The First Movie Ever Made: A History of Film Firsts

by Will Wright Dec 3, 2007

Asking what was the first movie ever made is a bit like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. It's hard to give a definitive reply. The answer really depends on what you consider to be a movie. If you consider a set of moving pictures to be the first movie ever made, then Eadweard Muybridge's high-speed photographs of a horse galloping can rightfully claim the title. While these photos can be considered the first moving pictures, were they truly the first movie ever made?

The best we can do is make a case for the leading contenders and let you decide for yourself what actually is the first movie ever.

Eadweard Muybridge's groundbreaking motion photography was accomplished using multiple cameras and assembling the individual pictures into a motion picture. Muybridge was commissioned by Leland Stanford (California governor/ Stanford University) to scientifically answer a popularly debated question during this era - are all four of a horse's hooves ever off the ground at the same time while the horse is galloping? Muybridge's time-motion photography proved they indeed were, and the idea of motion photography was born.

In 1872, the former governor of California Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, hired Muybridge for some photographic studies. He had taken a position on a popularly debated question of the day — whether all four feet of a horse were off the ground at the same time while trotting. The same question had arisen about the actions of horses during a gallop. The human eye could not break down the action at the quick gaits of the trot and gallop. Up until this time, most artists painted horses at a trot with one foot always on the ground; and at a full gallop with the front legs extended forward and the hind legs extended to the rear, and all feet off the ground. Stanford sided with the assertion of “unsupported transit” in the trot and gallop, and decided to have it proven scientifically. Stanford sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question.

In 1872, Muybridge settled Stanford's question with a single photographic negative showing his Standardbred trotting horse Occident airborne at the trot. This negative was lost, but the image survives through woodcuts made at the time (the technology for printed reproductions of photographs was still being developed). He later did additional studies, as well as improving his camera for quicker shutter speed and faster film emulsions. By 1878, spurred on by Stanford to expand the experiments, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse at a trot; lantern slides have survived of this later work. Scientific American was among the publications at the time that carried reports of Muybridge's groundbreaking images.

Stanford also wanted a study of the horse at a gallop. Muybridge planned to take a series of photos on 15 June 1878 at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm. He placed numerous large glass-plate cameras in a line along the edge of the track; the shutter of each was triggered by a thread as the horse passed (in later studies he used a clockwork device to set off the shutters and capture the images). The path was lined with cloth sheets to reflect as much light as possible. He copied the images in the form of silhouettes onto a disc to be viewed in a machine he had invented, which he called a zoopraxiscope. This device was later regarded as an early movie projector, and the process as an intermediate stage toward motion pictures or cinematography.

The study is called Sallie Gardner at a Gallop or The Horse in Motion; it shows images of the horse with all feet off the ground. This did not take place when the horse's legs were extended to the front and back, as imagined by contemporary illustrators, but when its legs were collected beneath its body as it switched from “pulling” with the front legs to “pushing” with the back legs.

Early movie history is surrounded in the mists of time, as different competitors developed movie technology simultaneously. However, the Roundhay Garden Scene is thought to be the oldest surviving film on record.

The Roundhay Garden Scene was directed by the French inventor, Louis Le Prince and features some members of Le Prince's family playfully walking around a garden. The film lasts about two seconds.

To see what is considered to be the first movie ever made, click HERE.

Monkeyshines, No. 1 may very well be the first movie ever shot using a continuous strip of film. It was shot as a camera test by W.K.L. Dickson and William Heise, both of whom worked for Thomas Edison. Historians are unsure of the exact date this film was shot as it was filmed to be a camera test and not for commercial purposes.

The film depicts a blurry Edison co-worker goofing off for the camera. It was quickly followed by Monkeyshines No. 2 and 3.

If you would like to see Monkeyshines No. 1, click HERE.

This title goes to Fred Ott's Sneeze, which reportedly was the first movie ever made at Thomas Edison's Black Maria rooftop studio. The actual name of this movie is Record of a Sneeze, which was made in late 1893 and copyrighted on January 7, 1894.

This movie was made for the Kinetoscope and not intended to be projected.

You can view Fred Ott's Sneeze by clicking HERE. Personally, I think he was faking it.

Movies for mass public consumption are considered to be the invention of Auguste and Louis Lumiere. Edison's interest in movies was to sell his Kinetoscope machines, designed as individual 'peep shows“ in which a person looked into a box and saw a moving picture. The Lumiere brothers envisioned movies as public showings. The two approaches are like the difference between listening to an I-pod on your headphones versus sitting in a theater and listening to a concert.

The Lumiere Brothers held a private screening of projected movies on March 22, 1895. This test screening was a success. The Lumiere's then held their first paid, public screening of movies on December 28, 1895 in the basement the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. The basement was set up with a hundred seats. Thirty-three people paid attendance to witness the birth of cinema.

The program that night consisted of ten Lumiere shorts, each running approximately 46 seconds in length.

To watch the program of ten shorts shown that historic night, click HERE. (Please Note: this site is in French.) You will need Quicktime to watch this collection of short movies.

To watch the first short, Workers Leaving the Lumiere factory, click HERE.

While historians consider the Lumiere screening to be the first demonstration of movies as a commercial medium, they do so because of the projection system used by the Lumiere brothers. Almost two months earlier, two other brothers showed moving pictures to a paying audience using a different technology.

Max and Emil Sklandanowsky were German inventors who created the Bioskop, a different technology for showing moving pictures that involved an elaborate machine using two parallel film strips and two lenses which were able to flash pictures on a screen at 16 frames per second. This was enough of a frame rate to give the illusion of motion. On November 1, 1895, nearly two months before the Lumiere public showing, the Sklandanowsky brothers presented a moving picture show as part of the Berlin WIntergarten festival as part of a program of novelties. The moving pictures were a big hit and played to sold out shows in the ensuing weeks; however, the Lumiere projection system was technologically superior to the complicated arrangements necessary to show Bioskop pictures, which is why the Lumiere's are generally credited with the creation of the commercial medium we call movies.

So what was the first movie ever made? That's really up to you and how you define what a movie is.