TSPDT Starting List (Silent Era)

Ranking 6786

Production Co: Whitley Partners
Country: United Kingdom - France
Genre: Documentary, Short
Original length: 4.33 seconds, 52 frames at 12fps

"A dedicated inventor, Louis Le Prince started experimenting with film as early as 1881, and by October 1888, he captured on film what would become the world's first motion picture: a family scene in a garden of Roundhay, Leeds, during his time in England. The now legendary 2 seconds short features his son Adolphe walking across the garden while the family of Le Prince's wife, the Whitleys, move on the backgroun. Cinema was born in that garden." - Luis Rivera, W-Cinema

Featured in: The First Film (2015)

Ranking 21990

Production Co: Whitley Partners
Country: United Kingdom - France
Genre: Documentary, Short
Runtime: 2 sec

"For his second experiment, Le Prince went to Leeds Bridge, and shot a 2 seconds of the traffic crossing the bridge. The carriages pulled by horses are captured by Le Prince's camera in what could be considered as the very first documentary in history. Despite its extremely short runtime, this movie is quite interesting as it's a small glimpse to life in the late Victorian era, almost like a time machine to a past that now, more than 100 years later feels very distant." - Luis Rivera, W-Cinema

Featured in: The First Film (2015)

Ranking 6568

Production Co: Edison Manufacturing Company
Country: United States
Genre: Experimental, Short
Runtime: 27 sec

"The "Monkeyshines" films were three experimental movies shot in the Edison laboratories in order to test Kinetograph, a camera invented to shot the movies that would appear in the Kinetoscope. With the collaboration of William Heise, Dickson shot one of Edison's workers in front of the camera doing gestures and movements.. While it was never released to the public, "Monkeyshines, No. 1" is indeed the very first movie shot in the United States, marking the birth of the Kinetoscope and the beginning of the age of cinema as entertainment." - Luis Rivera, W-Cinema

DVD: Edison, The Invention of the Movies (Kino, 2005)

Ranking 22512

Production Co: Edison Manufacturing Company
Cinematography: W. K. L. Dickson & William Heise
Country: United States
Genre: Experimental, Short
Runtime: 12 sec at 16 fps

"Produced May-June 1891, this experimental film was one of the first made in America at the Edison Laboratory in West Orange, N.J. The filmmakers were W.K.L. Dickson and William Heise, both of whom were employed as inventors and engineers in the industrial research facility owned by Thomas Edison. Heise and especially Dickson made important technical contributions during 1891-1893, leading to the invention of the world’s first successful motion picture camera - the Edison Kinetograph - and to the playback device required for viewing early peepshow films - the Edison Kinetoscope" - Library of Congress

DVD: Edison, The Invention of the Movies (Kino, 2005)

Ranking 22402

AKA: Blacksmithing Scene
Production Co: Edison Manufacturing Company
Cinematography: William Heise
Country: United States
Genre: Short
Runtime: 30 sec at 24 fps

"Not blacksmiths but employees of the Edison Manufacturing Company, Charles Kayser, John Ott and another unidentified man are likely the first screen actors in history, and 'Blacksmith Scene' is thought to be the first film of more than a few feet to be publicly exhibited. The 30-second film was photographed in late April 1893 by Edison's key employee, W.K.L. Dickson, at the new Edison studio in New Jersey. On May 9, audiences lined up single file at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences to peer through a viewing machine called a kinetoscope where glowed images of a blacksmith and two helpers forging a piece of iron, but only after they'd first passed around a bottle of beer. A Brooklyn newspaper reported the next day, 'It shows living subjects portrayed in a manner to excite wonderment.'" - Library of Congress

DVD: Edison, The Invention of the Movies (Kino, 2005)

Ranking 13234

Production Co: Edison Manufacturing Company
Cinematography: William Heise
Country: United States
Genre: Experimental, Short
Runtime: 21 sec at 30 fps

"This short film is the world's first known experiment in producing a motion picture with a recorded synchronized sound track. Although the kinetophone combined recorded sound with moving pictures, even approximate synchronization was elusive. Still, Dickson and his crew pursued serious efforts in this direction, in this case simultaneously photographing the image and recording the sound (note the gramophone horn on the left). The R (for Raff and Gammon) that appears in the scene suggests that someone may have felt this film had commercial potential; so far as is known, however, it was never shown publicly. The musical selection, performed by Dickson himself, is from the opera The Chimes at Midnight by Jean Robert Planquette." - Kino

DVD: Edison, The Invention of the Movies (Kino, 2005)

