Although the start of the history of film is not clearly defined, the commercial, public screening of ten of Lumière brothers' short films in Paris on 28 December 1895 can be regarded as the breakthrough of projected cinematographic motion pictures. There had been earlier cinematographic results and screenings but these lacked either the quality or the momentum that propelled the cinématographe Lumière into a worldwide success.

Soon film production companies were established all over the world. The first decade of motion picture saw film moving from a novelty to an established mass entertainment industry.
The earliest films were in black and white, under a minute long and without recorded sound.
During the 1890s films became several minutes long and started to consist of several shots. The first film studios were built in 1897. The first rotating camera for taking panning shots was built in 1898. Special effects were introduced and film continuity, involving action moving from one sequence into another, began to be used.
In the 1900s, continuity of action across successive shots was achieved and the first close-up shot was introduced (some claim D. W. Griffith was the inventor). Most films of this period were what came to be called "chase films". The first successful permanent theatre showing only films was "The Nickelodeon" in Pittsburgh in 1905. The first feature length multi-reel film was a 1906 Australian production. By 1910, actors began to receive screen credit for their roles, opening the way for the creation of film stars. Regular newsreels were exhibited from 1910 and soon became a popular way for finding out the news. From about 1910, American films had the largest share of the market in Australia and in all European countries except France.
New film techniques were introduced in this period including the use of artificial lighting, fire effects and low-key lighting (i.e. lighting in which most of the frame is dark) for enhanced atmosphere during sinister scenes. As films grew longer, specialist writers were employed to simplify more complex stories derived from novels or plays into a form that could be contained on one reel and be easier to be understood by the audience – an audience that was new to this form of storytelling. Genres began to be used as categories; the main division was into comedy and drama but these categories were further subdivided. During the First World War there was a complex transition for the film industry. The exhibition of films changed from short one-reel programs to feature films. Exhibition venues became larger and began charging higher prices. By 1914, continuity cinema was the established mode of commercial cinema. One of the advanced continuity techniques involved an accurate and smooth transition from one shot to another.
D. W. Griffith had the highest standing among American directors in the industry, because of the dramatic excitement he conveyed to the audience through his films. The American film industry, or "Hollywood", as it was becoming known after its new geographical center in Hollywood, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, gained the position it has held, more or less, ever since: film factory for the world and exporting its product to most countries. By the 1920s, the United States reached what is still its era of greatest-ever output, producing an average of 800 feature films annually, or 82% of the global total (Eyman, 1997). During late 1927, Warner's released The Jazz Singer, with the first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film. By the end of 1929, Hollywood was almost all-talkie, with several competing sound systems (soon to be standardized). Sound saved the Hollywood studio system in the face of the Great Depression (Parkinson, 1995).
The desire for wartime propaganda created a renaissance in the film industry in Britain, with realistic war dramas. The onset of American involvement in World War II also brought a proliferation of films as both patriotism and propaganda. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hollywood in the early 1950s. During the immediate post-war years the cinematic industry was also threatened by television and the increasing popularity of the medium meant that some film theatres would bankrupt and close. The 1950s was considered a "Golden Age" for non-English cinema.
Roundhay Garden Scene is an 1888 short silent film recorded by French inventor Louis Le Prince. It is believed to be the oldest surviving film in existence, as noted by the Guinness Book of Records. The film Sortie de l'usine Lumière de Lyon (1895) by French Louis Lumière is considered the "first true motion picture".
