Honestly, when most people think about the birth of cinema, they imagine a bunch of guys in top hats sitting in a dark room in Paris. They think of the Lumière brothers and that train that supposedly made everyone scream and run away. But movie history of the world part 1 is a lot messier than that. It wasn't some "eureka" moment where one guy woke up and decided to project The Avengers. It was a gritty, competitive, and often litigious race involving stage magicians, eccentric wealthy inventors, and people who literally just wanted to study how horses gallop.
The story starts way before the 1890s. If we’re being real, humans have been obsessed with "moving pictures" since we were painting flickering bison on cave walls by firelight. But the technical leap—the moment things got serious—happened because of a bet.
The Galloping Horse and the 12-Camera Hack
In 1872, Leland Stanford, a former governor of California, had a hunch. He believed that when a horse gallops, all four hooves leave the ground at the same time. People thought he was crazy. To prove it, he hired Eadweard Muybridge.
Muybridge was a character. He eventually murdered his wife's lover (and got off on a plea of justifiable homicide), but before that drama, he set up 12 cameras along a racetrack. He used tripwires. As the horse ran past, it triggered the shutters one by one. The result was a series of still images that, when flipped through quickly, showed the truth: the hooves do leave the ground, but they tuck under the horse, they don't sprawl out like a rocking horse. This wasn't a "movie" yet, but it proved that captured time could be reconstructed into motion.
This sparked a global obsession. Over in France, Étienne-Jules Marey was doing similar things but with a "photographic gun." Imagine a rifle that took 12 frames per second on a rotating glass plate. He used it to study birds. It’s kinda poetic that the first "shots" fired in the history of cinema were literally from something shaped like a weapon.
Edison, Dickson, and the Peephole Problem
By the late 1880s, Thomas Edison smelled money. But here’s the thing: Edison wasn't the "inventor" of movies in the way his PR team claimed. He was the boss. The heavy lifting was done by an Englishman named William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson.
Dickson was the one who actually figured out how to use celluloid film—the flexible stuff developed by George Eastman of Kodak—and punch holes in the sides so gears could pull it through a camera smoothly. They called their machine the Kinetograph.
But Edison made a weird strategic mistake. He didn't think people wanted to watch movies on a big screen together. He thought the real profit was in the Kinetoscope—a heavy wooden box where one person at a time paid a nickel to peer through a hole at a tiny, flickering loop of film.
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Basically, the first "movie theaters" were Kinetoscope parlors. They were like the arcades of the 1890s. You’d go in, drop a coin, and watch 30 seconds of a guy sneezing or a lady dancing. It was voyeuristic. It was private. And it was almost the end of the road for the industry before it even started.
The Lumières and the Birth of the Audience
While Edison was trying to keep movies in a box, Auguste and Louis Lumière in Lyon, France, were thinking bigger. They developed the Cinématographe. This thing was a marvel of engineering because it was three things in one: a camera, a printer, and a projector.
Because it was hand-cranked and lightweight, they could take it outside. They weren't stuck in a studio like Edison’s "Black Maria" (a weird, rotating building covered in black tar paper).
On December 28, 1895, at the Grand Café in Paris, they held the first commercial public screening. This is the date most historians point to as the true beginning of movie history of the world part 1. They showed Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. It sounds boring, right? It was. It was just people walking out of a building. But to an audience that had only ever seen static photos or paintings, it was a miracle.
The legend about the train (L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat) making people faint is probably a myth cooked up later for publicity, but the impact was real. The Lumières sent "cinematographers" all over the globe. They went to Russia, Japan, and Egypt, filming "Actualités"—early documentaries. They captured the world for the first time, and for a few years, they dominated.
Magicians and the Invention of Fiction
Early movies were just "stuff happening." A baby eating breakfast. A boat docking. Then came Georges Méliès.
Méliès was a professional magician who ran a theater in Paris. He saw the Lumière camera and wanted to buy it. They said no. They told him the "cinema is an invention without any commercial future." Talk about a bad take.
