Advances towards projection '' (1888) by
Louis Le Prince Throughout the late 19th century, several inventors such as
Wordsworth Donisthorpe,
Louis Le Prince,
William Friese-Greene, and the
Skladanowsky brothers made pioneering contributions to the development of devices that could capture and display moving images, laying the groundwork for the emergence of cinema as an artistic medium. The scenes in these experiments primarily served to demonstrate the technology itself and were usually filmed with family, friends or passing traffic as the moving subjects. The earliest surviving film, known today as the
Roundhay Garden Scene (1888), was captured by Louis Le Prince and briefly depicted members of his family in motion. In June 1889, American inventor
Thomas Edison assigned a lab assistant,
William Kennedy Dickson, to help develop a device that could produce visuals to accompany the sounds produced from the
phonograph. Building upon previous machines by Muybridge, Marey, Anschütz and others, Dickson and his team created the
Kinetoscope peep-box viewer, with celluloid loops containing about half a minute of motion picture entertainment. The Kinetoscope quickly became a global sensation with multiple viewing parlors across major cities by 1895. During that same period, inventors began advancing technologies towards
film projection that would eventually overtake Edison's peep-box format. The screening consisted of ten films and lasted roughly 20 minutes. The program consisted mainly of actuality films such as
Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory as truthful documents of the world, but the show also included the staged comedy ''
L'Arroseur Arrosé''. The most advanced demonstration of film projection thus far, the Cinématographe was an instant success, bringing in an average of 2,500 to 3,000 francs daily by the end of January 1896. Following the first screening, the order and selection of films were changed often. The Lumière brothers' primary business interests were in selling cameras and film equipment to exhibitors, not the actual production of films. Despite this, filmmakers across the world were inspired by the potential of film as exhibitors brought their shows to new countries. This era of filmmaking, dubbed by film historian Tom Gunning as "the cinema of attractions", offered a relatively cheap and simple way of providing entertainment to the masses. Rather than focusing on stories, Gunning argues, filmmakers mainly relied on the ability to delight audiences through the "illusory power" of viewing sequences in motion, much as they did in the Kinetoscope era that preceded it. Despite this, early experimentation with fiction filmmaking (both in
actuality film and other genres) did occur. Films were mostly screened inside temporary storefront spaces, in tents of traveling exhibitors at fairs, or as "dumb" acts in vaudeville programs. During this period, before the process of
post-production was clearly defined, exhibitors were allowed to exercise their creative freedom in their presentations. To enhance the viewers' experience, some showings were accompanied by live musicians in an orchestra, a theatre organ, live
sound effects and commentary spoken by the showman or projectionist. '', directed by
Alice Guy Experiments in film editing, special effects, narrative construction, and camera movement during this period by filmmakers in France, England, and the United States became influential in establishing an identity for film going forward. At both the Edison and Lumière studios, loose narratives such as the 1895 Edison film,
Washday Troubles, established short relationship dynamics and simple storylines. In 1896,
La Fée aux Choux (The Fairy of the Cabbages) was first released. Directed and edited by
Alice Guy, the story is arguably the earliest narrative film in history, as well as the first film to be directed by a woman. That same year, the
Edison Manufacturing Company released
The May Irwin Kiss in May to widespread financial success. The film, which featured the first kiss in cinematic history, led to the earliest known calls for
film censorship. Another early film producer was Australia's
Limelight Department. Commencing in 1898, it was operated by
The Salvation Army in
Melbourne, Australia. The Limelight Department produced evangelistic material for use by the Salvation Army, including
lantern slides as early as 1891, as well as private and government contracts. In its nineteen years of operation, the Limelight Department produced about 300 films of various lengths, making it one of largest film producers of its time. The Limelight Department made a 1904 film by
Joseph Perry called
Bushranging in North Queensland, which is believed to be the first ever film about bushrangers.
Proliferation of actualities and newsreels In its infancy, film was rarely recognized as an art form by presenters or audiences. Regarded by the upper class as a "vulgar" and "lowbrow" form of cheap entertainment, films largely appealed to the working class and were often too short to hold any strong narrative potential. Initial advertisements promoted the technologies used to screen films rather than the films themselves. As the devices became more familiar to audiences, their potential for capturing and recreating events was exploited primarily in the form of
newsreels and actualities. During the creation of these films, cinematographers often drew upon
aesthetic values established by past art forms such as
framing and the intentional placement of the camera in the
composition of their image. With the advertisement of film technologies over content, actualities initially began as a "series of views" that often contained shots of beautiful and lively places or performance acts. Following the success of their 1895 screening, The Lumière brothers established a company and sent cameramen across the world to capture new subjects for presentation. After the cinematographer shot scenes, they often exhibited their recordings locally and then sent them back to the company factory in Lyon to make duplicate prints for sale to whoever wanted them. In the process of filming actualities, especially those of real events, filmmakers discovered and experimented with multiple camera techniques to accommodate for their unpredictable nature. Due to the short length (often only one shot) of many actualities, catalogue records indicate that production companies marketed to exhibitors by promoting multiple actualities with related subject matters that could be purchased to complement each other. Exhibitors who bought the films often presented them in a program and would provide spoken accompaniment to explain the action on screen to audiences. In subsequent years, screenings of actualities and newsreels proved to be profitable. In 1897,
The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight was released. The film was a complete recording of a heavyweight world championship boxing match at
Carson City, Nevada. It generated more income in box office than in
live gate receipts and was the longest film produced at the time. Audiences had probably been drawn to the Corbett-Fitzsimmons film en masse because
James J. Corbett (a.k.a. Gentleman Jim) had become a
matinee idol since he had played a fictionalized version of himself in a stage play. From 1910 on, regular newsreels were exhibited and soon became a popular way of discovering the news before the advent of television the
British Antarctic Expedition to the South Pole was filmed for the newsreels as were the
suffragette demonstrations that were happening at the same time.