Precursors
Film as an art form has drawn on several earlier traditions in the fields such as (oral) storytelling, literature, theatre and visual arts. Forms of art and entertainment that had already featured moving and/or projected images include:
  • shadowgraphy, probably used since prehistoric times
  • camera obscura, a natural phenomenon that has possibly been used as an artistic aid since prehistoric times
  • shadow puppetry, possibly originated around 200 BCE in Central Asia, India, Indonesia or China
  • magic lantern, developed in the 1650s, preceded by some incidental and/or inferior projectors
  • stroboscopic "persistence of vision" animation devices (phénakisticope since 1832, zoetrope since 1866, flip book since 1868)
Some ancient sightings of gods and spirits may have been conjured up by means of (concave) mirrors, camera obscura or unknown projectors. By the 16th century necromantic ceremonies and the conjuring of ghostly apparitions by charlatan "magicians" and "witches" seemed commonplace.The very first magic lantern shows seem to have continued this tradition with images of death, monsters and other scary figures. Around 1790 this was developed into multi-media ghost shows known as phantasmagoria that could feature mechanical slides, rear projection, mobile projectors, superimposition, dissolves, live actors, smoke (sometimes to project images upon), odors, sounds and even electric shocks. While the first magic lantern images seem to have been intended to scare audiences, soon all sorts of subjects appeared and the lantern was not only used for storytelling but also for education. In the 19th century several new and popular magic lantern techniques were developed, including dissolving views and several types of mechanical slides that created dazzling abstract effects (chromatrope, etc.) or that showed for instance falling snow, or the planets and their moons revolving.
Early Period
In the 1890s, films were seen mostly via temporary storefront spaces and traveling exhibitors or as acts in vaudeville programs. A film could be under a minute long and would usually present a single scene, authentic or staged, of everyday life, a public event, a sporting event or slapstick. There was little to no cinematic technique, the film was usually black and white and it was without sound.
The novelty of realistic moving photographs was enough for a motion picture industry to blossom before the end of the century, in countries around the world. "The Cinema" was to offer a cheaper, simpler way of providing entertainment to the masses. Filmmakers could record actors' performances, which then could be shown to audiences around the world. Travelogues would bring the sights of far-flung places, with movement, directly to spectators' hometowns. Movies would become the most popular visual art form of the late Victorian age.
The Berlin Wintergarten theater hosted an early movie presentation in front of an audience, shown by the Skladanowsky brothers in 1895. The Melbourne Athenaeum started to screen movies in 1896. Movie theaters became popular entertainment venues and social hubs in the early 20th century, much like cabarets and other theaters.
Until 1927, motion pictures were produced without sound. This era is referred to as the silent era of film. To enhance the viewers' experience, silent films were commonly accompanied by live musicians in an orchestra, a theatre organ, and sometimes sound effects and even commentary spoken by the showman or projectionist. In most countries, intertitles came to be used to provide dialogue and narration for the film, thus dispensing with narrators, but in Japanese cinema human narration remained popular throughout the silent era. The technical problems were resolved by 1923.
Illustrated songs were a notable exception to this trend that began in 1894 in vaudeville houses and persisted as late as the late 1930s in film theaters. Live performance or sound recordings were paired with hand-colored glass slides projected through stereopticons and similar devices. In this way, song narrative was illustrated through a series of slides whose changes were simultaneous with the narrative development. The main purpose of illustrated songs was to encourage sheet music sales, and they were highly successful with sales reaching into the millions for a single song. Later, with the birth of film, illustrated songs were used as filler material preceding films and during reel changes.
The 1914 The Photo-Drama of Creation was a non-commercial attempt to combine the motion picture with a combination of slides and synchronize the resulting moving picture with audio. The film included hand-painted slides as well as other previously used techniques. Simultaneously playing the audio while the film was being played with a projector was required. Produced by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania (Jehovah's Witnesses), this eight–hour bible drama was being shown in 80 cities every day and almost eight million people in the United States and Canada saw the presentation.
Birth of movies
Within eleven years of motion pictures, the films moved from a novelty show to an established large-scale entertainment industry. Films moved from a single shot, completely made by one person with a few assistants, towards films several minutes long consisting of several shots, which were made by large companies in something like industrial conditions.
By 1900, the first motion pictures that can be considered as "films" – emerged, and film-makers began to introduce basic editing techniques and film narrative.
