The history of film chronicles the artistic and cultural development of a visual art form that uses film technologies that began in the late 19th century, influenced by the existing screen culture of magic lantern shows, and by traditions in photography, theater, and other popular media. The advent of film as an artistic medium is not clearly defined. There were moving picture screenings long before the commercial, public screening of ten Lumière brothers' short films in Paris on 28 December 1895, which has generally been regarded as the breakthrough of projected cinematographic motion pictures. The earliest films were typically in black and white, under a minute long, without recorded sound, and consisted of a single shot from a steady camera. The first decades saw film move from a novelty, to an established mass entertainment industry, with film production companies and studios established throughout the world. Conventions toward a general cinematic language developed, with film editing, camera movements and other cinematic techniques contributing specific roles in the narrative of films. Popular new media, including television (mainstream since the 1950s), home video (1980s), and the internet (1990s), influenced the distribution and consumption of films. Film production usually responded with content to fit the new media, technical innovations (including widescreen (1950s), 3D, and 4D film), and more spectacular films to keep theatrical screenings attractive. Systems that were cheaper and more easily handled (including 8mm film, video, and smartphone cameras) allowed for an increasing number of people to create films of varying qualities, for any purpose including home movies and video art, outside the conventions of the production systems of big studios. The technical quality tended to be lower than professional movies, but improved with digital video and affordable, high-quality digital cameras. Improving over time, digital production methods became more popular during the 1990s, resulting in increasingly realistic visual effects and popular feature-length computer animations. Various film genres have emerged during the history of film, and enjoyed variable degrees of success.
Precursors
The use of film as an art form traces its origins to several earlier traditions in the arts such as (oral) storytelling, literature, theatre, opera, and visual arts. Cantastoria and similar ancient traditions combined storytelling with series of images that were shown or indicated one after the other. Predecessors to film that had already used light and shadows to create art before the advent of modern film technology include shadowgraphy, shadow puppetry, camera obscura, and the magic lantern. Around 1790, old traditions of charlatans and entertainers using camera obscura or magic lantern to project images of demons or ghosts were further developed into a type of multimedia show known as phantasmagoria. These popular shows entertained audiences using mechanical slides, rear projection, mobile projectors, superimposition, dissolves, live actors, smoke (on which projections may have been cast), odors, sounds and even electric shocks. While the earliest magic lantern shows were often designed to frighten viewers, advances by projectionists allowed for creative and even educational storytelling that could appeal to wider family audiences. New magic lantern techniques such as the use of dissolving views allowed for smoother transitions between two projected images and aided in providing stronger narratives, while chromatropes provided colourful animations of intricate abstract patterns. In 1833, scientific study of a stroboscopic illusion in spoked wheels by Joseph Plateau, Michael Faraday and Simon Stampfer led to the invention of the Fantascope, also known as the stroboscopic disk or the phenakistiscope, which was popular in several European countries for a while. Plateau thought it could be further developed for use in phantasmagoria and Stampfer imagined a system for longer scenes with strips on rollers, as well as a transparent version (probably intended for projection). Plateau, Charles Wheatstone, Antoine Claudet and others tried to combine the technique with the stereoscope (introduced in 1838) and photography (introduced in 1839) for a more complete illusion of reality, but until innovations in photo-sensitive chemicals and technologies to exchange the pictures allowed sharp recordings of sequences, such experiments relied on stop motion techniques to depict simple periodic movements.
