Film History: The Very First Films

The very first films in the early 1890's (what the very first film is depends on your definition of film; for all the contenders see wikipedia) were very short (sometimes only a few seconds) and viewed simply as novelties. The attraction was merely that they were pictures that moved. Audiences did not expect a story.

The first film to be displayed for paying audiences (and the first to be copyrighted) was produced by Thomas Edison in 1894 and is known as Fred Ott's Sneeze. It is short enough to be shown in its entirety in gif form:

 

Early films in many ways are more comparable to animated gifs on the internet today than movies. Within a short while, cameras were made that hold more film, and films became longer (30 seconds!) and longer (a whole minute!), but were still used mostly as a novelty. For example, silly cat videos:
 

 

To view one of Edison's films, you paid a nickel (a lot of money back then) and had to look into a box known as a kinetescope, also known as a "Nickelodeon."

The first projected films were made in France in 1895 by the Lumiere brothers. They titled their films "actualities," stressing that they were documenting things that really happened. Their most famous film is "A train arriving at a station." As depicted in the film Hugo, the first audiences were terrified because they thought a train was heading straight towards them.

It is stage magician Georges Méliès who is generally credited with being the first to explore the potential of movies to tell stories. I'll post more of his work along with links to some of his best work in a separate post.