When a great movie works, you forget you are staring at a flat screen in a dark room. That illusion is not an accident: it is the product of a highly documented rule book invented over a century ago. This episode traces classical Hollywood cinema from the locked-down full-shot films of the late 1890s that were essentially recorded stage plays, through the 1913 awakening when directors like D.W. Griffith, Victor Sjostrom, Leonce Perret and Yevgeni Bauer realized film could manipulate time and space, to the arrival of synchronized sound in 1927 and the rise of the Big Five studio system.

Drawing on film scholar David Bordwell's analysis, we unpack the invisible grammar of continuity editing: psychologically motivated, goal-oriented characters; linear time with tightly regulated flashbacks like the Paris sequence in Casablanca; the 180-degree  ...