With the 1878 publication of The Horse in Motion cabinet cards, Eadweard Muybridge introduced a method to record motion sequences that became known as chronophotography. Muybridge and later chronophotographers, like Étienne-Jules Marey, Georges Demenÿ, Albert Londe, and Ottomar Anschütz, almost exclusively used the technique for scientific study of locomotion of animals and humans. In 1880, Muybridge started lecturing on animal locomotion and used his Zoopraxiscope to project animations of the contours of his recordings, traced onto glass discs. In 1887, Anschütz started presenting his chronophotographic recordings in motion with his Electrotachyscope, displaying short loops on a small milk glass screen. By 1891, he had started mass production of a more economical, coin-operated peep-box viewing device of the same name that was exhibited at international exhibitions and fairs, including the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, or for longer periods at for instance the Berlin Exhibition Park (with nearly 34,000 paying visitors in summer 1892), at The Crystal Palace in London, and in several U.S. stores. Shifting the focus of the medium from technical and scientific interest in motion to entertainment for the masses, he recorded wrestlers, dancers, acrobats, scenes of everyday life, and probably some staged comical sequences. Extant records suggest some of his output directly influenced later works by the Edison Company, such as the 1894 film Fred Ott's Sneeze. From October 1892 to March 1900, inventor Émile Reynaud exhibited his Théâtre Optique ("Optical Theatre") film system at the Musée Grévin in Paris. Reynaud's screenings of animated stories such as Pauvre Pierrot and Autour d'une cabine were accompanied by live music, songs and some synchronised sound effects, and attracted over 500,000 visitors over the course of 12,800 shows. Edison's Kinetoscope peep-box viewer, mostly developed by lab assistant William Kennedy Dickson, was introduced to the public in 1893, with images on celluloid loops showing about half a minute of motion picture entertainment, mostly performed by well-known vaudeville acts in the company's Black Maria studio. The Kinetoscope quickly became a global sensation with multiple viewing parlors across major cities by 1895. As the initial novelty of the images wore off, the Edison Company was slow to diversify their repertoire of films and waning public interest caused business to slow by Spring 1895. To remedy declining profits, experiments, such as The Dickson Experimental Sound Film, were conducted in an attempt to achieve Edison's original goal of combining the phonograph with visual recordings. Limitations in syncing the sound to the visuals, however, prevented widespread application. During that same period, inventors began advancing technologies towards film projection that would eventually overtake Edison's peep-box format. On 25, 29 and 30 November 1894, Anschütz projected moving images from Electrotachyscope discs on a large screen in the darkened Grand Auditorium of a Post Office Building in Berlin. From 22 February to 30 March 1895, a commercial 1.5-hour program of 40 different scenes was screened for audiences of 300 people at the old Reichstag and received circa 4,000 visitors.
Novelty era (1890s – early 1900s)
Early projection
Throughout the late 19th century, several inventors such as Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Louis Le Prince, William Friese-Greene, and the Skladanowsky brothers developed devices that could capture and project moving images. The scenes in these experiments primarily served to demonstrate the technology itself and were usually filmed with family, friends or passing traffic as subjects.
Cinema as it is commonly known today was invented in Lyon by Auguste and Louis Lumière. On December 26, 1894 a Lyon républicain article has reported that Lumière brothers were working on the creation of a new kinetograph. The patent for their new invention the "cinematograph" has been filed on February 13, 1895 at INPI, and later on March 22 the brothers gave their first public screening in Paris. The first ever commercial screening took place on December 28, 1895, it consisted of ten films and lasted roughly 20 minutes. The program consisted mainly of actuality films such as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory as truthful documents of the world, but the show also included the staged comedy L'Arroseur Arrosé. The most advanced demonstration of film projection thus far, the Cinématographe was an instant success, bringing in an average of 2,500 to 3,000 francs daily by the end of January 1896. Following the first screening, the order and selection of films were changed often.
