Timeline of Influential Milestones and Turning Points in Film History

Timeline of Influential Milestones and Important Turning Points in Film History

1910s

Herein is a detailed timeline of the key film milestones, important turning points, and significant historical dates or events (organized by decade) that have had a significant influence on the world body of cinema and shaped its development. For more detailed accounts of many items, also see this site's extensive narratives on Film History by Decade, Film Milestones in Visual and Special Effects, and a comprehensive History of the Academy Awards.

Index to Timeline of Greatest Film Milestones and Turning Points

(by decade)

Pre-1900s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

1910s - Part 2

Year	Event and Significance
1913	"Hollywood"'s name was formally adopted. It replaced the East Coast as the center of the burgeoning movie industry.
1913	IMP's first feature-length film release - the first major American feature-length exploitation sex film - was the six-reel melodrama (and faux documentary) Traffic in Souls (1913) (aka While New York Sleeps). The film premiered in New York City on November 24, 1913 at Joe Weber's Theater. It was a "photo-drama" expose of white slavery (entrapment of young women into prostitution) at the turn of the century in NYC, although the film exploitatively promised steamy sex in its advertisements. This was one of the first films to understand that 'sex sells,' although its producers worried that a 'feature-length' film on any subject wouldn't be successful. It was the most expensive feature film of its time at $57,000, although its record earnings were $450,000.
1913	The American director D. W. Griffith, director of hundreds of short films, was credited with defining the art of motion pictures. In making his films, Griffith used filming techniques still used today. Such filming techniques included altering camera angles, using close-ups in a dramatic way, breaking scenes up into multiple shots, and more. Previously, filmmakers kept the camera in one position which was generally 12 feet away from the actors and at a right angle to the set. In 1913, Griffith finished his contract with Biograph films in NYC and left, because he wanted to make feature-length films. His production company became an autonomous production unit partner in Triangle Pictures Corporation with Keystone Studios and Thomas Ince.
1913	The first episode of the first cliff-hanger serial was released, for the multi-episode Selig Polyscope film The Adventures of Kathlyn, starring Kathlyn Williams as the heroine. Harold MacGrath's novel of the same name was released in early 1914, a few days after the theatrical film release (in late 1913), to be concurrently sold in bookstores. This was the first novel based on a movie, with stills taken from the film.
1913	The first feature-length western was Lawrence B. McGill's six-reel Arizona.
1913	The first film to feature an all-Native American cast was Hiawatha.
1913	John Randolph Bray's first animated film, The Artist's Dream (aka The Dachshund and the Sausage), the first animated cartoon made in the U.S. by modern techniques was the first to use 'cels' - transparent drawings laid over a fixed background.
1913	Denmark's Atlantis (1913), another ship-sinking story influenced by the Titanic tale - and filmed off the coast of New Zealand, was one of the first full-length films ever made - it had a 1 hour, 53 minute running time. This version of the story from director August Blom appeared to sink a full-scale boat for realism. It was a very realistic and naturalistic-looking Titanic film with a well-staged action scene of the ship's sinking. It was also one of the most popular films of the silent decades, and a worldwide smash hit.
1913-1914	French director Louis Feuillade’s Fantomas series popularized the crime serial.
1914	Young Cecil B. De Mille's first motion picture was The Squaw Man - it was the first feature-length film produced in Hollywood by a major film studio (it was distributed by Famous Players-Lasky Corporation). It was the first film to use an art director. However, it wasn't the first film to be made in Los Angeles.
1914	The start of the Great War (WWI) interrupted European motion-picture production and eventually brought it to a halt when there were signficant shortages of power and supplies. It never recovered its dominance in the marketplace. The American motion-picture industry thrived on business and viewership in the European market, using their profits to produce even bigger and better motion pictures.
1914	Lois Weber became the first woman to direct a feature film in the US - the Rex production of The Merchant of Venice, in which she also played the role of Portia. She co-directed with her husband Phillips Smalley (who played the part of Shylock).
1914	Charlie Chaplin's first film, Making a Living, was released. The silent comedian debuted his trademark mustached, baggy-pants 'Little Tramp' character in Kid Auto Races At Venice. It would become his most famous character. This was a year in which he made dozens of films and became filmdom's first great star.