F. Percy Smith was an early
nature documentary pioneer working for
Charles Urban when he pioneered the use of time lapse and micro cinematography in his 1910 documentary on the growth of flowers.
Experimentation with narrative filmmaking France: Georges Méliès, Pathé Frères, Gaumont (left) painting a backdrop in his studio Following the successful exhibition of the Cinématographe, development of a motion picture industry rapidly accelerated in France. Multiple filmmakers experimented with the technology as they worked to attain the same success that the Lumière brothers had with their screening. These filmmakers established new companies such as the
Star Film Company,
Pathé Frères, and
Gaumont. The most widely cited progenitor of narrative filmmaking is the French filmmaker,
Georges Méliès. Méliès was an illusionist who had previously used magic lantern projections to enhance his magic act. In 1895, Méliès attended the demonstration of the Cinematographe and recognized the potential of the device to aid his act. He attempted to buy a device from the Lumière brothers, but they refused. Months later, he bought a camera from
Robert W. Paul and began experiments with the device by creating actualities. During this period of experimentation, Méliès discovered and implemented various special effects including the
stop trick, the
multiple exposure, and the use of
dissolves in his films. At the end of 1896, Méliès established the
Star Film Company and started producing, directing, and distributing a body of work that would eventually contain over 500 short films. Recognizing the narrative potential afforded by combining his theater background with the newly discovered effects for the camera, Méliès designed an elaborate stage that contained trapdoors and a
fly system. In Méliès' films, he based the placement of the camera on the theatrical construct of
proscenium framing, the metaphorical plane or
fourth wall that divides the actors and the audience. Throughout his career, Méliès consistently placed the camera in a fixed position and eventually fell out of favor with audiences as other filmmakers experimented with more complex and creative techniques. Méliès is most
widely known today for his 1902 film,
Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon), where he used his expertise in effects and narrative construction to create the first
science fiction film. Prior to this focus on production, Pathé had become involved with the industry by exhibiting and selling what were likely counterfeit versions of the Kinetoscope in his phonograph shop. With the creative leadership of Zecca and the capability to mass-produce copies of the films through a partnership with a French toolmaking company, Charles Pathé sought to make Pathé-Frères the leading film producer in the country. Within the next few years, Pathé-Frères became the largest film studio in the world, with satellite offices in major cities and an expanding selection of films available for presentation. The company's films were varied in content, with directors specializing in various genres for fairground presentations throughout the early 1900s. Her earlier films share many characteristics and themes with her contemporary competitors, such as the Lumières and
Méliès. She explored dance and travel films, often combining the two, such as
Le Boléro performed by Miss
Saharet (1905) and
Tango (1905). Many of Guy's early dance films were popular in music-hall attractions such as the
serpentine dance films – also a staple of the Lumières and
Thomas Edison film catalogs. In 1906, she made
The Life of Christ, a big-budget production for the time, which included 300 extras.
Germany: Oskar Messter German inventor and film tycoon
Oskar Messter was an important figure in the early years of cinema. His firm
Messter Film was one of the dominant German producers before the rise of UFA, with which it merged eventually. Messter first added a
Geneva drive on the projectors to oscillatingly cause intermittent movement to advance the frames of the film and he set up the first film studio in Germany in 1900. From 1896, Messter was interested in the search of a method of reproduction and synchronization of the sound effects of the cinematographic performance at the time of the
silent movies. So Messter invented the Tonbilder Biophon to show films, in which a gramophone played
Unter den Linden accompanying the projection of animated images, but it was not a simple add on but to precisely match the series of musical pieces with moving images. In effect, to add sound to the silent cinema, it was necessary to solve problems of synchronization, since the image and the sound were recorded and reproduced by separated devices, which were difficult to initiate and to maintain rigged. On August 31, 1903, Messter held the first sound projection that took place in Germany at the "Apollo" Theater in Berlin.