Ranking 17559

Production Co: Edison Manufacturing Company
Cinematography: William Heise
Country: United States
Genre: Documentary, Short
Runtime: 22 sec at 30 fps

"Annabelle Whitford, known as Peerless Annabelle, had her debut at the Columbia Exposition in Chicago. Although hardly a stage star on the order of Carmencita, films of her performances proved popular and the negatives wore out quickly, which meant that she appeared frequently before Edison’s cameras between 1894 and 1898, executing Butterfly, Serpentine and Sun dances. These films were frequently hand-tinted." - Kino

DVD: Edison, The Invention of the Movies (Kino, 2005)

Ranking 17561

AKA: Fire Rescue
Production Co: Edison Manufacturing Company
Country: United States
Genre: Drama, Short
Runtime: 20 sec at 40 fps

"This Kinetoscope short may be considered for the title of 'the first disaster movie.' Apparently shot in the Black Maria, it gives us a tableaux of three firemen saving children from a burning building. It’s worth noting that in the late nineteenth century volunteer firemen were often idolized as heroes and seen as appropriate centers of dramatic narrative. The opportunity to show them in action was no doubt a draw for the kinetoscope parlors." - Century Film Project

DVD: Edison, The Invention of the Movies (Kino, 2005)

Ranking 22490

Production Co: Edison Manufacturing Company
Cinematography: William Heise
Country: United States
Genre: Documentary, Short
Runntime: 3 sec at 30 fps

"Initially considered a comic novelty for the way it used technical innovation to make much ado about nothing, the title of this film succinctly informs us of its content. The filming of an entire action from conflict to resolution, although only a few seconds in duration, gives the movie a kind of narrative structure. One reason this documentary is associated with comedy is that the subject’s loss of bodily control, a condition that theorist Henri Bergson described as 'something mechanical encrusted upon the living,' makes Ott a comic figure.. According to silent film historian Luke McKernan, 'in later years Fred Ott was happy to claim that he was the first ever ‘film star,’ which in a way was true'." - Frank Scheide, A Companion to Film Comedy

DVD: Edison, The Invention of the Movies (Kino, 2005)

Ranking 1049

AKA: Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory
Production Co: Lumière
Country: France
Genre: Documentary, Short
Runtime: 50 seconds

"One day in March 1895, around noon, the doors of the Lumière factory in Lyon open. Before them, on the opposite sidewalk, a new invention: the cinematograph. What does the Lumiere Brothers say this day? Go ahead! action! No testimony, no archive, just the uneven gesture: [The workers leaving the factory would have seen some of the earlier attempts at making moving pictures. Knowing exactly what is going on, they act up for the camera.] The adventure of the cinematograph begins: 17 meter of film, 35 mm of width, 50 seconds of an eternity which lasts still. Since then, chemim Saint-Victor has become the first movie street, and the first character in the history of cinema is the crowd, it's the people." - Thierry Frémaux, Lumière!

Blu-ray: Lumière! (Prestige, 2015) [Movie shown in three versions]

Ranking 3014

AKA: Boat Leaving the Port
Production Co: Lumière
Country: France
Genre: Documentary, Short
Runtime: 50 seconds

"Two women and two children watch as three men in a rowboat leave the shore to bob and sway in the breaking waves. Just before the shot comes to an end, the movement of the sea causes the boat to lurch to the left. What happens to the rowers? We will never know. Barque sortant du port is exemplary of the cinema’s power to capture fleeting moments. Here, the filmic medium and the ocean – united by inhuman animus and a penchant for flux – conspire against anthropocentrism. No longer separate from nature, and certainly not its master, the human is dwarfed by the unruly, intractable contingency of the water." - Punto de Vista Festival

DVD: The Movies Begin (Kino, 2002)

Ranking 3354

AKA: Baby's Meal
Production Co: Lumière
Country: France
Genre: Documentary, Short
Runtime: 50 seconds

"For the first films they made, the Lumiere Brothers used their cinematograph as they would a still camera. The variety of subjects they chose, including taking close-ups of people, was also similar to still photography. Here, Louis Lumiere films his brother Auguste and family. Early audiences were just as fascinated by the realism of the moving leaves in the background as they were by the people moving. Many would have already seen convincing painting of people moving, in the phenakistiscopes and zoetropes, but not of the fine detail like the foliage. [Film historians often jokingly refer to this film as the first 'home movie,' as it depicts the filmmaker's home life in a documentary fashion, without any attempt at narrative contrivances.]" - Barry Salt, BFI

