showed only one scene from one point of view. Most of the earliest films used a single camera without cuts, zooms or any of the special effects that we see in today's movies. Many of the films were called "actualities." The audiences liked these films because they showed them a record of an actual event. There were also "novelty" films. These films told a short story. Like the "actualities," these films were made by using a single camera, a single viewing range, and no cuts, pans, zooms or close ups. In this sense, they were much like stage performances. In fact, they often borrowed ideas from stage magicians or vaudeville skits. But because of lack of technology they could only tell very simple stories. However, early filmmakers soon learned to make the camera do tricks--to have people appear and disappear, shrink and grow, or even move backwards in time

Like novelty films narrative films are films that tell a story. Edwin S. Porter was one of the first film directors to try to tell more complicated stories, i.e., give films a more complicated narrative structure. Porter used a method called "temporal overlap" in which the same event is seen twice from two different perspectives. For example, Porter's Life of an American Fireman shows a woman and her child being rescued from a burning building. It has two key scenes of action--the woman in her bedroom on the inside of the house, and the firemen on the outside trying to get in to save her. Unlike filmmakers before him, Porter wanted to edit the film in such a way that two different stories were told. He edited the two scenes of action separately and thereby showed the audience the story from each character's perspective. Generally, editing a film involves selecting and joining together shots to create a finished film. The filmmaker must be sure that the shots are in the correct order so that the film makes sense to the audience. The final cut is the finished edit of a film, approved by the director and producer. This is what the audience will see.

By the second decade of the twentieth century, moviemakers learned how to tell complicated stories with multiple scenes of action. They developed a new "visual language" for combining several occurrences into one story. Once this happened, the early silent films became obsolete. However, these older films seemed to be more true to real life whereas the modern films seemed to be very unnatural. Audiences were turned off by this new type of filmmaking because it suggested the feeling that they could be in two places at once. They saw film as a "realistic" medium, and in real life no one can be in two places at once.