As almost any writer on the history of the cinema has pointed out, there were two parallel lines of development in cinematography from the time of its conception (as an entertainment medium): the realistic line initiated by Lumière and the illusionist line explored by Méliès, who ‘stamped the theatrical mark on some of his films by lining up his performers at the end of a reel to take a curtain call as if they were appearing on stage’. It was not, however, until the film began to move away from a fixed-position camera recording of a staged entertainment that the cinema took the first steps towards a dramatic language of its own. Edwin S. Porter was the first film maker to explore this new dramatic language by breaking away from the conventions of the theatre and thereby establishing not simply the discontinuity of space as an essence of cinema, but also the dramatic equation of man and object, and the discontinuity of time. In his film The Life of an American Fireman (1902),