Blu-ray: Lumière! (Prestige, 2015)

Ranking 6129

AKA: The Sprinkler Sprinkled | The Waterer Watered
Production Co: Lumière
Country: France
Genre: Comedy, Short
Runtime: 50 seconds

"While L’Arroseur arrosé is primarily a cinematic depiction of a gag, there is enough of a rudimentary plot to characterize this film as a comic narrative. Because the gardener possesses a 'mark of the ridiculous' – an incapacity for ascertaining why a hose might not function, the capacity for becoming curious, and the capability to peer foolishly into a nozzle that can douse him with water – he is susceptible to becoming the victim (comic butt) of a practical joke. When the boy (comic wit) recognizes the gardener's mark of the ridiculous he exploits this deficiency by stepping on the hose, which sets the comic narrative into play. The incongruity of the loss of control suffered by the gardener while sprayed makes this situation humorous." - Frank Scheide, A Companion to Film Comedy

Blu-ray: Lumière! (Prestige, 2015) [Movie shown in two versions]

Ranking 16505

Production Co: Lumière
Country: France
Genre: Documentary, Short
Runtime: 50 seconds

"[From the beginning of cinema, operators looked for new, novel, abstract points of view, launching several decades of experimental cinema.] Shown in atypical close-up, the Lumières' masterful short captures numerous goldfish swimming about a large bowl, dashing in and out of its light and shadow against the backdrop of some intriguing reflections, dazzling the viewer’s eye dynamically as they do so." - Iain Stott, A Thousand Nights in the Dark

Blu-ray: Lumière! (Prestige, 2015)

Ranking 16527

AKA: The Photographical Congress Arrives in Lyon
Production Co: Lumière
Country: France
Genre: Documentary, Short
Runtime: 50 seconds

"During the congress of French Photography Societies taking place in Lyon, on June 11, 1895, the delegates took a boat trip on the Saône, going up about fifteen kilometers to Neuville-sur-Saône where Louis Lumière filmed their landing on the Pasteur quay. The next day, the film was screened at the end of the closing session of the congress, in the Monnier salons (place Bellecour in Lyon). The informative content of the film characterizes it as the first "news" of cinema, the ancestor of the television news." - Catalogue Lumière

Blu-ray: Lumière! (Prestige, 2015)

Ranking 19563

Production Co: Edison Manufacturing Company
Cinematography: William Heise
Country: United States
Genre: History, Short
Runtime: 12 seconds

"As the kinetoscope business declined in the second half of 1895, the Edison group hired Alfred Clark to make some films of original subject matter. He produced a number of historical tableaux, including Burning of Joan of Arc, Frontier Scene (showing a lynching), Indian Scalping Scene, and this recreation of the beheading of Mary Stuart. Several of these, including The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, used the technique of stop-action substitution (in which a human body is replaced by a dummy) that would later be exploited by French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Robert Thomae played Mary, an early instance of female impersonation in the movies." - Kino

DVD: Edison, The Invention of the Movies (Kino, 2005)

Ranking 21238

Production Co: Skladanowsky Film
Screenplay: Max Skladanowsky
Cinematography: Wilhelm Fenz & Max Skladanowsky
Country: Germany
Genre: Short

"The eight short films projected at the Wintergarten Ballroom were all longer, comprising between 99 and 174 frames, and were each shown repeatedly, in loops. Shot in May 1895, two months before the Cafe Sello test-projections, they showed physical spectacles, dances and acrobatics. The first film to be projected each evening simulated an Italian peasants’ dance, performed by two children; a further film depicted a wrestling contest featuring a celebrated bodybuilder and wrestler of the era, Eugen Sandow, fighting another wrestler named Greiner; the other films showed a boxing kangaroo, an acrobatics display, a human pyramid, a juggler, and a Russian cossacks’ dance; finally, the film of the Skladanowsky Brothers themselves, appearing from either side of the screen, ended the program." - Stephen Barber, Senses of Cinema

Ranking 1246

AKA: The Arrival of a Train
Production Co: Lumière
Cinematography: Louis Lumière
Country: France
Genre: Documentary, Short
Runtime: 50 seconds

"Today, we cannot comprehend the terror that gripped the 1895 audience facing the Lumière brothers' arriving train—this first film with which they gave birth to documentary film. Louis Lumière's film Arrival of the Train shows, in only fifty seconds, an everyday occurrence, a familiar experience for spectators: a train pulls into a station, the passengers go back and forth on the platform. Despite its brevity and the banality of its subject matter, this film has attained fame, entering film history as an icon of the medium's origins." - Martin Loiperdinger, Cinema's Founding Myth

