The Kinetograph, a motion-picture camera developed by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and

Thomas Edison from 1888.

Image: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National
Historic Site

Kinetoscope, invented by Thomas Edison and William Dickson in 1891.

Image: The Bettmann Archive

Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902; A Trip to the Moon), directed by Georges Méliès.

Image: © 1902 Star Film
The Great Train Robbery (1903), directed by Edwin S. Porter.
Image: Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division, Washington, D.C.

The Edison kinetoscope.

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory: One of the first films viewed by an audience.

Louis Le Prince

Roundhay Garden Scene

The world's earliest surviving motion-picture film, showing actual consecutive action is
called Roundhay Garden Scene. It's a short film directed by French inventor Louis Le Prince.
However, in 1891 the Edison Company in the USA successfully demonstrated a prototype of
the Kinetoscope, which enabled one person at a time to view moving pictures through a
peephole viewer window close to an Indian ‘Bioscope’. In 1895 Lumeire Brothers; Louis and
Auguste Lumeire unveiled their invention, the Cinématographe, at the Grand Café in Paris on
December 28. The Cinematographe projected images on a wall creating for the first time ever
a movie audience. Lumeire Brothers screened 10 short films of different duration in different
parts of the world. Soon after the introduction of cinematographe the camera became the
dominant source of accurate depiction of life. As the technology became more sophisticated,
so did the activities for which people used cameras.  
The key innovation at the heart of the Cinématographe was the mechanism through which
film was transported through the camera. Two pins or claws were inserted into the sprocket
holes punched into the celluloid film strip; the pins moved the film along and then retracted,
leaving the film stationary during exposure. Louis Lumière designed this process of
intermittent movement based on the way in which a sewing machine worked, a tactic that
Edison had considered but rejected in favor of continuous movement. A three-in-one device
that could record, develop and project motion pictures, the Cinématographe would go down
in history as the first viable film camera. Using it, the Lumière brothers shot footage of
workers at their factory leaving at the end of the day. They showed the resulting film,
“Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory” at an industrial meeting in Paris in March 1895; it is
considered to be the very first motion picture. After a number of other private screenings, the
Lumière brothers unveiled the Cinématographe in their first public screening on December
28, 1895 at the Grand Café along with other films, “The arrival of a train”, “The baby meal”,
“The sprinkler sprinkled” etc. In early 1896, they would open Cinématographe theaters in
London, Brussels, Belgium and New York. After making more than 40 films that year,
mostly scenes of everyday French life, they began sending other cameramen-projectionists
out into the world to record scenes of life and showcase their invention. On July 17, 1896
Lumiere brother’s cinema was showcased at the Watson Hotel in Mumbai. Cinema was
shown for the first time in India just six months after their first show in Paris.
When the first genuine movies, made by the Lumière brothers, were shown in Paris in 1895,
Méliès, a professional magician and manager-director of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, was
among the spectators. The films were scenes from real life having the novelty of motion, but
Méliès saw at once their further possibilities. He acquired a camera, built a glass-enclosed
studio near Paris, wrote scripts, designed ingenious sets, and used actors to film stories. With
a magician’s intuition, he discovered and exploited the basic camera tricks: stop motion, slow
motion, dissolve, fade-out, superimposition, and double exposure. From 1899 to 1912 Méliès
made more than 400 films, the best of which combine illusion, comic burlesque, and
pantomime to treat themes of fantasy in a playful and absurd fashion. He specialized in
depicting extreme physical transformations of the human body (such as the dismemberment
of heads and limbs) for comic effect. His films included pictures as diverse as Cléopâtre
(1899; Cleopatra’s Tomb), Le Christ marchant sur les eaux (1899; Christ Walking on Water),
Le Voyage dans la lune (1902; A Trip to the Moon), Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904;
The Voyage Across the Impossible), and Hamlet (1908). He also filmed studio
reconstructions of news events as an early kind of newsreel. It never occurred to him to move
the camera for close-ups or long shots. The commercial growth of the industry forced him out
of business in 1913, and he died in poverty. The shift in consciousness away from films as
animated photographs to films as stories, or narratives, began to take place about the turn of
the century and is most evident in the work of the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Méliès
was a professional magician who had become interested in the illusionist possibilities of the
cinématographe; when the Lumières refused to sell him one, he bought an animatograph
projector from Paul in 1896 and reversed its mechanical principles to design his own camera.
The following year he organized the Star Film company and constructed a small glass-
enclosed studio on the grounds of his house at Montreuil, where he produced, directed,
photographed, and acted in more than 500 films between 1896 and 1913.  
 