The Lumière brothers' primary business interests were in selling cameras and film equipment to exhibitors, not the actual production of films. Despite this, filmmakers across the world were inspired by the potential of film as exhibitors brought their shows to new countries. This era of filmmaking, dubbed by film historian Tom Gunning as "the cinema of attractions", offered a relatively cheap and simple way of providing entertainment to the masses. Rather than focusing on stories, Gunning argues, filmmakers mainly relied on the ability to delight audiences through the "illusory power" of viewing sequences in motion, much as they did in the Kinetoscope era that preceded it. Despite this, early experimentation with fiction filmmaking (both in actuality film and other genres) did occur. Films were mostly screened inside temporary storefront spaces, in tents of traveling exhibitors at fairs, or as "dumb" acts in vaudeville programs. During this period, before the process of post-production was clearly defined, exhibitors were allowed to exercise their creative freedom in their presentations. To enhance the viewers' experience, some showings were accompanied by live musicians in an orchestra, a theatre organ, live sound effects and commentary spoken by the showman or projectionist.
Experiments in film editing, special effects, narrative construction, and camera movement during this period by filmmakers in France, England, and the United States became influential in establishing an identity for film going forward. At both the Edison and Lumière studios, loose narratives such as the 1895 Edison film, Washday Troubles, established short relationship dynamics and simple storylines. In 1896, La Fée aux Choux (The Fairy of the Cabbages) was first released. Directed and edited by Alice Guy, the story is arguably the earliest narrative film in history, as well as the first film to be directed by a woman. That same year, the Edison Manufacturing Company released The May Irwin Kiss in May to widespread financial success. The film, which featured the first kiss in cinematic history, led to the earliest known calls for film censorship. Another early film producer was Australia's Limelight Department. Commencing in 1898, it was operated by The Salvation Army in Melbourne, Australia. The Limelight Department produced evangelistic material for use by the Salvation Army, including lantern slides as early as 1891, as well as private and government contracts. In its nineteen years of operation, the Limelight Department produced about 300 films of various lengths, making it one of largest film producers of its time. The Limelight Department made a 1904 film by Joseph Perry called Bushranging in North Queensland, which is believed to be the first ever film about bushrangers.
Proliferation of actualities and newsreels
In its infancy, film was rarely recognized as an art form by presenters or audiences. Regarded by the upper class as a "vulgar" and "lowbrow" form of cheap entertainment, films largely appealed to the working class and were often too short to hold any strong narrative potential. Initial advertisements promoted the technologies used to screen films rather than the films themselves. As the devices became more familiar to audiences, their potential for capturing and recreating events was exploited primarily in the form of newsreels and actualities. During the creation of these films, cinematographers often drew upon aesthetic values established by past art forms such as framing and the intentional placement of the camera in the composition of their image. In a 1955 article for The Quarterly of Film Radio and television, film producer and historian Kenneth Macgowan asserted that the intentional staging and recreation of events for newsreels "brought storytelling to the screen". With the advertisement of film technologies over content, actualities initially began as a "series of views" that often contained shots of beautiful and lively places or performance acts. Following the success of their 1895 screening, The Lumière brothers established a company and sent cameramen across the world to capture new subjects for presentation. After the cinematographer shot scenes, they often exhibited their recordings locally and then sent them back to the company factory in Lyon to make duplicate prints for sale to whoever wanted them. In the process of filming actualities, especially those of real events, filmmakers discovered and experimented with multiple camera techniques to accommodate for their unpredictable nature. Due to the short length (often only one shot) of many actualities, catalogue records indicate that production companies marketed to exhibitors by promoting multiple actualities with related subject matters that could be purchased to complement each other. Exhibitors who bought the films often presented them in a program and would provide spoken accompaniment to explain the action on screen to audiences. The first paying audience for a motion picture gathered at Madison Square Garden to see a staged actuality that purported itself to be a boxing fight filmed by Woodville Latham using a device called the Eidoloscope on May 20, 1895. Commissioned by Latham, the French inventor Eugene Augustin Lauste created the device with additional expertise from William Kennedy Dickson and crafted a mechanism that came to be known as the Latham loop, which allowed for longer continuous runtimes and was less abrasive on the celluloid film. In subsequent years, screenings of actualities and newsreels proved to be profitable. In 1897, The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight was released. The film was a complete recording of a heavyweight world championship boxing match at Carson City, Nevada. It generated more income in box office than in live gate receipts and was the longest film produced at the time. Audiences had probably been drawn to the Corbett-Fitzsimmons film en masse because James J. Corbett (a.k.a. Gentleman Jim) had become a matinee idol since he had played a fictionalized version of himself in a stage play. From 1910 on, regular newsreels were exhibited and soon became a popular way of discovering the news before the advent of television – the British Antarctic Expedition to the South Pole was filmed for the newsreels as were the suffragette demonstrations that were happening at the same time. F. Percy Smith was an early nature documentary pioneer working for Charles Urban when he pioneered the use of time lapse and micro cinematography in his 1910 documentary on the growth of flowers.
