The motion picture industry can be traced back to the 1890s, when Kennedy Laurie Dickson, the chief engineer at the Edison Laboratories, was credited with making celluloid strips containing a sequence of images that, when projected, would show movement. Thomas Edison himself developed this further, and in 1893 at the Chicagos Fair he introduced the Kinetograph, the first moving picture camera, and the Kinetoscope, which useds fi lm. The Kinetoscope spread successfully around the United States and Europe. British and European inventors did work on similar systems.
Work in Britain was pioneered by Robert William Paul and his partner Birt Acres. In France Auguste anda portable motion picture camera, fi lm processing unit, and projectorwhich quickly became one of the most manufactured items in France. Until the late 1920s the producers were unable to capture sound and synchronize it with the film, so the early films were known as silent movies, whereby the film was played and sometimes live musicians and live sound effects were used, including human voices off stage. The words of the film appeared on screen, being part of the film itself. Georges Méliès, a Paris stage magician, started shooting and exhibiting fi lms from 1896, many of his works being science fi ction, with A Trip to the Moon (1902) the fi rst fi lm to portray space travel. Gradually, there were fi lms lasting up to 15 minutes, with Edwin 252 motion picture industry S. Porter becoming an early director for Life of anmovie, The Great Train Robbery (1903). The fi rst full-length movie was The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), which was made in Australia and ran for 80 minutes. Filmed mostly at Rosanna, on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia, it told the story of the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly400 to25,000. It was shown all over Australia to packed audiences and was also shown in some places overseas. As with many fi lms, it tells the story of an event, although on many occasions it is not a reliable account of the actual historical event. Very little of the film has survived, although a large number ofwere released at the time, which, together with newspaper reviews, allow historians to analyze the film in considerable detail. It was later reissued as Ned Kelly and His Gang with some extra scenes included.
The next major films came out in Europe with Queen Elizabeth, produced in France in 1912, Quo Vadis? in Italy in 1913, and Cabiria in Italy in 1914. Soon longer fi lms started to be produced in the United States with The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), both directed by D. W. Griffith1948). In 1907 the Lafitte brothers launchedwhich were aimed at introducing wealthier people to the cinema, many of them at the time regarding films for the working class and the theater for the higher social classes.
The outbreak of World War I held up feature film production, but it did result in newsreel films beingby 1908 it was estimated that there were 10,000 of these theaters in the United States alone. After World War I Hollywood in California became the center of much of thes fi lm production, with an average output of up to 800 feature fi lms each year making up 82 percent of the total world output during the 1920s. By this time many actors and actresses were becoming famous1977),–1939), Clara Bow
1983), and Rudolf1926) all being important early film stars. Valentino became well known through films such as The Sheik (1921), Blood and Sand (1922), and Son of the Sheik (1926), and was the heartthrob of girls throughout the 1920s, with his death at the height of his popularity causing a mass outpouring of grief.
Other famous actors of the silent era were Tom Mix1940), who entered the fi lm industry in 1918, joining the Selig Company, and was said to be earningappearing in 270 films from The Trimming of Paradise Gulch (1910) until The77), who continued through the silent era into sound films. Some of these fi lms were controversial, with the British 1928 fi lm Dawn, about Edith Cavell, evoking a storm of protest in Germany. A later fi lm, Nurse Edith Cavell, was produced in 1939. Another early silent film was Ben Hur (1925), remade by M.G.M. in the 1959, ands The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1924) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Hollywood, near Los Angeles, was the base for American-produced films, the main companies including Columbia, M.G.M., Paramount, R.K.O., Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Brothers. Other famous studio locations were in Britain at Ealing, in France, in Italy, and in Germany. Indian fi lms were largely produced in Bombay.
