This page indexes the individual year in film pages. Each year is annotated with its significant events. __NOTOC__ 1820s–1890s 1900s–1925 1926–1975 1976–2025 2026–present
1826–1899
1826 – View from the Window at Le Gras; Nicéphore Niépce takes the oldest known extant photograph. 1833 – Since 1833 and onward, "animated films"—or, rather, animated effects—began to be created with the use of choreutoscopes, phénakisticopes, zoetropes, and praxinoscopes. 1865 – Revolving, self-portrait by French photographer Nadar. Around 1865, Nadar produced Revolving—a series of self-portraits consisting of 12 frames showing different angles of him sitting still in a chair. Except for a smile in one frame, not even a fold in his jacket or a single hair seems to change between the different angles. The portrait could be regarded as a predecessor to the chronophotography, with which Marey and Muybridge started to experiment more than 10 years later. As the sequence revolves around space, rather than time, it is even more related to the bullet-time effect popularized by The Matrix about 135 years later. There is no clue if more than one camera was used in the shoot, but it is certainly well-executed. 1874 – Passage de Vénus, first precedent of a film. On December 9, 1874, French astronomer Pierre Janssen and Brazilian engineer Francisco Antônio de Almeida created Passage de Vénus using Janssen's "photographic revolver" to photograph the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun. The photographs were purportedly taken in Japan. It is the oldest film on IMDb.
Before British photographer Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 work, photo sequences were not recorded in real-time because light-sensitive emulsions needed a long exposure time. The sequences were basically made as time-lapse recordings. It is possible that people at the time actually viewed such photographs come to life with a phénakisticope or zoetrope. (This certainly happened with Muybridge's work.)
1878 – The Horse in Motion; Muybridge took a series of "automatic electro-photographs" depicting the movement of a horse. He shot the photographs in June 1878. An additional card reprinted the single image of the horse "Occident" trotting at high speed, which had previously been published by Muybridge in 1877. The most famous of these electro-photographs is "Sallie Gardner," taken on June 19, 1878. Railroad tycoon Leland Stanford hired Muybridge to settle the questions of whether a galloping horse ever has all four of its feet off the ground. Muybridge's photos showed the horse with all four feet off the ground. He went on a lecture tour showing his photographs on a moving-image device he called the zoopraxiscope. Le singe musicien, first animated movie using the praxinoscope. 1885 – American inventors George Eastman and Hannibal Goodwin each invented a sensitized celluloid base roll photographic film to replace the glass plates then in use. L'homme Machine was directed by French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey; it is the oldest known black and white animated film. 1886 – Louis Le Prince was granted an American dual-patent for a 16-lens device, which combines a motion picture camera with a projector. 1887 – Man Walking Around a Corner, directed by French inventor Louis Le Prince; it is the oldest known film. Although, according to David Wilkinson's 2015 documentary The First Film, it is not film, but a series of photographs, 16 in all, each taken from one of the lenses from Le Prince's camera. Pictures from the film were sent in a letter dated August 18, 1887, to Le Prince's wife. Le Prince later developed the one-lens camera, and, on October 14, 1888, he finally made the world's first moving image, Roundhay Garden Scene. 1888 – Roundhay Garden Scene, the earliest surviving film by French inventor Louis Le Prince; is shot in Leeds, West Yorkshire, in England with a groundbreaking 20 frames per second. Other short films made at the same time were Accordion Player and Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge. 1889 – Eastman Kodak is the first company to begin commercial production of film on a flexible transparent base, celluloid. 1891 – Dickson Greeting, Men Boxing, Newark Athlete 1892 – Le Clown et ses chiens, Pauvre Pierrot, Un bon bock; first projected animated films released by Émile Reynaud 1893 – Blacksmiths, the first film shown publicly on the Kinetoscope, a system given to Edison; Thomas Edison created "America's First Film Studio", Black Maria 1894 – Carmencita, directed by William K.L. Dickson, who was the Scottish inventor credited with the invention of the motion picture camera under the employ of Edison. According to film historian Charles Musser, the film featured the first woman to appear in front of an Edison motion picture camera, who may have also been the first woman to appear in a motion picture in the United States. The Dickson Experimental Sound Film, made by Dickson in late 1894 or early 1895, is the first known film with live-recorded sound and appears to be the first motion picture made for the Kinetophone, the proto-sound-film system developed by Dickson and Edison. 1895 – In Paris on December 28, 1895, the Lumière brothers screen 10 films at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris making the first commercial public screening ever made, marked traditionally as the birth date of the film. Gaumont, the oldest ever film studio, was founded by inventor Léon Gaumont. 1896 – L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, one of the six additional short films released by the Lumière brothers; Pathé-Frères is founded; Le Manoir du diable (The Haunted Castle) is a French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès, which depicts a pantomimed sketch in the style of a theatrical comic fantasy. 1897 – Vitagraph is founded in New York City 1898 –The Astronomer's Dream, The Cavalier's Dream, Photographing a Ghost, Santa Claus 1898 – Shinin No Sosei and Bake Jizo were made by Ejiro Hatta, some of the first films in Japan that were ghost stories. Salvador Toscano created the film "Don Juan Tenorio", which is considered one of the first films in Mexico and perhaps the first fictional film in Mexico, as South America, as a continent, focuses on making documentaries in its early film history. 1898 – Hiralal Sen was inspired by and filmed the play the Flower of Persia 1899 – The Dreyfus Affair and Cendrillon (first screen adaptation of the traditional fairy tale Cinderella) was released by Georges Méliès; earliest known use of a color motion picture film footage by Edward Raymond Turner
