25 Best Films of the 19th Century

Doubtless, this is the most recognizable scene from this period. Rightly so, too, although not because of the apocryphal story of how audiences feared they were going to be run over by an actual train. The achievement of this and many other Lumière films was in the framing or composition of the image, which was surely informed by the brothers' background in still photography; filming the train diagonally made all the difference.

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Another apocryphal story of the beginnings of film is that Georges Méliès invented editing and trick photography by accident; yet, it seems more likely that he merely saw this Edison film, which had already invented film editing before Méliès even touched a camera. If early-cinema spectators were concerned by an approaching train on screen, I wonder what their reactions were when they peered through the peephole Kinetoscope and saw a person's head chopped off.

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This is one of Émile Reynaud's two surviving animation films. We'll never be able to view these "Pantomines Lumineuses," however, as they were originally exhibited in Paris from 1892 to 1900. With Reynaud hand-cranking his Théâtre Optique, he would stretch, for instance, the 636 frames of this film for 15 minutes. Today's reanimation of it only lasts a couple minutes. As for this film in particular, it features a somewhat more humorous love triangle than Reynaud's other surviving animated work, "Le Pauvre Pierrot," and it features a very early instance of the written word on film. Translated into English, it self-referentially announces that "the show is over." "Round the Beach Hut" was the showstopper.

Georges Méliès's films are very similar and theatrically so, except for this one. At nine-to-eleven scenes, this account of the contemporary Dreyfus Affair was one of the longest subjects of its time. The varied camera positions, staging in depth, frontal character exits beside the camera, the realistic decors, and a letter motif are extraordinary enough for 1899, but are a complete departure for a filmmaker who, otherwise, tried to make cinema an extension of the stage.

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The beginnings of the story film are very evident in this first instance of Méliès's genre of féeries (or "fairy films"). Blubeard (1901), Kingdom of the Fairies (1903), A Trip to the Moon (1902) and many other films of his follow much of the same framework introduced in "Cinderella," including linking scenes by dissolves, the fairy godmother character, trick photography, and theatricality.

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What G.A. Smith actually made was a one-shot film of a couple kissing, but this shot was sold to exhibitors for them to edit it into a phantom-ride film. Besides being an early example of scene editing, this was ingenious comic relief that must've caught spectators off guard.

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The temptation to record a tragedy instead of helping victims is not a recent phenomenon of the smart-phone era; R.W. Paul created controversy when he kept rolling his camera after the launching of a ship caused an accident that killed more than 30 people--and he faced even more heat by exhibiting the film. In addition to being an early instance of a disaster documentary, this film is comprised of four shots--which was very rare in 1898, although not unprecedented in nonfiction films.

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Dance was a popular subject in early cinema, and, perhaps, the most famous dancing of the era was Loïe Fuller's Serpentine Dance, which on the stage was assisted by lighting effects for color transformations. These Edison films weren't the first to record a Fuller imitator, nor the first dance films offered in hand-colored prints, but, as far as I know, they were the first to use color on film as a substitute for the lighting effects used by Fuller on stage. The brilliance of the effect led numerous other filmmakers to imitate this filmed imitation.

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This film (all three versions) of workers leaving the Lumière factory is, of course, strongly associated with the birth of cinema, as it was the first Lumière Cinématographe film exhibited to the public. It's also an interesting film for other reasons: for it being a staged nonfiction film, for the opening and closing of the doors at the beginning and ending of the film creating both a linear structure and a circular one that resembles the loop aesthetic of pre-cinematic philosophical toys such as the Zoetrope, and for the way the brothers exhibited the film by freezing its first frame--which further associated the new medium with earlier media including the magic lantern and still photography.

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One of the first, if not the first, commercial films ever, the film introduced the Kinetoscope and, to some degree, motion pictures to both sides of the Atlantic. The film is also something of the beginning of staged fiction films, although this is somewhat concealed by what may seem like a nonfiction view of blacksmiths working and taking a break to drink beer. In fact, the "blacksmiths" were the inventors of the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, and the scene was a complete fiction staged inside the "Black Maria" proto-movie-studio. Other early filmmakers realized this and made their own versions of the film.

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"Santa Claus" is the only surviving example of a few films that G.A. Smith made in 1898 that exploited multiple-exposure photography and masking. The result in this film is a circular vignette reminiscent of images from magic-lantern shows. Also interesting is that the doubled images may be interpreted as both a representation of a dream and as parallel actions without crosscutting--leaving the question of whether or not Santa Clause is real entirely unresolved.

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This is the first (or, at least, the earliest surviving) of Georges Méliès's trick films. As aforementioned, Méliès didn't invent the stop-substitution effect, but here in "The Vanishing Lady," he did reimagine the presentation of the trick. He took a magic act that he could've performed in the usual stage manner with a trap door, which would've resulted in something of an actuality film, but, instead, he envisioned film editing as the magic trick.

