This research was begun in 1993 and consists in locating the various traces of fragmentation, assemblage, and, ultimately, editing in the “views” produced during the early years of cinema. In so doing, we hope to contribute to the ongoing revision of the traditional hypotheses concerning these phenomena. Our close and exhaustive scrutiny of the views produced by the Lumière company between 1895 and 1905 and the Edison company between 1890 and 1900 has made possible the discovery that an impressive number of pre-1900 views are made up of frames, or what we will call photograms, of more than one block of time, contrary to the canonic model of photogrammic continuity. These discontinuous views--whose sequence of photograms necessarily bears the mark of at least one caesura--join at least two distinct segments through a minimal editing procedure. Our research thus contributes to a re-evaluation of early cinema, particularly with respect to the so-called birth of film language.