Before the turn of the 20th-century, even before the first cinemas, Georges Melies began making movies. He directed, edited, produced, designed and starred in over 500 films between 1896 and 1912. Elizabeth Ezra explodes several myths about Melies’s role in film history. Dismantling the long-held opposition between early film and what we see today, this text locates the roots of modern narrative cinema in Melies’s work, identifying techniques of editing and mise-en-scene previously thought to have originated with D.W. Griffith.