Experimentation with narrative filmmaking
France: Georges Méliès, Pathé Frères, Gaumont
Following the successful exhibition of the Cinématographe, development of a motion picture industry rapidly accelerated in France. Multiple filmmakers experimented with the technology as they worked to attain the same success that the Lumière brothers had with their screening. These filmmakers established new companies such as the Star Film Company, Pathé Frères, and Gaumont. The most widely cited progenitor of narrative filmmaking is the French filmmaker, Georges Méliès. Méliès was an illusionist who had previously used magic lantern projections to enhance his magic act. In 1895, Méliès attended the demonstration of the Cinematographe and recognized the potential of the device to aid his act. He attempted to buy a device from the Lumière brothers, but they refused. Months later, he bought a camera from Robert W. Paul and began experiments with the device by creating actualities. During this period of experimentation, Méliès discovered and implemented various special effects including the stop trick, the multiple exposure, and the use of dissolves in his films. At the end of 1896, Méliès established the Star Film Company and started producing, directing, and distributing a body of work that would eventually contain over 500 short films. Recognizing the narrative potential afforded by combining his theater background with the newly discovered effects for the camera, Méliès designed an elaborate stage that contained trapdoors and a fly system. The stage construction and editing techniques allowed for the development of more complex stories, such as the 1896 film, Le Manoir du Diable (The House of the Devil), regarded as a first in the horror film genre, and the 1899 film Cendrillon (Cinderella). In Méliès' films, he based the placement of the camera on the theatrical construct of proscenium framing, the metaphorical plane or fourth wall that divides the actors and the audience. Throughout his career, Méliès consistently placed the camera in a fixed position and eventually fell out of favor with audiences as other filmmakers experimented with more complex and creative techniques. Méliès is most widely known today for his 1902 film, Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon), where he used his expertise in effects and narrative construction to create the first science fiction film. In 1900, Charles Pathé began film production under the Pathé-Frères brand, with Ferdinand Zecca hired to lead the creative process. Prior to this focus on production, Pathé had become involved with the industry by exhibiting and selling what were likely counterfeit versions of the Kinetoscope in his phonograph shop. With the creative leadership of Zecca and the capability to mass-produce copies of the films through a partnership with a French toolmaking company, Charles Pathé sought to make Pathé-Frères the leading film producer in the country. Within the next few years, Pathé-Frères became the largest film studio in the world, with satellite offices in major cities and an expanding selection of films available for presentation. The company's films were varied in content, with directors specializing in various genres for fairground presentations throughout the early 1900s. Gaumont was the main regional rival of Pathé-Frères. Founded in 1895 by Léon Gaumont, the firm initially sold photographic equipment and began film production in 1897, under the direction of Alice Guy, the industry's first female director. Her earlier films share many characteristics and themes with her contemporary competitors, such as the Lumières and Méliès. She explored dance and travel films, often combining the two, such as Le Boléro performed by Miss Saharet (1905) and Tango (1905). Many of Guy's early dance films were popular in music-hall attractions such as the serpentine dance films – also a staple of the Lumières and Thomas Edison film catalogs. In 1906, she made The Life of Christ, a big-budget production for the time, which included 300 extras.
