Cinema: Year by Year

1878​

1887

1890

1891

1893

Etienne Jules-Marey filmed a Falling Cat.

Alexander Black's Miss Jerry became the first feature-length fictional film. It has, sadly, been lost.

They created several new 35mm Paul-Acres cameras and made several films together. Including one of a rough sea hitting Dover, and another of the Epsom derby.
Birt Acres filed for the patents under his own name.
Meanwhile, across the channel from Dover, the Lumiere Brothers finished work on their Cinematographe. Or CINEMA.
Unlike the Kinetoscopes, the Cinema had the ability to not only capture and develop moving pictures but to project them too. The brothers filmed their workers exiting their factory after a long day, a short Actuality (Primitive documentary) that is widely considered to be the true first film in cinematic history. 
They filmed 8 other short Actualities to become a part of their public debut, and one that could be considered the world's first comedy film.
They, in true fashion, quickly filed for a patent for the Cinema.

Speaking of patents, ol' Edison's still knocking about. William Dickson was still making his Vaudeville films with William Heise in Black Maria. They experimented with the film development process and hand tinted a film of a serpentine dance, creating the first colour film.

Alfred Clark then came along and blew them out of the water by creating a cut in his film, utilizing a special effect. The first of either kind. It depicts the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Look away if you voted Yes.


The rest of his films were lost. Clark, shortly after making this, decided to switch to his true passion of sound recording, and along with Johnson and Berliner, developed the Gramophone.

Max Sklandowsky and his brother Emil were creating their own camera (The Bioscope) in Germany. Like the Lumiere's Cinema, this could also project images. They filmed several Vaudeville films that they put together into their Wintergartenprogramm.

Their success at their launch was later eclipsed by the Lumiere Brothers' Cinema, which was clearly technically superior. A magician named Georges Melies attended the Lumiere's screening, and immediately offered them 10,000 francs for a cinematograph. They refused, emphasizing their belief that the cinema was a scientific device. The Lumieres were eventually caught saying "The Cinema is an invention without a future."
The Sklandowskys, meanwhile, tried to improve their camera and continue, but by 1897 they had to stop producing and exhibiting their films as ""too many film licenses were already in circulation".





Birt Acres and Robert W. Paul had a falling out, after Acres filed the patent for their cameras in his name. They both demonstrated their own projectors seperately. It was Paul that would end up on top though, as in the audience of his demonstration was Georges Melies. Melies purchased Paul's Theatrograph, along with several of Paul's and Edison's short films and a large amount of unperforated film. He took them back to Paris. Here he tinkered with Paul's projector and turned it into his own motion picture camera. Of course, it was a complete amateur project and made a lot of noise when in production. Melies thus called it his "Machine gun". He also developed his own film through a process of trial and error.

He began by remaking the Lumiere Brothers' films, in order to capitalise on the scientific actuality market.

But his passion was magic, spectacle and art, not science and research. He began making staged comedy films like Post No Bills, and A Terrible Night.

When making one of his films, Melies' camera jammed. In the film it looked like women had become men, and a bus had become a hearse. He had just discovered what Alfred Clark had performed a year prior. He began releasing films where things disappeared and reappeared, like The Vanishing Lady, The Haunted Castle and A Nightmare. He displayed these films in his theater where he performed magic.


He constructed his own film studio tp the exact specifications of his theater. and made it from glass. This was to let as much light in as possible for the most exposure. This contrasted Edison's studio which was designed to keep as much sun out as possible, safe for the retractable studio roof that would illuminate only the subjects.
Melies made 79 films in 1896, but only these ones here are still known to survive.

In Black Maria, William Heise made a film of the final scene from a Broadway stage show called "The Widow Jones". It became the first film to ever be commercially shown to the public. As Edison had finally found people (Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat) to build a projector for him.
Heise was helped by his cameraman James H. White. White began making actualities for Edison, such as "A Morning Alarm" and "A Morning Bath".