1900–1925
1900 – Sherlock Holmes Baffled, Joan of Arc 1901 – Blue Beard, Star Theatre, Stop Thief!, Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost 1902 – A Trip to the Moon, The Coronation of Edward VII, The Little Match Seller 1903 – The Great Train Robbery, The Infernal Cauldron, Life of an American Fireman, The Kingdom of the Fairies 1904 – The Impossible Voyage; Titanus was founded 1905 – Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; or, Held for Ransom 1906 – The Story of the Kelly Gang, The Merry Frolics of Satan, The '?' Motorist, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces; Nordisk Film was founded 1907 – That Fatal Sneeze, Ben-Hur, The Eclipse, or the Courtship of the Sun and Moon, L'Enfant prodigue 1908 – Fantasmagorie, The Taming of the Shrew, The Thieving Hand, The Assassination of the Duke of Guise, The Adventures of Dollie; Pathé News invented the newsreel 1909 – The Country Doctor, A Corner in Wheat, Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy, Les Misérables; 35 mm film becomes a filmmaking standard across the world; first public screening of Kinemacolor 1910 – Frankenstein, In Old California, In the Border States, Jean the Match-Maker, White Fawn's Devotion 1911 – L'Inferno, Baron Munchausen's Dream, Defence of Sevastopol, The Lonedale Operator 1912 – The Cameraman's Revenge, Falling Leaves, Independenţa României, The Musketeers of Pig Alley, Richard III; Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures, Hollywood's two oldest major film studios, were founded; the British Board of Film Classification was established 1913 – The Bangville Police, Fantômas, Barney Oldfield's Race for a Life, Raja Harishchandra, The Student Of Prague; invention of the film trailer 1914 – The Perils of Pauline, Tillie's Punctured Romance, Judith of Bethulia, Gertie the Dinosaur 1915 – The Birth of a Nation, The Tramp, Les Vampires, The Cheat 1916 – Intolerance, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Judex; invention of Technicolor 1917 – Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, A Man There Was, The Immigrant 1918 – The Outlaw and His Wife, Stella Maris, Mickey, Shifting Sands, Shoulder Arms 1919 – Blind Husbands, Broken Blossoms, True Heart Susie, Dalagang Bukid, Male and Female, Wagon Tracks; United Artists was founded 1920 – The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Way Down East, The Penalty, The Mark of Zorro, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Golem: How He Came into the World, Within Our Gates 1921 – The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Kid, The Phantom Carriage, Fool's Paradise, The Sheik, The Mechanical Man, Destiny, The Three Musketeers 1922 – Nosferatu, Foolish Wives, The Little Rascals, Blood and Sand, Nanook of the North, Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler; the Motion Picture Association of America was established 1923 – Safety Last!, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Ten Commandments; Warner Bros. Pictures and Walt Disney Pictures were founded; 16 mm film was introduced 1924 – The Thief of Bagdad, Greed, The Hands Of Orlac, Sherlock Jr., The Last Laugh, He Who Gets Slapped, Die Nibelungen; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Columbia Pictures were founded 1925 – The Gold Rush, The Battleship Potemkin, The Big Parade, The Phantom of the Opera, Ben-Hur, The Lost World, The Pleasure Garden
1926–1975
1926 – The General, Don Juan, The Black Pirate, Faust 1927 – The Jazz Singer, Metropolis, Wings, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Napoléon, The King of Kings 1928 – The Man Who Laughs, Mickey Mouse, Lights of New York, The Circus, The Singing Fool, In Old Arizona; RKO Pictures was founded 1929 – Blackmail, Bosko, Un Chien Andalou, Pandora's Box, Man with a Movie Camera, The Broadway Melody, Disraeli, The Virginian; 1st Academy Awards 1930 – Looney Tunes, King of Jazz, All Quiet on the Western Front, Earth, Journey's End, The Blue Angel, The Bat Whispers, Murder!, Animal Crackers, Hell's Angels, The Big House, The Big Trail 1931 – Frankenstein, Dracula, The Champ, The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, Cimarron, M, City Lights, The Front Page, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1932 – Shanghai Express, Scarface, Tarzan the Ape Man, The Mummy, Freaks, The Music Box, Trouble in Paradise, The Sign of the Cross, Grand Hotel; 8mm film was introduced 1933 – King Kong, Gold Diggers of 1933, The Invisible Man, 42nd Street, Duck Soup, Sons of the Desert, She Done Him Wrong 1934 – L'Atalante, It Happened One Night, The Thin Man, Cleopatra, The Goddess, Imitation of Life, Manhattan Melodrama, The Black Cat, Bright Eyes 1935 – A Night at the Opera, Bride of Frankenstein, The 39 Steps, Top Hat, Mutiny on the Bounty; 20th Century Fox and The Rank Organisation was founded 1936 – Modern Times, Swing Time, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Flash Gordon, My Man Godfrey, The Great Ziegfeld, Come and Get It, Romeo and Juliet, Camille 1937 – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Life of Emile Zola, La Grande Illusion, Pépé le Moko, The Prisoner of Zenda, Lost Horizon 1938 – Bringing Up Baby, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Alexander Nevsky, Jezebel, A Christmas Carol, Boys Town, Angels with Dirty Faces 1939 – Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, The Rules of the Game, Sherlock Holmes, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Of Mice and Men, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach