Top Ten Cinema Firsts - The Early Years

You may be able to name the first ever film to screen to the public but do you know which was the world's first cinema hit? Which was the first film that made Chaplin the world's first superstar? And was Cinemascope really the first widescreen image? Find out all this and more as Making Movies compiles a Top Ten of film pioneers...

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1. Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory, 1895: Louis and Auguste Lumiere

Before 1895, the only moving images could be seen in magic lanterns and zoetropes. However, Frenchmen Louis and Auguste Lumiere were born to a father with a photographic shop, who nurtured in them a keen interest in the development of moving pictures. Fitting their patented cinematographe camera with a projector lens, the Lumiere brothers projected the first motion picture for the public in the basement lounge of the Grand Caf&eactute; on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, November 1895. The programme featured around ten short films, comprising of scenes of everyday life, including a train pulling into a station, which reputedly had audiences diving for cover. Praise was heaped on the brothers' exciting new invention, but they remained sceptical, famously dismissing cinema as a medium 'without a future' because they could not envisage long term public interest in watching scenes of everyday life on a screen when they could see it on the streets for free.

2. The Great Train Robbery, 1903: Edwin S Porter

Convinced that public interest in the single shot films of everyday life would soon wane, travelling projectionist Edwin S Porter was determined to push the medium forward with a longer film that told an exciting story - and reap the financial rewards. Thus The Great Train Robbery was born. In addition to shifts in location, the camera was placed in new and innovative positions - film critics point to a crucial shot of a man running from a robber and falling dead in front of the camera as a landmark moment in cinema realism, a shot that must have had an electrifying effect on audiences of the time. Train Robbery was a hit beyond Porter's wildest dreams; it became the success of the decade and the first worldwide hit. Three years after it was released, Porter's stomping ground of vaudeville houses and fairgrounds were already feeling the impact of his innovation, as their leaseholders converted them into permanent cinema screens.

Next page • Birth Of A Nation, 1915: D.W. Griffith