History of Cinema

The silent era

Silent movies are those made before the invention of synchronous sound projecting. They were accompanied by musicians, and dialogue was presented on intertitles.

1901-1919

1902 - Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon, (Le Voyage dans la Lune), premieres, the first science fiction film with extravagant special effects. The Charles Urban Trading Company was founded by Charles Urban, an American, in England. The company produced original films and distributed films made by the Lumiere brothers and Georges Méliès throughout Europe. Méliès filmed a mock coronation of Edward VII and it was presented in theaters the same night as the actual ceremony. Léon Gaumont begins experimenting with the possibilities of sound on film.
1903 - Edwin S. Porter produces The Great Train Robbery.
1906 - Eugene Lauste patents a sound-on-film process in London.
1909 - George Albert Smith produced a processed two-color system using panchromatic stock in Brighton for the Charles Urban Trading Company, this was dubbed Kinemacolor. The first public presentation of Kinemacolor was in February in London, when a series of twenty short movies by the Natural Colour Kinematograph Company was shown at the Palace Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue.
1909 - the Electric Cinema on Station street, Birmingham is the oldest working Cinema in the UK and was once reputedly a haunt of George Bernard Shaw.
1910 - Wladyslaw Starewicz (Ladislas Starevich - Polish Director) - The Beautiful Lukanida - the first puppet animated film.
1912 - Universal Pictures Company is founded by Carl Laemmle in Hollywood.
1914 - Charlie Chaplin charms audiences as "The Little Tramp." Vaudeville begins to suffer from this redirected audience for entertainment, but early films soon became a new venue for many stage performers.
1917 - An estimated 3,000 cinemas in England.
1919 - United Artists Corporation is collectively formed by Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford.

1920-1929

The 1920s represented the era of greatest output in the US movie market. An average of 800 films were produced annually. While developments in color and sound were still in the experimental stage a strong demand for movies and, therefore, potential for profit, encouraged productions for commercial release.

The French model of commercial movie houses became the international model, and entrepreneurs scurried to build impressive movie houses across North America and Europe including theatres to seat up to 5,000 people. Oscar Deutsch opened his first Odeon cinema in the UK in Perry Barr in 1920. By 1930 the Odeon was a household name and still thrives today across Britain with a vast array of purpose built cinemas.

1927 saw the introduction of some early zoom lenses. These were operated with a primitive hand crank. Optical lenses were not to be perfected for another 20 years.

With many technical obstacles overcome, film as entertainment begain to blossom as an art form in the 1920s, a decade hearalded by art deco and German expressionism. Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin rose to stardom in this era, which also saw the premier of the first Walt Disney animated cartoon. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences founded in 1927 with the first "Oscar" given in 1929. The popularity of Horror movies is traced to this era with Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Abel Gance's Napoleon was one movie presented on three screens simultaneously, a hallmark of epic filmmaking and film editing that was to presage large format film projection system such as the three-projector Cinerama system of later decades.

Sound technology, both recording and playback technology, was slow in development. The 1920s would be largely dominated by silent features, often musically accompanied by an in-house organist, pianist or orchestra. Theatres would be the single largest source of employment for musicians. By the latter half of the decade, new innovations in audio, synchronized sound in the form of Vitaphone, allowed theatrical release of The Jazz Singer (1927), featuring Al Jolson. 1928 saw Disney's Steamboat Willie, the first film with entirely post-produced dialogue, sound effects and score. The first all-out Hollywood musical, The Broadway Melody, came to theatres in 1929. The demand for musicians would dry up at the onset the depression.

1922 - The Motion Picture Producers and Distributers of America is created by Will H. Hays to serve as Hollywood's public relations firm. Hays would go on to dictate the motion picture production code which attempted to define objectionable content for US audiences. Other countries would institute their own "code" systems.
1924 - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is founded by Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer.