On 28 December 1895, in a basement room of the Grand Café in Paris, a few dozen people paid one franc each to watch moving pictures thrown onto a screen. The program, by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, showed workers leaving a factory, a baby being fed and a wall being knocked down. Each film lasted under a minute. The Lumière brothers' Cinématographe, a machine that could both film and project, gave the first commercial public screening in Paris in December 1895, the event usually counted as the birth of cinema. (In Berlin, the Skladanowsky brothers had projected films a few weeks earlier, so "first" depends on how you count.)

Others were close behind. Thomas Edison's company had already built the Kinetoscope, a cabinet in which one person at a time watched a short film through a peephole; much of the engineering was done by his assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. Projection won because a whole room could watch at once, which made movies a shared public experience rather than a private one.

Recording and inventing

The Lumières made actualities, short records of real life. A popular legend says that viewers of their Arrival of a Train fled in terror as the engine approached, though historians find little evidence for it. A different path was opened by Georges Méliès, a stage magician who used camera tricks such as the stop trick to create fantasy, most famously in A Trip to the Moon (1902). Stop the camera, remove an actor, start again, and the actor vanishes. Film theorists still describe cinema as torn between these two impulses: recording the world and inventing new ones.

Learning to tell stories

The earliest films were single shots. Within a decade filmmakers learned to join shots into stories. Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), made for Edison's company, cut between a robbery, a chase and a posse, and ended with a bandit firing straight at the audience. From about 1905, storefront theaters called nickelodeons, charging five cents, spread across American cities by the thousands. Movies became the cheap entertainment of workers and immigrants, partly because a film without spoken words needed no English.

The most influential American film of the era is also one of the most troubling. D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) combined ambitious technique with a racist story that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. It ran about three hours, staged huge battle scenes and used cross-cutting to build suspense. The NAACP organized protests, and several cities banned it. The film is a hard lesson that skill and moral content are separate questions, and that a powerful technique can serve a harmful message.

Silent was never silent

Silent films were almost always shown with live music, from a lone pianist to a full orchestra. Dialogue appeared on intertitles, printed cards cut between shots. In Japan, a benshi stood beside the screen to narrate the film and voice its characters, and popular benshi were stars in their own right. Because intertitles could be swapped for cards in another language, silent films crossed borders easily. Charlie Chaplin's Tramp and Buster Keaton's deadpan stunts in The General (1926) were understood worldwide. In Germany, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) used painted, twisted sets to show a disturbed mind, a style known as Expressionism.

The coming of sound

The Jazz Singer (1927), released by Warner Bros., was the first feature film with synchronized dialogue and singing, though most of it still used intertitles. Its star Al Jolson, who performed in blackface makeup in parts of the film, ad-libbed a line that audiences took as a promise: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!" Within a few years Hollywood stopped making silent features. Cameras were first locked in soundproof booths, some stars' careers ended, and films now needed dubbing or subtitles to travel. Chaplin held out, making City Lights (1931) with music and effects but no spoken dialogue.

Worked example: A Trip to the Moon

Watch A Trip to the Moon with the tools of Level 1. The camera never moves: almost every scene is a single long shot, framed like the view from a good theater seat. Méliès thought like a stage director, building painted sets and arranging actors across the width of the frame. His magic happens in editing, through stop tricks, hidden splices and dissolves, so that explorers turn a moon creature into a puff of smoke.

The one famous exception is the shot in which the Moon's face grows larger until a space capsule lands in its eye. That push toward the face works almost like an early close-up, and it became one of the most copied images in film history.

Copying is part of the story. Prints of the film were duplicated and sold in the United States without payment, including by Edison's company, so Méliès opened an American office to protect his work. He went bankrupt in the 1910s and later sold toys and sweets at a Paris railway station before admirers rediscovered him. A hand-colored print, long thought lost, turned up in Barcelona in 1993 and was restored for screening in 2011. The case shows early film as art, as a commodity easy to pirate, and as something fragile that survives only when someone chooses to keep it.