The industrial production of films at Pathés factories and studios helped different film genres to become established. Genres had to be varied, with comic and dramatic films, with animated and so-called chase-films, not to mention documentaries and newsreels.

The fiction films were paradoxically simpler and often cheaper to produce, since they could be planned and produced rationally, which was much harder to do with documentaries of sudden events.

At Pathé, the art of using pictures for storytelling developed gradually. In the beginning a kind of attraction cinema was established, where various fictitious events were on display in front of the camera, rather than the film running a story.

The film to the left, Le Voleur de bicyclettes [Bicycles Thief] was shot in 1905. It consists of a number of filmed scenes, put together dramaturgically by the chase for a man, who in the beginning of the film steals a bicycle.

The film eventually develops into a humorous fake riot, set in front of the camera. The cuts between the scenes occur only after the last chasing party has vanished off screen.