It was the great George Albert Smith who invented the technique of breaking down a sequence into more than one shot and the method of making cuts within a single scene, keeping continuity of action across them. His first experiment came with Grandma's Reading Glass which shows a curious child playing with the over sized magnifying glass which his grandmother, who also happens to be present in the same scene - uses to read with. As the child peruses a newspaper, a bird in a cage, his grandma's eye and so on, there is a cut to a big close-up of each of the objects framed in a circular black vignette mask before the camera moves back to the more distant shot of the boy as he turns away to look at something else.
The POV shot immediately became popular in increasingly elaborate stories that were made in America and France and often focused on fly on the wall, voyeuristic activities such as keyhole peeping, and by 1905 both it and the inserted close shot were standard elements of film technique.
Simultaneously, the idea of action moving from one shot to another, with a direct cut between the shots, was being developed. The first films where this could be observed were James Williamson's Stop Thief (1901) and Fire (1902). Stop Thief was technically speaking - the first chase film although the genre itself would not be popularized until the following year and 1903 marked the year that things would move rapidly in the film industry.
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| Cutting to the chase in 1903 with Daring Daylight Burglary |
Other English filmmakers produced elaborate chase films ,Daring Daylight Burglary, Desperate Poaching Affray and The Pickpocket - which were all screened in the United States before Edison's director-cameraman, Edwin S. Porter made The Great Train Robbery at the end of 1903. Besides the matter of taking the action out of one shot into another shot set in a separate location. Desperate Poaching Affray in particular showed the force that could be obtained by keeping the camera closer to the proximity of the action than usual and also by having the chase itself go out of the frame towards and past the camera in every shot. As a result this film still seems the fastest and most violent of those produced in the early years.