20th century loss of many early films British Film Institute Come Along, Do! Attack on a China Mission intertitle intertitles Robert W. Paul film
The first films to move from single shots to successive scenes began around the turn of the 20th century. Due to the loss of many early films, a conclusive shift from static singular shots to a series of scenes can be hard to determine. Despite these limitations, Michael Brooke of the British Film Institute attributes real film continuity, involving action moving from one sequence into another, to Robert W. Paul's 1898 film, Come Along, Do!. Only a still from the second shot remains extant today. Released in 1901, the British film Attack on a China Mission was one of the first films to show a continuity of action across multiple scenes. The use of the intertitle to explain actions and dialogue on screen began in the early 1900s. Filmed intertitles were first used in Robert W. Paul's film, Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost. In most countries, intertitles gradually came to be used to provide dialogue and narration for the film, thus dispensing the need for narration provided by exhibitors.