Invention and advancement of camera
Early movie cameras were fastened to the head of a tripod with only simple levelling devices provided. These cameras were effectively fixed during the course of a shot, and the first camera movements were the result of mounting a camera on a moving vehicle. The Lumière brothers shot a scene from the back of a train in 1896.
The first rotating camera for taking panning shots was built by Robert W. Paul in 1897, on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. He used his camera to shoot the procession in one shot. His device had the camera mounted on a vertical axis that could be rotated by a worm gear driven by turning a crank handle, and Paul put it on general sale the next year. Shots taken using such a "panning" head were also referred to as 'panoramas' in the film catalogues.
Georges Méliès built one of the first film studios in May 1897. It had a glass roof and three glass walls constructed after the model of large studios for still photography, and it was fitted with thin cotton cloths that could be stretched below the roof to diffuse the direct rays of the sun on sunny days. Beginning in 1896, Méliès would go on to produce, direct, and distribute over 500 short films. The majority of these films were short, one-shot films completed in one take. Méliès drew many comparisons between film and the stage, which was apparent in his work. He realized that film afforded him the ability (via his use of time lapse photography) to "produce visual spectacles not achievable in the theater.
The Execution of Mary Stuart, produced by the Edison Company for viewing with the Kinetoscope, showed Mary Queen of Scots being executed in full view of the camera. The effect was achieved by replacing the actor with a dummy for the final shot. Georges Méliès also utilized this technique in the making of Escamotage d'un dame chez Robert-Houdin (The Vanishing Lady). The woman is seen to vanish through the use of stop motion techniques.
The other basic technique for trick cinematography was the double exposure of the film in the camera. This was pioneered by George Albert Smith in July 1898 in England. The set was draped in black, and after the main shot, the negative was re-exposed to the overlaid scene. His 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.”
G.A. 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 negative of the forwards motion backwards frame by frame, so 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".
The use of different camera speeds also appeared around 1900 in the films of Robert W. Paul and Hepworth. Paul shot scenes from On a Runaway Motor Car through Piccadilly Circus (1899) with the camera turning 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. This gives what we would call a "slow motion" effect.
Film editinng and continuous narrative
The first films to consist of more than one shot appeared toward the end of the 19th century, a notable example was the French film of the life of Jesus Christ, La vie du Christ (The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ), by Alice Guy. These weren't represented as a continuous film, the separate scenes were interspersed with lantern slides, a lecture, and live choral numbers, to increase the running time of the spectacle to about 90 minutes. Another example of this is the reproductions of scenes from the Greco-Turkish war, made by Georges Méliès in 1897. Although each scene was sold separately, they were shown one after the other by the exhibitors. Even Méliès' Cendrillon (Cinderella) of 1898 contained no action moving from one shot to the next one. To understand what was going on in the film the audience had to know their stories beforehand, or be told them by a presenter.
Real film continuity, involving action moving from one sequence into another, is attributed to British film pioneer Robert W. Paul's Come Along, Do!, made in 1898 and one of the first films to feature more than one shot. In the first shot, an elderly couple is outside an art exhibition having lunch and then follow other people inside through the door. The second shot shows what they do inside. 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 and thereby to create super-positions and multiple exposures. This technique was first used in his 1901 film Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost.

The further development of action continuity in multi-shot films continued in 1899 at the Brighton School in England. In the latter part of that year, George Albert Smith made The Kiss in the Tunnel. This started with a shot from a "phantom ride" at the point at which the train goes into a tunnel, and continued with the action on a set representing the interior of a railway carriage, where a man steals a kiss from a woman, and then cuts back to the phantom ride shot when the train comes out of the tunnel. A month later, the Bamforth company in Yorkshire made a restaged version of this film under the same title, and in this case they filmed shots of a train entering and leaving a tunnel from beside the tracks, which they joined before and after their version of the kiss inside the train compartment.
