The X-Ray Fiend

A couple courting on a bench, a professor who wheels up an X-ray machine, and a jump cut: the pair are skeletons now, still flirting, his bony hand around her waist. The machine goes away and the courtship carries on. Röntgen's discovery was two years old and Méliès's splice was one, and George Albert Smith put them in the same shot in Brighton in 1897. His wife, Laura Bayley, is the woman. One minute.