Early Cinema 1895–1915

The earliest films in this Reel are shorter than a modern advertisement. Newark Athlete (1891) and Blacksmith Scene (1893) were shot at Edison's laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey by W. K. L. Dickson (the second in the new "Black Maria" studio), who also made the Dickson Experimental Sound Film (c. 1894), the first attempt to synchronise picture and sound, with Dickson playing violin into a phonograph horn. The Lumière brothers' Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) and Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) turned the same technology into public exhibition; The Kiss (1896) and Rip Van Winkle (1896) show Edison's company discovering stars and stories.

Georges Méliès, a Paris magician, discovered that a jammed camera could make things vanish. The Haunted Castle (1896) is often called the first horror film; A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904) are the foundation of science-fiction cinema. Alice Guy, a secretary at Gaumont, directed The Cabbage Fairy in 1896 and became the first woman filmmaker; J. Stuart Blackton's The Enchanted Drawing (1900) is the earliest surviving film with animated sequences.

In the United States Edwin S. Porter's Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery (both 1903) invented cross-cutting and the chase. The same year the Edison company filmed Electrocuting an Elephant, the killing of Topsy at Coney Island, included here because it is a document and not because it is entertainment. Actuality films — President McKinley's inauguration (1901), Westinghouse Works (1904), a ride through the Interior N.Y. Subway (1905), A Trip Down Market Street (1906) shot from a cable car days before the earthquake, and the San Francisco Earthquake aftermath itself — are the surviving record of a country that was not otherwise filmed.

D. W. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat (1909) shows the Biograph one-reeler turning into social drama; Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908), the first fully animated film, and Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), the first animated character with a personality, close the Reel.

Everything here is in the public domain everywhere; most of the titles are on the U.S. National Film Registry, and many survive only because they were deposited at the Library of Congress as paper prints.