In 1900, continuity of action across successive shots was definitively established by George Albert Smith and James Williamson, who also worked in Brighton. In that year Smith made As Seen Through a Telescope, in which the main shot shows street scene with a young man tying the shoelace and then caressing the foot of his girlfriend, while an old man observes this through a telescope. There is then a cut to close shot of the hands on the girl's foot shown inside a black circular mask, and then a cut back to the continuation of the original scene. Even more remarkable is James Williamson's Attack on a China Mission Station (1900). 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.
G.A Smith pioneered the use of the close-up shot in his 1900 films As Seen Through a Telescope and Grandma's Reading Glass. He further developed the ideas of breaking a scene shot in one place into a series of shots taken from different camera positions over the next couple of years, starting with The Little Doctors of 1901. In a series of films he produced at this time, he also introduced the use of subjective and objective point-of-view shots, the creation of dream-time and the use of reversing. He summed up his work in Mary Jane's Mishap of 1903, with repeated cuts in to a close shot of a housemaid fooling around, along with superimpositions and other devices, before abandoning film-making to invent the Kinemacolor system of colour cinematography. His films were the first to establish the basics of coherent narrative and what became known as film language, or "film grammar".
James Williamson concentrated on making films taking action from one place shown in one shot to the next shown in another shot in films like Stop Thief!, made in 1901, and many others. He also experimented with the close-up, and made perhaps the most extreme one of all in The Big Swallow, when his character approaches the camera and appears to swallow it. These two film makers of the Brighton School also pioneered the editing of the film; they tinted their work with color and used trick photography to enhance the narrative. By 1900, their films were extended scenes of up to 5 minutes long.
Most films of this period were what came to be called "chase films". These were inspired by James Williamson's Stop Thief! of 1901, which showed a tramp stealing a leg of mutton from a butcher's boy in the first shot, then being chased through the second shot by the butcher's boy and assorted dogs, and finally being caught by the dogs in the third shot. Several British films made in the first half of 1903 extended the chase method of film construction. These included An Elopement à la Mode and The Pickpocket: A Chase Through London, made by Alf Collins for the British branch of the French Gaumont company, Daring Daylight Burglary, made by Frank Mottershaw at the Sheffield Photographic Company, and Desperate Poaching Affray, made by William Haggar. Haggar in particular innovated the first extant panning shots; the poachers are chased by gamekeepers and police officers and the camera pans along, creating a sense of urgency and speed. His films were also recognised for their intelligent use of depth of staging and screen edges, while film academic Noël Burch praised Haggar's effective use of off-screen space. He was also one of the first film makers to purposefully introduce violence for entertainment; in Desperate Poaching Affray the villains are seen firing guns at their pursuers.
Other filmmakers took up all these ideas including the American Edwin S. Porter, who started making films for the Edison Company in 1901. Porter, a projectionist, was hired by Thomas Edison to develop his new projection model known as the Vitascope. Porter wanted to develop a style of filmmaking that would move away from the one-shot short films into a "story-telling [narrative]" style. When he began making longer films in 1902, he put a dissolve between every shot, just as Georges Méliès was already doing, and he frequently had the same action repeated across the dissolves. His film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), had a running time of twelve minutes, with twenty separate shots and ten different indoor and outdoor locations. He used cross-cutting editing method to show simultaneous action in different places. The time continuity in The Great Train Robbery was actually more confusing than that in the films it was modeled on, but nevertheless it was a greater success than them due to its Wild West violence. The Great Train Robbery served as one of the vehicles that would launch the film medium into mass popularity.
The Pathé company in France also made imitations and variations of Smith and Williamson's films from 1902 onwards using cuts between the shots, which helped to standardize the basics of film construction. An influential French film of the period was Méliès's 14-minute-long A Trip to the Moon.It was extremely popular at the time of its release, and is the best-known of the hundreds of films made by Méliès. It was one of the first known science fiction films, and used innovative animation and special effects, including the well-known image of the spaceship landing in the Moon's eye. The sheer volume of Pathé's production led to their filmmakers giving a further precision and polish to the details of film continuity.