Blu-ray: Lumière! (Prestige, 2015)

Ranking 3430

AKA: The Cabbage Fairy
Production Co: Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont
Country: France
Genre: Family, Fantasy, Short

This short film is considered lost. Alice Guy remade it twice in the early 1900s, first as "La fée aux choux, ou la naissance des enfants" (The Cabbage-Patch Fairy, 1900) and secondly as "Sage-femme de première classe" (Midwife to the Upper Class, 1902). Both films are included on the "Alice Guy Blanche Vol. 1: The Gaumont Years" blu-ray, released by Kino.

Ranking 6652

AKA: Venice, view of the Grand Canal from a boat
Production Co: Lumière
Cinematography: Alexandre Promio
Country: France
Genre: Documentary, Short
Runtime: 50 seconds

"The film Lumiere 295 is called 'Venice, view of the Grand Canal from a boat' and is famous because it is considered the first movement of the camera, this Tracking shot which was then called a panorama. Alexandre Promio thought that if a motionless cinematograph could film moving subjects, the reverse could also be true. This was the case. In fact, another panorama was shot by Constant Girel in Cologne on the edge of the Rhine on September 1896, almost a month before that of Venice. With Lumiere as with John Ford, we print the legend rather than the reality. " - Thierry Frémaux, Lumière!

Blu-ray: Lumière! (Prestige, 2015)

Ranking 7218

Production Co: American Mutoscope Company
Cinematography: W.K.L. Dickson
Country: United States
Genre: Sport, Short
Runntime: 24 sec at 16 fps

"Eugen Sandow [was the first star] to perform at the Black Maria studio in West Orange, NJ, in order to promote his vaudeville career and his bodybuilding books and equipment via Thomas A. Edison's Kinetoscope. The American Mutoscope Company later made four 1896 films featuring Eugen Sandow. The company was co-founded in Dec 1895 by former Edison Manufacturing Company inventor William K. L. Dickson, fellow inventors Herman Casler and Harry Marvin, and businessman Elias Koopman." - AFI Catalog

DVD: Edison, The Invention of the Movies (Kino, 2005)

Ranking 7628

Production Co: Robert W. Paul
Country: United Kingdom
Genre: Comedy, Short

Britain's first drama (i.e. non documentary) film. This short film is presumed lost. Robert W. Paul remade it as Tommy Atkins in the Park (1898)

Ranking 8195

AKA: The May Irwin Kiss
Production Co: Edison Manufacturing Company
Cinematography: William Heise
Country: United States
Genre: Romance, Short
Runtime: 23 sec at 24 fps

[This is a medium close-up] of May Irwin and John C. Rice enacting the final moment from The 'Widow Jones', a musical comedy then playing on Broadway. The stage kiss had become a center of controversy during the 1895-96 theatrical year, and the Edison company brought these two stars to the Black Maria to film the famous scene. The film was one of the first movies shot for the Edison Vitascope projection system, and was released with much ballyhoo." - Kino

DVD: Edison, The Invention of the Movies (Kino, 2005)

Ranking 10733

AKA: Demolition of a Wall
Production Co: Lumière
Cinematography: Louis Lumière
Country: France
Genre: Documentary, Short
Runtime: 50 seconds

"Even when some of Lumiere Brothers' films begin as documentaries, they are not quite so. Let's look at this one: Demolition of a Wall. [Auguste Lumiere directs the demolition of a wall in the grounds of Lumiere factory. When the travelling Lumiere cameramen showed this film, they would delight the audience by stopping the projector, and running the film backwards.] The effect of the demolition reversed itself to become the construction of a wall after a twirling smoke. It is easy to imagine the impression on the spectators of the time. The next day, when they attended the screening, the Lumiere factory workers shouted: the bosses are dowsers!" - Thierry Frémaux, Lumière!

Blu-ray: Lumière! (Prestige, 2015)

Ranking 16286

AKA: Woman Undressing
Production Co: Esme Collings
Country: United Kingdom
Genre: Short

"In her boudoir, supposedly free from prying eyes, a woman undresses to her petticoat before settling down to read a book. It seems certain that the film's purpose was primarily to titillate, though the lady in question keeps her voluminous petticoat firmly on throughout the entire disrobing process. It's impossible to say whether this was to achieve a specific erotic frisson or because the film-maker wanted to play safe with regard to Britain's obscenity laws of the time." - Michael Brooke, BFI