Germany: Oskar Messter
German inventor and film tycoon Oskar Messter was an important figure in the early years of cinema. His firm Messter Film was one of the dominant German producers before the rise of UFA, with which it merged eventually. Messter first added a Geneva drive on the projectors to oscillatingly cause intermittent movement to advance the frames of the film and he set up the first film studio in Germany in 1900. From 1896, Messter was interested in the search of a method of reproduction and synchronization of the sound effects of the cinematographic performance at the time of the silent movies. So Messter invented the Tonbilder Biophon to show films, in which a gramophone played Unter den Linden accompanying the projection of animated images, but it was not a simple add on but to precisely match the series of musical pieces with moving images. In effect, to add sound to the silent cinema, it was necessary to solve problems of synchronization, since the image and the sound were recorded and reproduced by separated devices, which were difficult to initiate and to maintain rigged. On August 31, 1903, Messter held the first sound projection that took place in Germany at the "Apollo" Theater in Berlin.
England: Robert W Paul, Cecil Hepworth, The Brighton School Both Cecil Hepworth and Robert W. Paul experimented with the use of different camera techniques in their films. Paul's 'Cinematograph Camera No. 1' of 1895 was the first camera to feature reverse-cranking, which allowed the same film footage to be exposed several times, thereby creating multiple exposures. This technique was first used in his 1901 film Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost. Both filmmakers experimented with the speeds of the camera to generate new effects. Paul shot scenes from On a Runaway Motor Car through Piccadilly Circus (1899) by cranking the camera apparatus very slowly. When the film was projected at the usual 16 frames per second, the scenery appeared to be passing at great speed. Hepworth used the opposite effect in The Indian Chief and the Seidlitz Powder (1901). The Chief's movements are sped up by cranking the camera much faster than 16 frames per second, producing what modern audiences would call a "slow motion" effect. The first films to move from single shots to successive scenes began around the turn of the 20th century. Due to the loss of many early films, a conclusive shift from static singular shots to a series of scenes can be hard to determine. Despite these limitations, Michael Brooke of the British Film Institute attributes real film continuity, involving action moving from one sequence into another, to Robert W. Paul's 1898 film, Come Along, Do!. Only a still from the second shot remains extant today. Released in 1901, the British film Attack on a China Mission was one of the first films to show a continuity of action across multiple scenes. The use of the intertitle to explain actions and dialogue on screen began in the early 1900s. Filmed intertitles were first used in Robert W. Paul's film, Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost. In most countries, intertitles gradually came to be used to provide dialogue and narration for the film, thus dispensing the need for narration provided by exhibitors. Development of continuous action across multiple shots was furthered in England by a loosely associated group of film pioneers collectively termed "the Brighton School". These filmmakers included George Albert Smith and James Williamson, among others. Smith and Williamson experimented with action continuity and were likely the first to incorporate the use of inserts and close-ups between shots. A basic technique for trick cinematography was the double exposure of the film in the camera. The effect was pioneered by Smith in the 1898 film, Photographing a Ghost. According to Smith's catalogue records, the (now lost) film chronicles a photographer's struggle to capture a ghost on camera. Using the double exposure of the film, Smith overlaid a transparent ghostly figure onto the background in a comical manner to taunt the photographer. Smith's The Corsican Brothers was described in the catalogue of the Warwick Trading Company in 1900: "By extremely careful photography the ghost appears *quite transparent*. After indicating that he has been killed by a sword-thrust, and appealing for vengeance, he disappears. A 'vision' then appears showing the fatal duel in the snow." Smith also initiated the special effects technique of reverse motion. He did this by repeating the action a second time, while filming it with an inverted camera, and then joining the tail of the second negative to that of the first. The first films made using this device were Tipsy, Topsy, Turvy and The Awkward Sign Painter. The earliest surviving example of this technique is Smith's The House That Jack Built, made before September 1900. Cecil Hepworth took this technique further by printing the negatives of the forward motion in reverse frame by frame, producing a print in which the original action was exactly reversed. To do this he built a special printer in which the negative running through a projector was projected into the gate of a camera through a special lens giving a same-size image. This arrangement came to be called a "projection printer", and eventually an "optical printer".