H. S. Bhatavdekar a portrait photographer by occupation was a resident of Mumbai (then
Bombay); Bhatavdekar was one of the first witnesses to the Lumiere Brothers film show. He
soon acquired a movie camera from London and a projector and went on to make some films
on day-to-day life of the city as also some important events. Harishchandra Sakharam
Bhatavdekar also known as Save dada, was the first Indian to make a film (motion picture) in
India in 1897. After the film screening in Mumbai by the Lumiere brothers, films became a
sensation in India and the following year a Professor Stevenson staged a show at Calcutta’s
(now Kolkata) Star Theatre. Using Stevenson’s camera, Hiralal Sen (founder of the Royal
Bioscope Company in Calcutta), an Indian photographer, made a motion picture of scenes
from that show, namely The Flowers of Persia (1898).  
Films began with documentaries whether they were made by Lumeire Brothers in France or
Save Dada in India. They were historical and sociological documents. Indian cinema thus has
more than a hundred and twenty years of history, like the European or American film
industry. H. S. Bhatavdekar shot "The Wrestlers" during a wrestling match in Mumbai and
was the first film to be shot by an Indian. His later films also were all reality films with local
scenes “A man and his monkeys” (1899), “Landing of M. M. Bhownuggree” (1901), “Atash
Behram: construction of Parsi Fire Temple”(1901), Sir Wrangler Mr. R. P. Paranjpe"(1902)
and "Delhi Darbar of Lord Curzon"(1903) being of historical significance; since important
personalities like R. P. Paranjpe can be seen landing in India from a ship; and the proceedings
of the Delhi Durbar (Delhi Royal Court). Bhatavdekar also filmed Lord Curzon at the
coronation of King Edward VII in Kolkata (Calcutta) in 1903. Bhatavdekar can be considered
the first documentary filmmaker of India, with his films as India's first newsreels. On the
other hand, Hiralal Sen was initially dependent on imported film, generally exhibited at the
Classic Theatre, Calcutta, where the films featured in the intervals in the stage shows. When
he began producing his own films regularly, they chiefly were, as with Stevenson, scenes
from stage productions at the Classic, such as Bhramar, Hariraj and Buddhadev, all between
1901 and 1904. This phase of his career culminated with his longest film, Alibaba and the
Forty Thieves (1903), again based on an original Classic Theatre staging. He also made many
local views and news films, took commissions, made advertising films and put on private
shows for members of high society. As newer film ventures entered the market place Royal
Bioscope's fortunes declined, and production ceased in 1913. Shortly afterwards all of Sen's
films were accidentally destroyed by fire. The first film released in India was Shree Pundlik a
silent film at Coronation Cinematograph, Girgaum by Dadasaheb Torne on May 18th 1912
which was a Marathi musical play which he had produced and directed but it was shot by a
foreign cameraman Johnson with a fixed camera. It was more of a recorded theatre
production; the film was shot at Mangaldas Wadi in Bombay where a theatre group was
performing the play ‘Pundalik’. This film was censored along with a foreign film “A dead
man’s child” and shown also together. The reels of Shree Pundalik were sent to London for
processing; it had a runtime of 22 minutes. Shree Pundalik is not considered as the first
Indian feature production, and not the first Indian film, as it was a recording of a Marathi play
and its cameraperson and process team were British.  
India’s first full length film was made by Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, popularly known as
Dadasaheb Phalke (also known as the father of Indian cinema), India’s earliest film maker
who blended together elements from Sanskrit epics to make his first film Raja Harishchandra
in 1913, a silent film. The roles of females were played by men and this film remains a
landmark moment in the history of Indian cinema. Raja Harishchandra was a great
commercial success and was an inspiration for further such films. The reason behind this
movie standing out among the others was not just because it was the first Indian movie
released, but because of the fact that Dadasaheb was the Director, Writer, Cameraman,
Editor, Make-Up Artist and the Art Director. He made the movie entirely on his own by
mortgaging his wife’s jewellery. He eventually stepped into the limelight with having
produced 23 films from 1913 to 1918. The biggest achievement that Dadasaheb had was that
his first movie became the first ever Indian film which was screened in London in 1914. Ever
since then, new production companies have emerged in the 1920s. The movies that were
produced back then were mainly about purans and historical lores and episodes from epics
such as Mahabharata and Ramayana.
 