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Méliès eventually got a camera elsewhere and discovered something by accident. One day, his camera jammed while he was filming a bus. When he cleared the jam and started filming again, a hearse happened to be in the same spot. When he played the film back, the bus appeared to magically turn into a hearse.
Stop-motion was born.
He went nuts with this. He built a glass-walled studio and started making "trick films." His most famous work, A Trip to the Moon (1902), is iconic. You've seen the image—the moon with a rocket stuck in its eye. He used hand-painted color, elaborate sets, and multiple exposures. He proved that movies weren't just for recording reality; they were for dreaming.
The Great Train Robbery and the Move to Narrative
Back in America, a guy named Edwin S. Porter was watching what Méliès was doing and decided to take it further. In 1903, he made The Great Train Robbery.
This was a game-changer for a few reasons. First, it used "cross-cutting." It showed two things happening at the same time in different places. This seems obvious now, but at the time, it was a radical way to tell a story.
Second, it was a Western. It gave people action, crime, and a shocking ending where a bandit fires his gun directly at the camera. Audiences lost their minds. It proved that people wanted stories, not just 50-second clips of someone's cat.
Why Hollywood Didn't Exist Yet
During this first part of movie history, the center of the film world wasn't California. It was New Jersey and New York. Or Paris. Or London.
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Hollywood only became a thing because Thomas Edison was a litigious nightmare. He formed the Motion Picture Patents Company (the "Trust"). If you wanted to make a movie, you had to pay him. If you didn't, he’d send goons to smash your cameras.
Independent filmmakers fled. They went as far away from Edison’s lawyers as possible. They ended up in Southern California because the weather was good for year-round filming, the landscape was diverse (mountains, desert, ocean), and it was close to the Mexican border. If a process server showed up with a lawsuit, the directors could literally run across the border and hide.
The Evolution of the "Language" of Film
Between 1905 and 1912, the industry moved from "Nickelodeons" (small, dirty storefront theaters) to more respectable venues. But the art form was still primitive.
For a long time, the camera stayed still. It acted like a person sitting in the front row of a play. There were no close-ups. If a character was sad, you saw their whole body standing ten feet away.
D.W. Griffith is a controversial figure—rightly so, given the blatant racism of his later work like The Birth of a Nation—but from a purely technical standpoint, he helped codify the "grammar" of movies. He started moving the camera. He used the "close-up" to show emotion. He used the "long shot" for scale.
By the time 1914 rolled around and World War I began, the foundation was set. We had shifted from a scientific curiosity to a global industry.
Key Takeaways from the Early Era
It's easy to look back at these flickery, silent clips and think they're cute. But the people making them were pioneers in a wild west environment. There were no rules.
- The technology preceded the art. We had cameras for nearly 15 years before we figured out how to use them to tell a sophisticated story.
- Patents shaped geography. Hollywood exists because of a legal fight over who owned the rights to use a sprocket hole.
- Globalism was there from Day 1. The Lumières were showing films in Mumbai and Mexico City before most Americans had even seen a "moving picture."
What to Do Next
If you want to actually understand movie history of the world part 1 beyond just reading about it, you have to see it. Most of these films are in the public domain and available on YouTube or through the National Film Registry.
- Watch "A Trip to the Moon" (1902). Don't watch a clip. Watch the whole 13 minutes. Look for the "dissolves" and how Méliès uses the frame.
- Compare a Lumière film to an Edison film. Notice how the French films are mostly "outdoors/real life" while the American ones feel like "staged vaudeville."
- Look up the "Brighton School." Everyone talks about France and the US, but British filmmakers like George Albert Smith were actually the ones who invented things like the "POV shot" and the first "continuity" edits.
- Visit a local independent theater. Many still run "silent film nights" with live organ accompaniment. Seeing these films with a crowd, the way they were intended, changes the experience entirely.
The silent era wasn't just "movies without sound." It was a completely different visual language that we’ve mostly forgotten how to speak. Studying this period isn't just a history lesson; it's a look at how humans learned to see the world through a lens for the very first time.