In 1898, George Albert Smith experimented with close-ups, filming shots of a man drinking beer and a woman using sniffing tobacco. The following year, Smith made The Kiss in the Tunnel, a sequence consisting of three shots: a train enters a tunnel; a man and a woman exchange a brief kiss in the darkness and then return to their seats; the train exits the tunnel. Smith created the scenario in response to the success of a genre known as a phantom ride. In a phantom ride film, cameras would capture the motion and surroundings from the front of a moving train. The separate shots, when edited together, formed a distinct sequence of events and established causality from one shot to the next. Following The Kiss in the Tunnel, Smith more definitively experimented with continuity of action across successive shots and began using inserts in his films, such as Grandma's Reading Glass and Mary Jane's Mishap. In 1900, Smith made As Seen Through a Telescope. The main shot shows a street scene with a young man tying the shoelace and then caressing the foot of his girlfriend, while an old man observes this through a telescope. There is then a cut to close shot of the hands on the girl's foot shown inside a black circular mask, and then a cut back to the continuation of the original scene. James Williamson perfected narrative building techniques in his 1900 film, Attack on a China Mission. The film, which film historian John Barnes later described as having "the most fully developed narrative of any film made in England up to that time", opens as the first shot shows Chinese Boxer rebels at the gate; it then cuts to the missionary family in the garden, where a fight ensues. The wife signals to British sailors from the balcony, who come and rescue them. The film also used the first "reverse angle" cut in film history. The following year, Williamson created The Big Swallow. In the film. a man becomes irritated by the presence of the filmmaker and "swallows" the camera and its operator through the use of interpolated close-up shots. He combined these effects, along with superimpositions, use of wipe transitions to denote a scene change, and other techniques to create a film language, or "film grammar". James Williamson's use of continuous action in his 1901 film, Stop Thief! stimulated a film genre known as the "chase film." In the film, a tramp steals a leg of mutton from a butcher's boy in the first shot, is chased by the butcher's boy and assorted dogs in the following shot, and is finally caught by the dogs in the third shot.
United States: The Edison Company and Edwin S. Porter
The Execution of Mary Stuart, produced in 1895 by the Edison Company for viewing with the Kinetoscope, showed Mary Queen of Scots being executed in full view of the camera. The effect, known as the stop trick, was achieved by replacing the actor with a dummy for the final shot. The technique used in the film is seen as one of the earliest known uses of special effects in film. The American filmmaker Edwin S. Porter started making films for the Edison Company in 1901. A former projectionist hired by Thomas Edison to develop his new projection model known as the Vitascope, Porter was inspired in part by the works of Méliès, Smith, and Williamson and drew upon their newly crafted techniques to further the development of continuous narrative through editing. When he began making longer films in 1902, he put a dissolve between every shot, just as Georges Méliès was already doing, and he frequently had the same action repeated across the dissolves. In 1902, Porter shot Life of an American Fireman for the Edison Manufacturing Company and distributed the film the following year. In the film, Porter combined stock footage from previous Edison films with newly shot footage and spliced them together to convey a dramatic story of the rescue of a woman and her child by heroic firemen. Porter's film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), had a running time of twelve minutes, with twenty separate shots and ten different indoor and outdoor locations. The film is seen as a first in the Western film genre and is significant for the use of shots suggesting simultaneous action occurring at different locations. Porter's use of both staged and real outdoor environments helped to create a sense of space while the placement of the camera in a wider shot established depth and allowed for an extended duration of motion on screen. The Great Train Robbery served as one of the vehicles that would launch the film medium into mass popularity. That same year, the Miles Brothers opened the first film exchange in the country, which allowed permanent exhibitors to rent films from the company at a lower cost than the producers that sold their films outright. John P. Harris opened the first permanent theater devoted exclusively to the presentation of films, the nickelodeon, in 1905 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The idea rapidly took off and by 1908, there were around 8,000 nickelodeon theaters across the country. With the arrival of the nickelodeon, audience demand for a larger quantity of story films with a variety of subjects and locations led to a need to hire more creative talent and caused studios to invest in more elaborate stage designs. In 1908, Thomas Edison spearheaded the creation of a corporate trust between the major film companies in the United States known as the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) to limit infringement on his patents. Members of the trust controlled every aspect of the filmmaking process from the creation of film stock, the production of films, and the distribution to cinemas through licensing arrangements. The trust led to increased quality filmmaking spurred by internal competition and placed limits on the number of foreign films to encourage the growth of the American film industry, but it also discouraged the creation of feature films. By 1915, the MPPC had lost most of its hold on the film industry as the companies moved towards the wider production of feature films. During the 1900s, the leader in the United States was the French group Pathé, which held almost 50% of the global market on its own.