Edison’s Kinetoscope

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory: One of the first films viewed by an audience.
Louis & Auguste Lumiére
George Méliés, beside himself.

A scene from Raja Harishchandra

Thomas Edison with his Kinetoscope

Lumière Brothers and Edison: Documentary and Drama  

As long as there have been human beings there have been stories, and some of those stories
have always been about what’s “really” going on around us and why. In the beginning there’s
the tool. We’re alive; we see things happening around us, but in order to tell other people
about what we’re seeing we need an instrument for communication. The first instrument was
the human voice, the cave paintings, and then came chalk, pen, then camera, followed by
sound recorders and movie cameras, the video recorder, and now the smartphone Internet. In
each case, with each new invention, we had to figure out how to use the tool to capture real
events, assemble them into a narrative arc to be shown or told to other people. People always
want to know what’s happening and why, it’s just the way we are. Creators in each new
technology had to discover its narrative techniques and language. Photojournalism began in
the Civil War. The Lumière Brothers, original inventors of the movie camera/projector
cinemagraph, started by filming real events such as a train coming into a station or workers
leaving a factory. Thomas Edison, inventor of the kinetograph, invited actors and athletes to
come to his studio and perform. These films are what we might now call raw footage. They
are single shots, no edits. The films by the Lumière brothers are more like what we now call
documentary — real things that were happening in the world. Edison’s films are
more like what we call drama — actors performing on a stage. But because there’s no
narration or edits, no montage of images, it’s hard to tell what the films are about or what
they mean. They are not stories. The train comes into the station, but who is on the train and
why are they coming to town? Workers leave the factory, but what are the working
conditions inside? A man and a woman are kissing, but how did they meet and how will it
end? Stories arouse emotions and engage the imagination of the audience. In real life things
just happen, in stories we give them meaning.  
Stories are constructed, made up of parts called the beginning, middle and end. Events
proceed in an arc of tension, and at the end people and places are somehow different than
they were in the beginning. There’s usually a reason for the change, sometimes good and
sometimes bad, and the reason usually makes sense and the whole thing seems true, like it
really happened. Because it did, it happened in our minds. That’s how stories work. The stuff
we experience through our imagination always amounts to much more than the words on the
page or the images on the screen or the sounds coming out of the speakers. The narrative arc
has this power, and both drama and documentary use it. It took about ten years, roughly from
1895 to 1905, for early filmmakers to figure out how to make edits and use narration to tell a
story. The first narrative films were dramatic: “The Great Train Robbery” (Edwin Porter
1903) and “A Trip to the Moon” (“Le Voyage dans la lune” Georges Méliès 1902). It wasn’t
until the 1920s that people started making narrative documentaries. I don’t know why it took
so long, but it did. The first two popular documentaries were “Man with a Movie Camera”
(1929) and “Nanook of the North” (1922) and they are quite different in their approach and
style, good examples of different documentary forms.  
The idea behind “Man with a Movie Camera” of 66 minutes duration was to document and
promote the success of the proletariat revolution in the new Soviet Union. The producer,
Dziga Vertov, believed that movie cameras and movies could show the truth about how
things are and how people should live together on the planet. To him the new technology was
like a gift from heaven, ‘Now the truth can finally be told!’ I think this was a reaction to
every new medium — print, audio, Internet. But it ain’t necessarily so. Vertov gathered the
raw footage for his story by having a cameraman go out in the street, into the homes, into the
factories to record real life, real people, doing real things. But then there came the problem of
how to use the raw footage to tell a story, how to cut it together in a way that would tell us
‘What does all this reality mean?’ Vertov realized that the construction of a story might make
the whole thing untrue, not real, so he made up a set of rules to follow in the editing process
— how to put one thing with another and then another in a way that told the truth. He called
this method Kino Pravda, or film truth.  
Vertov believed in his method, but while “Man with a Movie Camera” is beautifully shot and
edited it’s just boring as hell, unless you were actually there, and nobody these days was
there. Vertov’s method doesn’t tell a story where we care about the people involved. We
don’t even know who these people are. We don’t know the good guys from the bad guys and
we don’t know what’s at stake. So in the end we have a bunch of reality but we don’t know
what it means. But then there came the problem of how to use the raw footage to tell a story,
how to cut it together in a way that would tell us “What does all this reality mean?” In
“Nanook of the North” of 78 minutes duration. Robert Flaherty makes a movie with a very