But what happened to Dickson? He had split from Edison the year before, and made the Mutoscope to compete with his own Kinetoscope. In 1896, he invented the biograph, a superior competitor to Edison's Vitascope projector. Dickson's film was 68mm, compared to Edison's 35mm format, in order to get around Edison's patents. The Company mostly produced actualities (Such as a staged reenactment of William McKinley receiving the Republican nomination), Vaudeville pictures and the occasional narrative film. In 1896, William K. Dickson began filming his Rip Van Winkle serial with Joseph Jefferson.


The Coronation of Tsar Nicolas II (Russia's last emperor) marked the first time a monarch's coronation was filmed.

Alice Guy was a secretary working for Léon Gaumont in his photography company. She had attended the Lumiere's first screening of "Workers leaving the Lumiere factory", and at that moment realized (Like Melies) the potential film had as a medium. She asked Gaumont to make a film on her own time, to which he agreed. And she made "The Cabbage Fairy", becoming the first female director (And only female director for 10 years). She pioneered narrative film making and was the first filmmaker to systematically develop narrative in all her films. Even before Melies.


After seeing the film, Gaumont made Guy head of production of his new film department.

In The Netherlands, M. H. Ladde made the first ever Dutch movies. But none were preserved, and hence have been lost.
The production company Pathé was found in 1896.



Edison's had both Heise and White film pillow fight scenes, between girls and young women respectively.


James H. White also filmed Edison in a mock-up of his chemical laboratory. Providing a oft-not-seen documentation of the man.


The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, fresh off McKinley's presidential success, created their comedy film "Peeping Tom".


The Lumiere brothers and Promio were still making actualities. Promio's achievement this year being the creation of the "Phantom Ride"
genre, where a camera is put on the front (or back) of a moving object.


Alice Guy made sixteen films in 1897, three of which survived. Two are about a group of young boys playing in a river, the other about burglars being apprehended on a heist. 


Georges Melies dramatized several war scenes in 1897. He recreated a painting set in the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian war, called "The Last Cartridges". "The Surrender of Turnavos" and "Sea Fighting in Greece" during the Greco-Turkish war of 1897. He used to same ship set from "Sea Fighting in Greece" for "Between Dover and Calais", the first film to feature a trademark. He also made a comedy of a bumbling police officer attempting to catch 2 burglars, "On the roofs". Melies rounded out the year with his trick film "The Bewitched Inn" and the first film to feature nudity (Actually a body-stocking that looks like a naked body) "After the Ball".


Peter Elfelt's "Kørsel med grønlandske hunde" was the first film to ever be shot in Denmark.

Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee was filmed.

1897 also marks cinema's first tragedy. On 4th May, during a film screening in Paris, some ether used to fuel the projector lamp caught fire. This spread and resulted in the deaths of 126 people.


Melies then made a foray into a fantastical, with "The Astronomer's Dream", about an Astronomer that is tormented as he tries to work, and "The Temptation of St. Anthony", the first film with a religious narrative. They show the first signs of Melies' passion for fantasy and science fiction, and the art of telling a story.


His English counterpart George Albert Smith discovered double exposure with his lost film "Photographing a Ghost" and used it again to demonstrate parallel action for the first time, in "Santa Claus".


Among his actualities and a couple short comedies, Robert W. Paul exhibited the first example of continuity, where one shot cuts to another to continue a scene. Only fragments of the second shot in "Come Along Do" survive.


The first film from Czech Republic (Then under the Austro-Hungarian Empire) was made by Josef Šváb-Malostranský.

Four of Alice Guy's films from 1898 survive today, these include a war scene, a comedy about a beggar and a blind man, a disappearing act and the goings on at the house of a hypnotist.




His next project was just as ambitious, but had Melies' usual theatricality and flair. Melies adapted the story of Cinderella, parts of which survive in colour.