Continued international growth (1900s–1910s)
New film producing countries
With the worldwide film boom, more countries now joined Britain, France, Germany and the United States in serious film production. In Italy, production was spread over several centers, Turin was the first major film production centre, and Milan and Naples gave birth to the first film magazines. In Turin, Ambrosio was the first company in the field in 1905, and remained the largest in the country through this period. Its most substantial rival was Cines in Rome, which started producing in 1906. The great strength of the Italian industry was historical epics, with large casts and massive scenery. As early as 1911, Giovanni Pastrone's two-reel La Caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy) made a big impression worldwide, and it was followed by even bigger productions like Quo Vadis? (1912), which ran for 90 minutes, and Pastrone's Cabiria of 1914, which ran for two and a half hours. Italian companies also had a strong line in slapstick comedy, with actors like André Deed, known locally as "Cretinetti", and elsewhere as "Foolshead" and "Gribouille", achieving worldwide fame with his almost surrealistic gags. The most important film-producing country in Northern Europe up until the First World War was Denmark. The Nordisk company was set up there in 1906 by Ole Olsen, a fairground showman, and after a brief period imitating the successes of French and British filmmakers, in 1907 he produced 67 films, most directed by Viggo Larsen, with sensational subjects like Den hvide Slavinde (The White Slave), Isbjørnejagt (Polar Bear Hunt) and Løvejagten (The Lion Hunt). By 1910, new smaller Danish companies began joining the business, and besides making more films about the white slave trade, they contributed other new subjects. The most important of these finds was Asta Nielsen in Afgrunden (The Abyss), directed by Urban Gad for Kosmorama. This combined the circus, sex, jealousy and murder, all put over with great conviction, and pushed the other Danish filmmakers further in this direction. By 1912, the Danish film companies were multiplying rapidly. The Swedish film industry was smaller and slower to get started than the Danish industry. Here, Charles Magnusson, a newsreel cameraman for the Svenskabiografteatern cinema chain, started fiction film production for them in 1909, directing a number of the films himself. Production increased in 1912, when the company engaged Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller as directors. They started out by imitating the subjects favoured by the Danish film industry, but by 1913 they were producing their own strikingly original work, which sold very well. Russia began its film industry in 1908 with Pathé shooting some fiction subjects there, and then the creation of real Russian film companies by Aleksandr Drankov and Aleksandr Khanzhonkov. The Khanzhonkov company quickly became much the largest Russian film company, and remained so until 1918. In Germany, Oskar Messter had been involved in film-making from 1896, but did not make a significant number of films per year until 1910. When the worldwide film boom started, he, and the few other people in the German film business, continued to sell prints of their own films outright, which put them at a disadvantage. It was only when Paul Davidson, the owner of a chain of cinemas, brought Asta Nielsen and Urban Gad to Germany from Denmark in 1911, and set up a production company, Projektions-AG "Union" (PAGU), that a change-over to renting prints began. Messter replied with a series of longer films starring Henny Porten, but although these did well in the German-speaking world, they were not particularly successful internationally, unlike the Asta Nielsen films. Another of the growing German film producers just before World War I was the German branch of the French Éclair company, Deutsche Éclair. This was expropriated by the German government, and turned into DECLA when the war started. But altogether, German producers only had a minor part of the German market in 1914. Contrary to the claim that American films dominated European markets from the mid-1910s, the French film industry remained the world leader until the outbreak of World War one in July 1914. In 1913, French films occupied 85% of the screens worldwide, with Pathé alone accounting for around 50% of the global market through its extensive network of subsidiaries, production, and distribution channels. Gaumont also held a major position internationally, often outperforming American studios. It was only the disruptions caused by the war that allowed American companies to gradually become the world leaders in cinema.