Animation
The first use of animation in movies was in 1899, with the production of the short film Matches: An Appeal by British film pioneer Arthur Melbourne-Cooper- a thirty-second long stop-motion animated piece intended to encourage the audience to send matches to British troops fighting the Boer War. The film contains an appeal to send money to Bryant and May who would then send matches to the troops fighting in South Africa. It was shown in December 1899 at The Empire Theatre in London. This film is the earliest known example of stop-motion animation. Little puppets, constructed of matchsticks, are writing the appeal on a black wall. Their movements are filmed frame by frame, movement by movement.
The relative sophistication of this piece was not followed up for some time, with subsequent works in animation being limited to short, two or three frame effects, such as appeared in Edwin Stanton Porter's 1902 short Fun in a Bakery Shop, where a lump of dough was made to smile over the course of a three-frame sequence. Works rivaling the British short in length did not appear until 1905, when Edwin Porter made How Jones Lost His Roll, and The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog. Both of these films had intertitles which were formed by the letters moving into place from a random scattering to form the words of the titles. This was done by exposing the film one frame at a time, and moving the letters a little bit towards their final position between each exposure. This is what has come to be called "single frame animation" or "object animation", and it needs a slightly adapted camera that exposes only one frame for each turn of the crank handle, rather than the usual eight frames per turn.
In 1906, Albert Edward Smith and James Stuart Blackton at Vitagraph Studios took the next step, and in their Humorous Phases of Funny Faces,what appear to be cartoon drawings of people move from one pose to another. This is done for most of the length of this film by moving jointed cut-outs of the figures frame by frame between the exposures, just as Porter moved his letters. However, there is a very short section of the film where things are made to appear to move by altering the drawings themselves from frame to frame, which is how standard animated cartoons have since been made up to today.
The technique of single frame animation was further developed in 1907 by Edwin S. Porter in The Teddy Bears and by J. Stuart Blackton with Work Made Easy. In the first of these the toy bears were made to move, apparently on their own, and in the latter film building tools were made to perform construction tasks without human intervention, by using frame-by-frame animation. The technique got to Europe almost immediately, and Segundo de Chomon and others at Pathé took it further, adding clay animation, in which sculptures were deformed from one thing into another thing frame by frame in Sculpture moderne (1908), and then Pathé made the next step to the animation of silhouette shapes. Also in France, Émile Cohl fully developed drawn animation in a series of films starting with Fantasmagorie (1908), in which humans and objects drawn as outline figures went through a series of remarkable interactions and transformations. In the United States the response was from the famous strip cartoon artist Winsor McCay, who drew much more realistic animated figures going through smoother, more naturalistic motion in a series of films starting with the film Little Nemo, made for Vitagraph in 1911. In the next few years various others took part in this development of animated cartoons in the United States and elsewhere.
The world's first animated feature film was El Apóstol (1917), made by Italian-Argentine cartoonist Quirino Cristiani utilizing cutout animation. Cristiani also directed the first animated feature film with sound, Peludópolis, released with a vitaphone sound-on-disc synchronization system soundtrack. Unfortunately, a fire that destroyed producer Federico Valle's film studio incinerated the only known copies of the movies, and they are now considered as lost films.
In 1932, the first short animated film created entirely with technicolor (the trichromatic procedure (green, red, blue), whose use required a triple photographic impression, incorporation of chromatic filters and cameras of enormous dimensions) was Walt Disney's Flowers and Trees, directed by Burt Gillett.
Feature film
Films at the time were no longer than one reel, although some multi-reel films had been made on the life of Christ in the first few years of cinema. The first feature length multi-reel film in the world was the 1906 Australian production called The Story of the Kelly Gang.
It traced the life of the legendary infamous outlaw and bushranger Ned Kelly (1855–1880) and ran for more than an hour with a reel length of approximately 4,000 feet (1,200 m).It was first shown at the Athenaeum Hall in Collins Street, Melbourne, Australia on 26 December 1906 and in the UK in January 1908.

The first movie ever made in history 1896 by "The Lumière brothers"



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