List of years in film

• [|1820s–1890s]
• [|1900s], [|1910s], [|1920s], [|1930s], [|1940s]
• [|1950s], [|1960s], [|1970s], [|1980s], [|1990s],
• [|2000s], [|2010s], [|2020s]

  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.

• 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 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

  1900–1909

• 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

  1910–1919

• 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

  1920–1929

• 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 – 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