List of years in film

This page indexes the individual year in film pages. Each year is annotated with its significant events.

1826–1899

1826 – View from the Window at Le Gras, Nicéphore Niépce takes the oldest known extant photograph.
1833 – Since 1833 onwards, 'animated films' or rather animated effects began to be made with the use of choreutoscopes, phénakisticopes, zoetropes, and praxinoscopes.
1865 – Revolving, self-portrait by French photographer Nadar. Around 1865 he produced this series of self-portraits consisting of 12 frames showing different angles of him sitting still in a chair. Except for a smile in 1 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 which Marey and Muybridge started to experiment with 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 using Janssen's 'photographic revolver' photograph the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun. They were purportedly taken in Japan. It is the oldest film on IMDb.

Before 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.

1878 –
* The Horse in Motion; British photographer Eadweard 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 black and white animated known 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 lens from Le Prince's camera. Pictures from the film were sent in a letter dated August 18, 1887 to his 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 was made. According to film historian Charles Musser the first woman to appear in front of an Edison motion picture camera was in the film. She may have been the first woman to appear in a motion picture in the United States. It was directed and produced by William K.L. Dickson, who was the Scottish inventor credited with the invention of the motion picture camera under the employ of Edison.
*The Dickson Experimental Sound Film made by William 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 ten 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 more 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 which 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 and filmed the "Flower of Persia" play.
1899 – The Dreyfus Affair and Cendrillon was released by Georges Méliès; earliest known use of a color motion picture film footage by Edward Raymond Turner