Surprise d'une maison au petit jour

Action-packed short from Alice Guy with a realistic edge that's extremely rare for movies from this era.

Troops fire artillery and begin the assault on a building in this short from Alice Guy.

It's a one-shot set-up, which is pretty much the limit of a movie for this era. However, unlike many of the pictures of its type, it appears to have been shot neither on a stage nor out in the woods -- where, I would imagine, houses available for a staged assault would be harder to find.

It also establishes a peculiarity of this sort of shot: while movement, in general cinema terms, tends to be from the right and the upper corner (there seems to be no clear reason for this, except that the Lumieres' famous movie of a train was staged at a station, on the side the passengers descended from, which demanded that). Assaults, like this, tend to be from the left side of the frame.

Why? I have no idea. For the moment, I've concluded it's a random decision for one early movie that got built into the cinema's DNA.