Color was delayed until 1935, the wide screen until the early fifties.

Movement itself was the chief and often the only attraction of the primitive movies of the nineties.
Each film consisted of fifty feet, which gives a running time of about one minute on the screen.
As long as audiences came to see the movement, there seemed little reason to adventure further.
Motion-picture exhibitions took place in stores in a general atmosphere like that of the penny arcade which can still be found in such urban areas as Times Square.
Brief snips of actual events were shown: parades, dances, street scenes.
The sensational and frightening enjoyed popularity: a train rushes straight at the audience, or a great wave threatens to break over the seats.
An early Edison production was The Execution Of Mary, Queen Of Scots.
The unfortunate queen mounted the scaffold;
the headsman swung his axe;
the head dropped off;
end of film.
An early film by a competitor of the Wizard of Menlo Park simply showed a long kiss performed by two actors of the contemporary stage.

In the field of entertainment there is no spur to financial daring so effective as audience boredom, and the first decade of the new device was not over before audiences began staying away in large numbers from the simple-minded, one-minute shows.
In response, the industry allowed the discovery of the motion picture as a form of fiction and thus gave the movies the essential form they have had to this day.
Despite the sheer beauty and spectacle of numerous documentaries, art films, and travelogues, despite the impressive financial success of such a recent development as Cinerama, the movies are at heart a form of fiction, like the play, the novel, or the short story.
Moreover, the most artistically successful of the nonfiction films have invariably borrowed the narrative form from the fiction feature.
Thus such great American documentaries as The River and The Plow That Broke The Plains were composed as visual stories rather than as illustrated lectures.
The discovery that movies are a form of fiction was made in the early years of this century and it was made chiefly by two men, a French magician, Georges Melies, and an American employee of Edison, Edwin S. Porter.
Of the two, Porter is justly the better known, for he went far beyond the vital finding of fiction for films to take the first step toward fashioning a language of film, toward making the motion picture the intricate, efficient time machine that it has remained since, even in the most inept hands.

Narrative time and film time

Melies, however, out of his professional instincts as a magician, discovered and made use of a number of illusionary techniques that remain part of the vocabulary of film.
One of these is the "dissolve", which makes possible a visually smooth transition from scene to scene.
As the first scene begins to fade, the succeeding scene begins to appear.
For a moment or two, both scenes are present simultaneously, one growing weaker, one growing stronger.
In a series of fairy tales and fantasies, Melies demonstrated that the film is superbly equipped to tell a straightforward story, with beginning, middle and end, complications, resolutions, climaxes, and conclusions.
Immediately, the film improved and it improved because in narrative it found a content based on time to complement its own unbreakable connection with time.
Physically, a movie is possible because a series of images is projected one at a time at such a speed that the eye "remembers" the one that has gone before even as it registers the one now appearing.
Linking the smoothly changing images together, the eye itself endows them with the illusion of movement.
The "projection" time of painting and sculpture is highly subjective, varying from person to person and even varying for a given person on different occasions.
So is the time of the novel.
The drama in the theater and the concert in the hall both have a fixed time, but the time is fixed by the director and the players, the conductor and the instrumentalists, subject, therefore, to much variation, as record collectors well know.
The time of the motion picture is fixed absolutely.
The film consists of a series of still, transparent photographs, or "frames", 35-mm.-wide.
Each frame comes between the light and the lens and is individually projected on the screen, at the rate, for silent movies, of 16 frames per second, and, for sound films, 24 frames per second.
This is the rate of projection;
it is also the rate of photographing.
Time is built into the motion picture, which cannot exist without time.
Now time is also the concern of the fictional narrative, which is, at its simplest, the story of an action with, usually, a beginning, a middle, and an end -- elements which demand time as the first condition for their existence.
The "moving" picture of the train or the wave coming at the audience is, to be sure, more intense than a still picture of the same subject, but the difference is really one of degree;
the cinematic element of time is merely used to increase the realism of an object which would still be reasonably realistic in a still photo.
In narrative, time is essential, as it is in film.
Almost everything about the movies that is peculiarly of the movies derives from a tension created and maintained between narrative time and film time.
This discovery of Melies was vastly more important than his sometimes dazzling, magician's tricks produced on film.

It was Porter, however, who produced the very first movie whose name has lived on through the half century of film history that has since ensued.
The movie was The Great Train Robbery and its effects on the young industry and art were all but incalculable.
Overnight, for one thing, Porter's film multiplied the standard running time of movies by ten.
The Great Train Robbery is a one-reel film.
One reel -- from eight to twelve minutes -- became the standard length from the year of Robbery, 1903, until Griffith shattered that limit forever with Birth Of A Nation in 1915.
The reel itself became and still is the standard of measure for the movies.

