And as far as we can tell, the first people to do that were here in England, in Brighton, the so-called Brighton School. A man named James Williamson, in 1901, made two films. One called Stop, Thief!, and the other one called Fire! And these were, as you might imagine, a chase of a thief with the police running after him and him crawling over fences, and eventually hiding in a barrel and then finding him in the barrel and taking him off to jail. And it's all done with what we'd call today as 'continuity editing', that you do a shot of the man running around the corner and running out of frame, and then you do another shot of him running into this frame and jumping in the barrel. And you can shoot the second shot first and the first shot second, and it doesn't matter because you can rearrange the order by editing after the fact.
And this was not evident to Edison, or to the Lumière brothers, nobody thought of this as even being possible. Hence, the Lumière brothers saying, 'Cinema is an invention without a future.' They didn't see how it could really levitate and become something grand, which is in fact, what has happened. But Dickson is somebody who, right from the get-go, against all the evidence... There was no evidence that any... He's talking about going to Mars, what? But he was a visionary, and cinema... Many human activity, much human activity, certainly cinema, depends on these visionaries who have an idea that nothing... there's no evidence that supports this idea. But this idea is something that drives them forward, and we make, inevitably, against reason, we make progress in this way. So wherever Dickson is right now, he must be having a good smile, the fact that things written in this book 120 years ago are, in fact, true.