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Another contentious "first" is the invention of the multi-shot film. Most likely, this was first done in nonfiction films; first, by exhibitors assembling their programs and, later, by producers. The introduction of multiple scenes in fiction films was of more consequence for the evolution of movie producing and viewing, though. "Come Along Do!" by R.W. Paul and the film below it in this ranking are two of the earliest candidates for telling a fictional story on screen with multiple scenes. The situation with this film is a bit ambiguous since only a few stills of the second shot survive, and we're left to make an educated guess that the shots were edited together by a direct cut.

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Although a complete print survives of this early multi-shot Georges Méliès film, the division of shots isn't much clearer here than in the fragmented Paul film listed above. That's because Méliès didn't differentiate the settings of the different scenes very much, and because he also employed his usual stop-substitution trick effects. So, it's a bit of work to tell exactly which cuts are trick shots and which are to separate scenes within what there is of a narrative. Perhaps, this explains Méliès's motivation for adopting dissolves between scenes in subsequent productions, as well as the most elaborate stage designs in the movie business.

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This is another early fiction or story film that was frequently remade, including by the Lumière brothers themselves. The film's slapstick pattern of a prankster being chased or receiving physical retribution was also reworked in numerous other ways in early cinema. My favorite is in The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901), where the prankster is the movie projectionist.

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This popular early film has an interesting exhibition history. It's an actuality film (a nonfiction view outdoors of waves) that predates the premiere of the Lumière Cinématographe, which is more often credited with introducing this type of film. It was photographed by R.W. Paul and Birt Acres with a reverse-engineered Kinetoscope and, initially, was viewed through the peephole device. Later, however, it was a much-remarked-upon hit in some of the earliest projected cinema exhibitions. The effect of the crashing waves was enhanced by the slow-motion effect that resulted from taking a Kinetograph film (which were filmed at a faster rate) and projecting it at the slower frame rate established by the Cinématographe.

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This Lumière film is of another Lumière cameraman filming a parade. It's one of the earliest clear examples of a self-reflexive film of the act of filming. This document not only takes us back in time to what is otherwise an ordinary and rather boring parade, but by documenting the Cinématographe also places us in the position of the actuality filmmaker.

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Today, Eadweard Muybridge's chronophotography (that is, a series of sequential photographs) is widely available as animations, but Muybridge didn't actually project these photographs as motion pictures (although they may've been synthesized in Zoetropes and other non-projection motion picture toys). For his projection device, the Zoöpraxiscope, Muybridge had drawings based on his photographs made on glass discs--an early (but not the first) instance of projected animation. His lectures and demonstrations of these animations had a profound influence on other inventors of cinema and helped revolutionize the art world.

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"Chronophotography" is a word coined by the maker, Étienne-Jules Marey, of this early scientific film. In fact, however, Marey was making actual films on celluloid as early as, perhaps, 1888. Although his work, like that of Muybridge, influenced the invention of cinema and changes in artistic representation, Marey's concerns were purely scientific. Marey used this film in particular for his paper demonstrating how a cat landing on its feet contradicts Isaac Newton's First Law of Motion and the mathematical law of conservation of angular momentum.

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Ottomar Anschutz is an even lesser-known chronophotographer and inventor of cinema. Unlike Marey and, to some degree, even Muybridge, Anschutz's aims were more commercial. The now largely-forgotten pinnacle of his experiments was his Projecting Electrotachyscope, which achieved the projection of motion pictures for a paying audience more than a year before the Lumière brothers did the same. This particular movie of his was of a horse and rider jumping over obstacles--funded by the military and much in the vein of Muybridge's prior chronophotographic experiments (listed above).

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This is possibly the earliest cinematographic series ever photographed. The surviving images are actually of a test for the later recording of the transit of Venus by the astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen. Janssen's photographic revolver was especially influential on the work of Marey, and Janssen later appeared in films by Marey, as well as by the Lumière brothers.

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Louis Le Prince is a mysterious figure in the history of the invention of movies. As with other very early "films" or chronophotographic series, such as some of those listed above, Le Prince's work has since been animated and made accessible on the web in a way that they were never originally exhibited--leading to some rather unsubstantiated claims. Nevertheless, this film of his in particular is an early example in film history of a traffic scene. Although Le Prince's influence was limited due to his mysterious disappearance, other cinema experimenters nearby, namely Wordsworth Donisthorpe and William Friese-Greene, were quick to replicate the genre. Traffic was an ideal subject because it offered plenty of movement, no need for direction, and the machinery of newfangled automobiles analogous to the new invention of cinema.

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