The material of the Porter film is simplicity itself;
much of it has continued to be used over the years and the heart of it -- good guys and bad guys in the old West -- pretty well dominated television toward the end of the 1950's.
A band of robbers enters a railroad station, overpowers and ties up the telegraph operator, holds up the train and escapes.
A posse is formed and pursues the robbers, who, having made their escape, are whooping it up with some wild, wild women in a honky-tonk hide-out.
The robbers run from the hide-out, take cover in a wooded declivity, and are shot dead by the posse.
As a finale is appended a close-up of one of the band taking aim and firing his revolver straight at the audience.

All this is simple enough, but in telling the story Porter did two important things that had not been done before.
Each scene is shot straight through, as had been the universal custom, from a camera fixed in a single position, but in the outdoor scenes, especially in the capture and destruction of the outlaws, Porter's camera position breaks, necessarily, with the camera position standard until then, which had been, roughly, that of a spectator in a center orchestra seat at a play.
The plane of the action in the scene is not parallel with the plane of the film in the camera or on the screen.
If the change, at first sight, seems minor, we may recall that it took the Italian painters about two hundred years to make an analogous change, and the Italian painters, by universal consent, were the most brilliant group of geniuses any art has seen.
In that apparently simple shift Porter opened the way to the sensitive use of the camera as an instrument of art as well as a mechanical recording device.

He did more than that.
He revealed the potential value of the "cut" as the basic technique in the art of the film.
Cutting, of course, takes place automatically in the creation of a film.
The meaning of the word is quite physical, to begin with.
The physical film is cut with a knife at the end of one complete sequence, and the cut edge is joined physically, by cement, to the cut edge of the beginning of the next sequence.
If, as a home movie maker, you shoot the inevitable footage of your child taking its first steps, you have merely recorded an historical event.
If, in preparing that shot for the inevitable showing to your friends, you interrupt the sequence to paste in a few frames of the child's grandmother watching this event, you have begun to be an artist in film;
you are employing the basic technique of film;
you are cutting.

This is what Porter did.
As the robbers leave the looted train, the film suddenly cuts back to the station, where the telegrapher's little daughter arrives with her father's dinner pail only to find him bound on the floor.
She dashes around in alarm.
The two events are taking place at the same time.
Time and space have both become cinematic.
We leap from event to event -- including the formation of the posse -- even though the events, in "reality" are taking place not in sequence but simultaneously, and not near each other but at a considerable distance.

The "chase" as a standard film device probably dates from The Great Train Robbery, and there is a reason for the continued popularity of the device.
The chase in itself is a narrative;
it presumes both speed and urgency and it demands cutting -- both from pursued to pursuer and from stage to stage of the journey of both.
The simple, naked idea of one man chasing another is of its nature better fitted for the film than it is for any other form of fiction.
The cowboy films, the cops and robbers films, and the slapstick comedy films culminating in an insane chase are not only catering to what critics may assume to be a vulgar taste for violence;
these films and these sequences are also seeking out -- instinctively or by design -- the peculiarly cinematic elements of narrative.

The creator of the art of the film: D.W. Griffith

There still remained the need for one great film artist to explore the full potential of the new form and to make it an art.
The man was D.W. Griffith.
When he came to the movies -- more or less by accident -- they were still cheap entertainment capable of enthralling the unthinking for an idle few minutes.
In about seven years Griffith either invented or first realized the possibilities of virtually every resource at the disposal of the film maker.
Before he was forty Griffith had created the art of the film.

Not that there had not been attempts, mostly European, to do exactly that.
But in general the European efforts to make an art of the entertainment had ignored the slowly emerging language of the film itself.
Staggeringly condensed versions of famous novels and famous plays were presented.
Great actors and actresses -- the most notable being Sarah Bernhardt -- were hired to repeat their stage performances before the camera.
In all of this extensive and expensive effort, the camera was downgraded to the status of recording instrument for art work produced elsewhere by the actor or by the author.
The phonograph today, for all its high fidelity and stereophonic sound, is precisely what the early art purveyors in the movies wished to make of the camera.
Not surprisingly, this approach did not work.
The effort produced a valuable record of stage techniques in the early years of the century and some interesting records of great theater figures who would otherwise be only names.
But no art at all was born of the art effort in the early movies.