Just to get back up to speed, here’s a quick rundown of the first couple of decades of cinema, with a few thoughts about some highlights.

1888-1893: Experiments

Cameras that could take multiple shots in quick succession were just being developed, and the earliest films are more snippets of experiments than anything else. Thomas Edison’s lab was a leader here, though if you delve into the details, he developed almost nothing related to movies – he bought innovations other inventors made and his associates (especially W.K.L. Dickson) worked to improve them.

Roundhay Garden Scene

Considered to be possibly the oldest moving picture, just a few seconds of people meandering around a garden.

Monkeyshines

There were three of these, experiments done in the Edison lab, of a lone figure. The first is very out of focus and ghostly, the second a bit more defined, and the third one has been lost (be suspicious of videos on YouTube claiming to be Monkeyshines #3). I find these have a magnetic quality, though, perhaps because of the ghostliness of them.

Pauvre Pierrot

An anomaly for 1892, a stop-motion film at a narrative level which wouldn’t be seen again for several years.

Blacksmith Scene

https://youtu.be/cm5g7CfXYYE

The beginning of the actualities that would be the bread and butter for Edison’s studio, most of them actually made by W.K.L. Dickson – he gets a start on them in 1893 with this one, but there are oh so many more to come.

1894-1896: Actualities

The Boxing Cats (Prof. Welton’s)

Actual boxing movies were very popular, a way for people to watch fights they couldn’t dream of attending in person. Their popularity is perhaps the reason for this humorous parody.

Imperial Japanese Dance

Some of Dickson’s actualities were of normal everyday scenes, but many were exotic things like this, showing a snapshot of a world most Americans would never see. I mean, most of them were staged and not authentic at all, but that was the intention anyway.

Dickson Experimental Sound Film

https://youtu.be/dccnVNdqtJk

Sound may not have taken over until the late 1920s, but Edison’s lab was experimenting with it as early as 1896! Edison, in fact, thought moving pictures were a novelty, intending to use them merely as supplements for his main product, the phonograph.

Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory

https://youtu.be/BO0EkMKfgJI

Edison had competition early on from the Lumière brothers in France, whose actualities have a naturalistic quality to them as opposed to Edison/Dickson’s studio/controlled feel.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

https://youtu.be/RjtXXypztyw

It’s an urban legend that moviegoers jumped up and ran in fear that the train would hit them, but this is still a very pleasing film due to the Lumière’s sense of composition and angle.

Tables Turned on the Gardener

https://youtu.be/IooPPi1YzkM

The Lumières try their hand at comedy, an unusual mode for them, but a delightful one. Many films from this era were copied by others since copyright law was not well-defined in terms of moving pictures, so there is also a version of this directed by Alice Guy. Dueling copycat films continued into the 1910s, and in some cases it’s almost impossible to tell for sure which version is which!

1896-1899: Méliès Ascendant

There are still a lot of solid actualities in this time period, and I’ve included a couple, but 1896 marks the year Georges Méliès sprang onto the scene. Méliès was a stage magician who realized he could stop the camera, change something, and start it again and it would look like magic. He’s justly honored for the invention of camera tricks, and the first several years of his career are tough to beat.

The House of the Devil

This is like a “greatest hits” of Méliès, or at least a precursor to several strands of his future career. Costumes? Check. Conjuring and transformation tricks? Check. A devilish character playing tricks on people? Check. It’s a lot of fun, and a really great introduction to Méliès.

Childish Quarrel

I find actualities like this pretty dang charming – just the Lumière children having a little spat, but it’s cute and realistic and somehow really refreshing. Like home movies from the dawn of (cinematic) time.

The Bewitched Inn

Among the earliest “haunted inn” films, a genre that would serve Méliès very well for many years, and remains my personal favorite type of film he did. The setup is simple – a weary traveler arrives at an inn and settles in for some much-needed rest, only to have his clothes and all the furniture in his room develop minds of their own and move about the room unbidden. This one particularly amuses me because even though he’s mad, he doesn’t seem scared or weirded out by all these things moving of their own volition. It makes it even funnier.

The Dancing Skeleton

Disney would make a major thing of animated dancing skeletons thirty years later, but they weren’t the first – this unusual film for the Lumières experimented with stop-motion very early.

The Four Troublesome Heads

A fairly typical but high-level Méliès trick film, with a magician main character pulling off his head repeatedly and putting it on a table until he has four heads (plus the one still on his body). It’s impressive trickery, and quite funny as well; maybe the best example of what Méliès the Magician envisioned for expanding magic onto the screen.

Cendrillon

https://youtu.be/XQh3PJnLKT0

When Méliès wasn’t doing magician tricks or stranding hapless travelers in haunted inns, he was most likely doing a longer (and often long-winded) costume drama, with lavish sets, costumes, and hand-coloring. These get pretty tedious later on, but this one is kind of amazing – no one else at this time was even attempting narratives at this level.

More?!

Now, this is far from all I watched from 1888-1899. Here’s my Flickchart list of the top 30 or so I watched. I picked ones for this recap that I felt were particularly notable, not necessarily the ones I liked the best, so they don’t match the top of this exactly. I ended up having seen 76 films from the 1880s and 1890s.