Filmmaking has passed through several stages on its way to mass medium status. In the following pages, we trace those stages—including development (when inventors first made pictures move), entrepreneurial (when experimenters conducted movie demonstrations for a small number of paid viewers), and finally true mass medium (when movies became widely accessible and began telling coherent stories with specific meanings for viewers). Throughout these stages, creative and bold innovators have worked together to continually advance the medium, revealing the strongly collaborative nature of this industry.

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Advances in Film Technology

The concept of film goes back as early as Leonardo da Vinci, who theorized in the late 1400s that a device could be created to reproduce reality. There were other early precursors to film as well. For example, in the 1600s, the magic lantern projected images painted on glass plates using an oil lamp as a light source. In 1824, the thaumatrope consisted of a two-sided card whose different images appeared to combine when the card was twirled. And the zoetrope, created in 1834, was a cylindrical device with slits cut into it that rapidly spun images on the inside, appearing to viewers as if the images were moving.

But the true development stage of filmmaking began when inventors discovered a process for making a series of photographs appear to move while projected on a screen.

Muybridge and Goodwin Make Pictures Move

Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer living in America, is credited with being the first person to make images move. He studied motion by using multiple cameras to take successive photographs of humans and animals in motion. By 1880, he had developed a method for projecting the photographic images on a wall for public viewing.

Meanwhile, other inventors were also capturing moving images and projecting them. In 1884, George Eastman (founder of Eastman Kodak) developed the first roll film—a huge improvement over the heavy metal-and-glass plates previously used to make individual photos. Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, a Frenchman living in England, invented the first motion-picture camera using roll film. Le Prince, who disappeared mysteriously on a train ride to Paris in 1890, is credited with filming the first motion picture, Roundhay Garden Scene, in 1888. Recorded at twelve frames per second, the film depicts several people strolling on a lawn and runs for just a few seconds.

Click on the timeline above to see the full, expanded version.

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In 1889, a New Jersey minister, Hannibal Goodwin, improved Eastman’s roll film by using thin strips of transparent, pliable material called celluloid, which could hold a coating of chemicals sensitive to light. Goodwin’s breakthrough enabled a strip of film to move through a camera and be photographed in rapid succession, producing a series of pictures.

Edison and the Brothers Lumière Create Motion Pictures

The early developers of film laid the groundwork for the shift to the entrepreneurial stage. During this stage, inventors came up with new projection and distribution technologies, enabling people to come together in a public place to view movies. The action began in the late 1800s, when American inventor and businessman Thomas Edison (with the help of his assistant, William Kennedy Dickson) combined his incandescent light bulb, Goodwin’s celluloid, and Le Prince’s camera to create another early movie camera, the kinetograph, and a single-person viewing system, the kinetoscope. This small projection system required individual viewers to look through a small hole to see images moving on a tiny plate.

Meanwhile in France, brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière developed the cinematograph—a combined camera, film development, and projection system. The projection system was particularly important, as it enabled more than one person at a time to see the moving images on a large screen.

With inventors around the world now dabbling in moving pictures, Edison continued innovating in film. He patented several inventions and manufactured a new large-screen system called the vitascope, through which longer filmstrips could be projected without interruption. This device hinted at the potential of movies as a future mass medium. Staged at a music hall in New York in April 1896, Edison’s first public showing of the vitascope featured shots from a boxing match and waves rolling onto a beach. Some members of the audience were so taken with the realism of the images that they stepped back from the screen’s crashing waves to avoid getting their feet wet.

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At this point, movies consisted of movement recorded by a single continuous camera shot. Early filmmakers had not yet figured out how to move the camera itself or how to edit film shots together. Moreover, movies’ content consisted simply of people or objects in motion, without conveying any story. Nonetheless, various innovators had spotted the commercial possibilities of film. By 1900, short movies had become a part of the entertainment industry, used as visual novelties in amusement arcades, traveling carnivals, wax museums, and vaudeville theaters.

Telling Stories: The Introduction of Narrative

With the introduction in the late 1890s of narrative films—movies that tell stories through the series of actions depicted (later matched with sound)—the industry advanced from the entrepreneurial stage to mass medium status. And film promised to offer a far richer experience than other storytelling media—specifically, books and radio. Unlike those media, narrative films provided realistic moving images and compelling stories in which viewers became so immersed that they sometimes forgot they were watching a fictional representation.

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Some of the earliest narrative films (which were silent) were produced and directed by French magician and inventor Georges Méliès, who opened the first public movie theater in France in 1896. Méliès began producing short fantasy and fairy-tale films, including The Vanishing Lady (1896), Cinderella (1899), and A Trip to the Moon (1902). He increasingly used editing and unique camera tricks and techniques, such as slow motion and cartoon animation, which would become key ingredients in future narrative filmmaking.

The first American filmmaker to adapt Méliès’s innovations to narrative film was Edwin S. Porter. Porter shot narrative scenes out of order (for instance, some in a studio and some outdoors) and reassembled, or edited, them to tell a story. In 1902, he made what is regarded as America’s first narrative film, The Life of an American Fireman, which included the first recorded close-up. Porter also introduced the western genre and the first chase scene in The Great Train Robbery (1903).

The Arrival of Nickelodeons

Another turning point in film’s development as a mass medium was the 1907 arrival of nickelodeons—a type of movie theater whose name combines the admission price (five cents) with the Greek word for “theater.” According to media historian Douglas Gomery, these small and uncomfortable makeshift theaters often consisted of converted storefronts redecorated to mimic vaudeville theaters.² Nickelodeons showed silent films, which typically transcended language barriers and provided workers and immigrants with an inexpensive escape from the challenges of urban life. Not surprisingly, nickelodeons flourished during the great European immigration at the dawn of the twentieth century. Between 1907 and 1909, the number of nickelodeons in the United States skyrocketed from five thousand to ten thousand. The craze peaked by 1910, when entrepreneurs began seeking more affluent spectators, attracting them with larger and more lavish movie theaters.

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