Life of an American Fireman

A fireman dozes at his desk and dreams a woman and a child; an alarm goes; the horses come out of the station; and the rescue from a burning bedroom is shown twice over, once from inside the room and once from the street. Whether Edwin Porter meant the doubled action as overlap or whether a later hand re-cut it into cross-cutting is a long argument about the surviving prints. Either way the engines leaving the station show him learning what a cut can carry, months before The Great Train Robbery. Edison, January 1903, about six minutes.