Film technique
New film techniques that were introduced in this period include the use of artificial lighting, fire effects and low-key lighting (i.e. lighting in which most of the frame is dark) for enhanced atmosphere during sinister scenes. Continuity of action from shot to shot was also refined, such as in Pathé's le Cheval emballé (The Runaway Horse) (1907) where cross-cutting between parallel actions is used. D. W. Griffith also began using cross-cutting in the film The Fatal Hour, made in July 1908. Another development was the use of the point of view shot, first used in 1910 in Vitagraph's Back to Nature. Insert shots were also used for artistic purposes; the Italian film La mala planta (The Evil Plant), directed by Mario Caserini had an insert shot of a snake slithering over the "Evil Plant". By 1914 it was widely held in the American film industry that cross-cutting was most generally useful because it made possible the elimination of uninteresting parts of the action that play no part in advancing the drama. In 1909, 35mm became the internationally recognized theatrical film gauge. As films grew longer, specialist writers were employed to simplify more complex stories derived from novels or plays into a form that could be contained on one reel. Genres began to be used as categories; the main division was into comedy and drama, but these categories were further subdivided. Intertitles containing lines of dialogue began to be used consistently from 1908 onwards, such as in Vitagraph's An Auto Heroine; or, The Race for the Vitagraph Cup and How It Was Won. The dialogue was eventually inserted into the middle of the scene and became commonplace by 1912. The introduction of dialogue titles transformed the nature of film narrative. When dialogue titles came to be always cut into a scene just after a character starts speaking, and then left with a cut to the character just before they finish speaking, then one had something that was effectively the equivalent of a present-day sound film.
During World War I and industry
The years of the First World War were a complex transitional period for the film industry. The exhibition of films changed from short one-reel programmes to feature films. Exhibition venues became larger and began charging higher prices. In the United States, these changes brought destruction to many film companies, the Vitagraph company being an exception. Film production began to shift to Los Angeles during World War I. The Universal Film Manufacturing Company was formed in 1912 as an umbrella company. New entrants included the Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company, and Famous Players, both formed in 1913, and later amalgamated into Famous Players–Lasky. The biggest success of these years was David Wark Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith followed this up with the even bigger Intolerance (1916), but, due to the high quality of film produced in the US, the market for their films was high. In France, film production shut down due to the general military mobilization of the country at the start of the war. Although film production began again in 1915, it was on a reduced scale, and the biggest companies gradually retired from production. Italian film production held up better, although so called "diva films", starring anguished female leads were a commercial failure. In Denmark, the Nordisk company increased its production so much in 1915 and 1916 that it could not sell all its films, which led to a very sharp decline in Danish production, and the end of Denmark's importance on the world film scene. The German film industry was seriously weakened by the war. The most important of the new film producers at the time was Joe May, who made a series of thrillers and adventure films through the war years, but Ernst Lubitsch also came into prominence with a series of very successful comedi