It's official, I've run out of movies to watch. Well, not really, but it's come to the point that I'm going to just start over from the very beginning.
My quest is to watch the classics (and not so classics, and some anti-classics) in order of the year that they were released, starting with the dawn of film.
The first movies were made by Eadweard Muybridge in the mid 1880s. His technique was really just a series of photographs that gave a loose appearence of motion. You could say that these movies had a frame rate of 1 frame per second. Among the first movies were of naked women performaing various acts like walking up stairs, putting a vase on the floor and hopping on one foot. Brilliant!
It wasn't until the early 1890s when Edison (or W.K.L. Dickson who worked in Edison's lab) created the kinetoscope that creating movies became practical and profitable. In 1893, Edison built the world's first mvoie studio called The Black Maria. In this studio, W.K.L.Dickson would direct many short films, mostly lasting about 5 or 6 seconds.
These films included a woman performing a belly-dance, Sandow ("The World's Strong Man") posing, Annie Duke demostrating her sharpshooting, various comedy routines, Native Americans performaing dances, boxing matches, etc.
In fact, one of the earliest "scandels" was the fact that boxing was illegal in most states, including New Jersey where the Black Maria was location. The film of Jim Corbett vs. Peter Courtney was documented proof that Edison staged a boxing match. However, he simply claimed that it wasn't really a boxing match and it was just a demostration. Because of Edison's popularity, he got away with it. The first "Hollwood Star" to escape the law.
As you can see, the entire movie industry is founded on the stuff that people complain are happening "now". Sex, violence, people inside the industry breaking laws and the authorites allowing them to get away with it. The early success of the industry was founded on these things.
In France, the movie inustry was taking off as well, in a similar mold (shooting shorts). Inspired by Edison's work, the Lumiere Brothers built their own version of the kinetoscope. They called it the cinematographe. Over the next few years, many other people would create their own offshoots of the kinetoscope, but none of them caught on.
It took a magician to really take movies from simply filming people doing various acts to the use of special effects. His name was George Melies, a magician from France. He had seen a demostration of the Lumeire Brothers and wanted to buy one of their cameras, but they refused. So, he had to build his own, a variation of a different camera and projector and created Europe's first movie studio in 1897. He would go on to create over 500 shorts films in this studio that he would show in his magic theater. Very few of the films have survived, unfortunately.
In the early 1900s, a director in the US named Edward S. Porter, and the French magician George Melies, would start creating longer stories. The public was growing bored with the shorts and wanted more in ways of story telling, and both Porter and Melies predicted that it would happen. Exhibitors in the US would oftan take shorts and put them together to try and tell a story. So Porter decided to do that from the start, and in France, Melies did the same.
And that is where our journey begins...