England: Robert W Paul, Cecil Hepworth, The Brighton School Both
Cecil Hepworth and
Robert W. Paul experimented with the use of different camera techniques in their films. Paul's 'Cinematograph Camera No. 1' of 1895 was the first camera to feature reverse-cranking, which allowed the same film footage to be exposed several times, thereby creating
multiple exposures. This technique was first used in his 1901 film ''
Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost. Both filmmakers experimented with the speeds of the camera to generate new effects. Paul shot scenes from On a Runaway Motor Car through Piccadilly Circus
(1899) by cranking the camera apparatus very slowly. When the film was projected at the usual 16 frames per second, the scenery appeared to be passing at great speed. Hepworth used the opposite effect in The Indian Chief and the Seidlitz Powder'' (1901). The Chief's movements are sped up by cranking the camera much faster than 16 frames per second, producing what modern audiences would call a "
slow motion" effect. The first films to move from single shots to successive scenes began around the turn of the 20th century. Due to the
loss of many early films, a conclusive shift from static singular shots to a series of scenes can be hard to determine. Despite these limitations, Michael Brooke of the
British Film Institute attributes real film continuity, involving action moving from one sequence into another, to Robert W. Paul's 1898 film,
Come Along, Do!. Only a still from the second shot remains extant today. Released in 1901, the British film
Attack on a China Mission was one of the first films to show a continuity of action across multiple scenes. In most countries,
intertitles gradually came to be used to provide dialogue and narration for the film, thus dispensing the need for narration provided by exhibitors. Development of continuous action across multiple shots was furthered in England by a loosely associated group of film pioneers collectively termed "the
Brighton School". These filmmakers included
George Albert Smith and
James Williamson, among others. Smith and Williamson experimented with action continuity and were likely the first to incorporate the use of
inserts and
close-ups between shots. Smith's
The Corsican Brothers was described in the catalogue of the
Warwick Trading Company in 1900: "By extremely careful photography the ghost appears *quite transparent*. After indicating that he has been killed by a sword-thrust, and appealing for vengeance, he disappears. A 'vision' then appears showing the fatal duel in the snow." Smith also initiated the special effects technique of
reverse motion. He did this by repeating the action a second time, while filming it with an inverted camera, and then joining the tail of the second negative to that of the first. The first films made using this device were
Tipsy, Topsy, Turvy and
The Awkward Sign Painter. The earliest surviving example of this technique is Smith's
The House That Jack Built, made before September 1900. Cecil Hepworth took this technique further by printing the
negatives of the forward motion in reverse frame by frame, producing a print in which the original action was exactly reversed. To do this he built a special printer in which the negative running through a projector was projected into the gate of a camera through a special lens giving a same-size image. This arrangement came to be called a "projection printer", and eventually an "
optical printer". '' (1900), with the telescope POV simulated by the circular mask In 1898, George Albert Smith experimented with close-ups, filming shots of a man drinking beer and a woman using sniffing tobacco. The separate shots, when edited together, formed a distinct sequence of events and established
causality from one shot to the next. Following
The Kiss in the Tunnel, Smith more definitively experimented with continuity of action across successive shots and began using inserts in his films, such as ''
Grandma's Reading Glass and Mary Jane's Mishap''. James Williamson perfected narrative building techniques in his 1900 film,
Attack on a China Mission. The film, which film historian
John Barnes later described as having "the most fully developed narrative of any film made in England up to that time", opens as the first shot shows Chinese Boxer rebels at the gate; it then cuts to the missionary family in the garden, where a fight ensues. The wife signals to British sailors from the balcony, who come and rescue them. The film also used the first "reverse angle" cut in film history. The following year, Williamson created
The Big Swallow. In the film. a man becomes irritated by the presence of the filmmaker and "swallows" the camera and its operator through the use of interpolated close-up shots. He combined these effects, along with superimpositions, use of
wipe transitions to denote a scene change, and other techniques to create a film language, or "
film grammar". James Williamson's use of continuous action in his 1901 film,
Stop Thief! stimulated a film genre known as the "chase film." In the film, a tramp steals a leg of mutton from a butcher's boy in the first shot, is chased by the butcher's boy and assorted dogs in the following shot, and is finally caught by the dogs in the third shot. The technique used in the film is seen as one of the earliest known uses of special effects in film. The American filmmaker
Edwin S. Porter started making films for the
Edison Company in 1901. A former projectionist hired by Thomas Edison to develop his new projection model known as the
Vitascope, Porter was inspired in part by the works of Méliès, Smith, and Williamson and drew upon their newly crafted techniques to further the development of continuous narrative through editing.
The Great Train Robbery served as one of the vehicles that would launch the film medium into mass popularity. That same year, the
Miles Brothers opened the first
film exchange in the country, which allowed permanent exhibitors to rent films from the company at a lower cost than the producers that sold their films outright.
John P. Harris opened the first permanent theater devoted exclusively to the presentation of films, the
nickelodeon, in 1905 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The idea rapidly took off and by 1908, there were around 8,000 nickelodeon theaters across the country. With the arrival of the nickelodeon, audience demand for a larger quantity of story films with a variety of subjects and locations led to a need to hire more creative talent and caused studios to invest in more elaborate stage designs. During the 1900s, the leader in the United States was the French group
Pathé, which held almost 50% of the global market on its own. == Continued international growth (1900s–1910s) ==