First Steps

1895 · Louis Lumière

The first job: record. One locked shot, the gates open, and people walk toward the camera and then past it. Watch the ones who look at the lens and the ones who refuse to. The next hundred years are about which of them wins.

1896 · Georges Méliès

The job: conjure. A bat becomes Mephistopheles by substitution splice, the cut Méliès used for everything. Three minutes, a cauldron, a crucifix. The scares are jokes. The trick is not.

1896 · Auguste Lumière, Louis Lumière

The job: fill the frame. The train comes in on the diagonal and grows until it is bigger than the screen, and that is the whole event. The panicked audience is a story told later. The diagonal is real.

1896 · Louis Lumière

The job: set up a gag. One set, one hose, four beats. A boy steps on it, the gardener looks in, the jet hits him, he catches the boy. Fiction begins with a punchline.

1896 · Alice Guy-Blaché

The job: stage a story. Guy lifts babies out of painted cabbages and sends a doll back as not ready. A minute long and already a director's film: a set, a performer, a joke with a rule inside it.

1902 · Georges Méliès

The job: build a world. Thirty tableaux, a shell in the Moon's eye, selenites who go up in smoke when hit. Méliès had been a magician and treated the camera as the biggest cabinet he owned. See the hand-colored print if you can.

1903 · Edwin Stanton Porter

The job: cut. Porter leaves the bandits, goes to the telegraph office, and comes back, and the audience carries the story across the gap. Barnes firing at the lens could open or close the reel. Either way, it is the first time the film knows you are there.

1903 · Cecil M. Hepworth, Percy Stow

The job: adapt. Hepworth's Alice grows and shrinks by optical printing, a studio cutter plays her, and the family plays the rest. Eight minutes survive of twelve. Cinema starts borrowing books here and never stops.

1906 · Edwin Stanton Porter, Wallace McCutcheon Sr.

The job: show a dream. Porter puts the bed in the air over the city with double exposure and miniatures, nine days and $350. Subjective experience on screen before anyone had a word for it.

1906 · J. Stuart Blackton

The job: draw. Blackton's hand chalks two faces and they move on their own. Cutouts and stop motion do most of the work, with a short stretch of true frame-by-frame drawing. Animation begins as a magic act with a blackboard.

1906 · Alice Guy-Blaché

The job: scale up. Twenty-five tableaux, twenty-five sets, three hundred extras, Tissot's paintings as the model. Guy ran a production the size of anything Pathé was making, and Jasset got the credit for decades. Watch the crowd scenes. This is what a studio could do in 1906.

1908 · Émile Cohl

The job: draw everything. Seven hundred ink drawings printed in negative so the line looks like chalk. A stick figure gets sat on, boxed, and remade, and the line never rests. Cohl's hand appears at the start and the end to remind you who is in charge.

1908 · George Albert Smith

The job: color. Smith's Kinemacolor runs red and green filters at double speed and lets the Brighton promenade arrive in something like daylight. Eight minutes of pier and bathing machines. Nothing happens, and it happens in color.

1909 · D. W. Griffith

The job: compare. Griffith cuts from the speculator's banquet to the bread line and needs no title to say what he thinks. The sowers are staged after Millet. The ending, in the grain, is the film's verdict.

1910 · J. Searle Dawley

The job: bring something to life. The creature forms in a vat of smoke, a burning dummy run backward. Sixteen minutes, one surviving print, lost for most of a century. Ogle built the creature himself: the wig, the hunch, the hands.

1911 · Giuseppe de Liguoro, Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan

The job: go long. An hour, fifty tableaux, Doré's engravings restaged with real bodies. The feature film arrives from Italy with a lecturer standing beside it. Watch the frozen lake and Ugolino. The compositions are copied. The horror is not.

1911 · D. W. Griffith

The job: race. Griffith cuts the office, the tracks, and the train against each other, more than a hundred shots in one reel, until the rescue is a rhythm. The last close-up, a wrench held like a pistol, is the whole trick of editing in one object.