clear story — Man versus Nature. Who will win? He has a hero, Nanook, an Eskimo famous
for killing polar bears, and a villain, the harsh environment. Flaherty spent about three years
filming Nanook and his family as they went about their daily lives in the frozen arctic.
Midway in the process he lost all his footage in an explosion/fire because the film stock in
those days was made with nitroglycerin. So he had to go back and re-shoot everything, which
took another year and in the process decided it was okay if Nanook just faked catching a seal
by using one that was dead and frozen in storage, things like that. He staged events.  
Vertov would have thought this was illegal, a sin. I think he would have called “Nanook of
the North” a drama, not a documentary. He would have thought that imposing this drama of
man versus nature was nothing but film lies, not film truth. But Flaherty believed deeper
truths, profound truths, should be, and was the subject of films, so he didn’t see anything
wrong with fudging the facts in order to arrive at the higher truths. He lets us see Nanook as a
distinct individual, brave and funny, always laughing, not afraid of bears or walruses, always
trying to take care of his family. So, we care about him and hope he wins. (A couple of years
after the film came out, he was killed and eaten by a polar bear.)  
When the first genuine movies, made by the Lumière brothers, were shown in Paris in 1895,
Méliès, a professional magician and manager-director of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, was
among the spectators. The films were scenes from real life having the novelty of motion, but
Méliès saw at once their further possibilities. He acquired a camera, built a glass-enclosed
studio near Paris, wrote scripts, designed ingenious sets, and used actors to film stories. With
a magician’s intuition, he discovered and exploited the basic camera tricks: stop motion, slow
motion, dissolve, fade-out, superimposition, and double exposure. From 1899 to 1912 Méliès
made more than 400 films, the best of which combine illusion, comic burlesque, and
pantomime to treat themes of fantasy in a playful and absurd fashion. He specialized in
depicting extreme physical transformations of the human body (such as the dismemberment
of heads and limbs) for comic effect. His films included pictures as diverse as Cléopâtre
(1899; Cleopatra’s Tomb), Le Christ marchant sur les eaux (1899; Christ Walking on Water),
Le Voyage dans la lune (1902; A Trip to the Moon), Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904;
The Voyage Across the Impossible), and Hamlet (1908). He also filmed studio
reconstructions of news events as an early kind of newsreel. It never occurred to him to move
the camera for close-ups or long shots. The commercial growth of the industry forced him out
of business in 1913, and he died in poverty. The shift in consciousness away from films as
animated photographs to films as stories, or narratives, began to take place about the turn of
the century and is most evident in the work of the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Méliès
was a professional magician who had become interested in the illusionist possibilities of the
cinématographe; when the Lumières refused to sell him one, he bought an animatograph
projector from Paul in 1896 and reversed its mechanical principles to design his own camera.
The following year he organized the Star Film company and constructed a small glass-
enclosed studio on the grounds of his house at Montreuil, where he produced, directed,
photographed, and acted in more than 500 films between 1896 and 1913.  
The first Indian film released in India was “Pundlik Pundlik”, a silent film by Dadasaheb
Torne on 18 May 1912 at 'Coronation Cinematograph', Mumbai. Some have argued
that Pundalik does not deserve the honour of being called the first Indian feature film because
it was a photographic recording of a popular Marathi play about 1,500 feet or about 22
minutes only and because the cameraman—a man named Johnson—was a British national
and the film was processed in London. Another reason was that it was censored and shown
with a foreign film with its title rather than “Pundlik Pundlik”.  If the above picture is not of
printable quality check the below one.  
The credit of India’s first full length feature film or ‘Swadeshi film’ as said by Lokmanya
Tilak was made by Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, popularly known as Dadasaheb Phalke (also
known as the father of Indian cinema), India’s earliest film maker who inspired from the
elements of Sanskrit epics to make his first film ‘Raja Harishchandra’ released in 1913 based
on character from Shreemad Bhagwad Puran, which was a silent film. Dadasaheb Phalke
blended together the elements of Sanskrit Rasa, Natya Shastra and Folk stories in order to
write the screenplay, Dadasaheb was a scholar on India's languages and culture and was an
apprentice to great Painter Raja Ravi Verma. One day he watched ‘The Life of Christ’ and
started to envision Indian Gods on screen. He went to London to buy a Camera, learnt Film-
making there. After a heavy financial debt, this roadside magician started to shoot this film.
Because of social stigma the roles of females were played by men. This film remains a
landmark moment in the history of Indian cinema. Raja Harishchandra was a great
commercial success and was an inspiration for further such films.