George Albert Smith spliced a scene of a couple kissing on a train, in the middle of a phantom ride film to create the first proper example of narrative editing.


James Bamforth made a short comedy about "Women's Rights"


William K. L. Dickson produced the first ever film adaptation of a Shakespeare play, in London, with "King John".


James H. White depicted the first western scene on film in "Cripple Creek Bar room scene". And made several other Vignettes including "A Wringing Good Joke" and "Love and War", among many actualities.


Edison even made a film of his own this year, directing trick riding on a bicycle.


Tsunekichi Shibata ignited Japan's film industry by filming scenes from Kabuki plays. The only surviving one is called Momijigari.


Alice Guy's surviving films depict a man being served Absinthe and a card game going sour.


And Robert W. Paul defied the laws of gravity.



Raoul Grimoin-Sanson showcased his Cineorama technology: ten synchronised 70mm projectors arranged in a circle to project the images of a balloon ride onto a 360degree screen. However, the exhibit was closed prematurely due to health and safety concerns as the heat of the projectors caused a workman to faint.

This year, Arthur Marvin directed the first adaptation of Sherlock Holmes in "Sherlock Holmes Baffled" with the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. It depicts the wayward detective being confused by the tricks that cutting film has to offer.


Blackton, in Edison's Black Maria, directed the first ever animated sequence recorded onto film.


Meanwhile, a young upstart named Edwin S Porter took over Edison's New York production company and directed what would be the first ever film trilogy about a man named "Uncle Josh".  He also directed a film based on the encounter between Faust, Marguerite and Mephistopheles, a film about a mystical swing and even remade "The Kiss".


In London, Cecil Hepworth, a prodigee of Birt Acres, began directing his own picture plays. He blew up a motorcar for his comedic trick film and placed his camera in the path of a car Hepworth himself was driving.

[spoiiler]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CKih3hDIQY&list=PLi7wQc7a3qLBnro1MhYRbKXCHdqlFNYYY&index=2[/video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpr...o1MhYRbKXCHdqlFNYYY&index=5[/video][/spoiler]


South a bit, in Brighton, George Albert Smith and James Williamson produced several films. Smith invented the concept of a close-up, in "Grandma's Reading Glass", cutting from a medium shot of a child and his grandmother to several close-ups from the point of view of the titular reading glass. In his other films an Old Maid receives a valentine's letter, and "Let Me Dream Again" features the first example of a cross-dissolve between two shots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2h...7a3qLBvMcZPl6H88t0FvCRoet5l[/video][/spoiler]

Williamson made his "Attack on a China Mission", which used many actors for the battle, incorporated a reverse shot and Williamson used his background in chemistry to simulate gunfire and explosions. It depicts the Boxer Rebellion, which people had been demanding footage of since Melies' "Dreyfus Affair" opus.


Robert W. Paul directed a proto-feature-film (Several shorts combined into one) depicting the training regime of the British Armed Forces. Only a fragment, showing off the mounted infantry, survives today. Amongst his several actualities, Paul directed a staged burglary and became the first to use miniatures in his depiction of a rail crash.

[spoiiler]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye-XXVlKN6U&list=PL8D966C58DBC72BDC&index=28[/video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnqIAleknnE&list=PL8D966C58DBC72BDC&index=34[/video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZmgzCYvBU8&index=33&list=PL8D966C58DBC72BDC[/video][/spoiler]

At least 19 of Melies' films from 1900 survive today. Of note were a 10-minute long epic film about the life of Joan of Arc, a film about a one man orchestra (Using 7 separate exposures), a film of a man trying (and failing to undress) and a very christmassy dream. Melies produced several other trick and comedy movies.


Alice Guy made a film about machine that can both make hats and sausages, one of a disgruntled landlady and a photography subject that won't sit still. She also made other comedies, actualities and hand-tinted dance vignettes.


The Mitchell and Kenyon company began producing their actualities in 1900.​