1914	At Keystone, Mack Sennett made the first American feature-length comedy - Tillie's Punctured Romance, starring Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand and Charlie Chaplin.
1914	Winsor McCay created Gertie the Dinosaur, the first "interactive" animated cartoon and character, and the earliest example of combined 'live action' and animation. The brontosaurus dinosaur's appearance made Gertie the first animated cartoon star.
1914	Serials regularly added cliffhangers as one of their features, in multi-part serial films such as The Perils of Pauline with 20 episodes, featuring Pearl White as the 'damsel in distress' title character.
1914	The first feature-length color film, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, in Kinemacolor, premiered in London.
1914	Grand cinema houses were regularly replacing cheaper nickelodeons. For example, the first movie "palace", The Strand, opened at Times Square in New York with seating for 3,300.
1914	Bert Williams starred in Darktown Jubilee, one of the first movies to use an African-American actor in blackface, rather than using a white person in the same role in blackface.
1914	The influential three-hour Italian silent film from Giovanni Pastrone, Cabiria, was an early example of spectacular and monumental epic film-making. It laid the pattern and groundwork for future big-budget feature-length films (by the likes of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille). Its story of 3rd century BC Ancient Rome included sequences of the eruption of Mt. Etna and Hannibal's crossing of the Alps with elephants (with an early example of tracking shots). The landmark film was shot on location in North Africa, Sicily and the Italian Alps, and reportedly contained the first use of trucking shots (which became known as 'Cabiria' movements). It was also the first film to be screened at the White House.
1914	Paramount Pictures was founded in Los Angeles as a start-up company in order to release the films of Jesse Lasky and his Famous Players Company, and soon became the first successful nation-wide film distributor. More changes would occur involving Paramount in 1916.
1914	Charlie Chaplin, a silent actor and pantomimist, was recruited to Keystone Studios from an English variety act, and became Mack Sennett's most important discovery. Chaplin made 35 short Keystone films for Mack Sennett in 1914. In Chaplin's second picture, the 11-minute Kid Auto Races in Venice, he invented his immortal, trademark Little Tramp character as he attended a 'baby-cart' race in Venice, California.
1914	A 1912 religious production by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (the future Jehovah's Witnesses) and Charles Taze Russell, titled The Photo-Drama of Creation (aka the Eureka-Drama in its abbreviated version), was the first major screenplay which incorporated synchronized sound (recorded speech), moving film, and magic lantern color slides. Since its run-time was 8 hours (480 minutes), the b/w show (with some hand-colored slides), providing a religious survey from the time of Creation to the end of the Millenium (the 1,000 year reign of Jesus Christ), was divided into 4-part sets. Multiple copies of sets were made so that it could conceivably be shown in 80 different locations at the same time. It was introduced at a premiere in January of 1914 in New York, and was later screened that summer in Germany. By the end of the year, it was estimated that 9 million people had seen the production in North America, Europe, and Australia.
1915	Pioneering film-maker D. W. Griffith's technically brilliant, 3-hour Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation, premiered with a phenomenal ticket price of $2 -- it was based on The Clansman, a novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr. Griffith's film popularized the expressive close-up, naturalistic acting, the flashback and other elements (i.e., exciting cross-cutting, a last minute rescue) that endure today as the structural principles of narrative filmmaking. It introduced the historical epic and period piece as a film genre and defined the language of film. Although it was the most extravagant and expensive film up to that time (at a budget of approximately $110,000), it was also highly controversial because of its racist theme. It was the first US motion picture shown in the White House, where President Woodrow Wilson described it as "writing history with lightning."
1915	Producer/director Thomas H. Ince introduced a 'factory system' - a method that would be used to mass produce films. Different films in various stages of production would be systematically rotated through his movie studio. Ince appointed a group of supervisors called producers who each had control over a certain number of pictures. Sometimes, ten or more movies were being produced in his studios at one time.
1915	Charlie Chaplin's first masterpiece, The Tramp, produced by the Essanay Company in Chicago, showed the early development of his well-known character with baggy pants, bowler hat, walking cane, funny stride, and oversized shoes.
1915	The Bell & Howell 2709 movie camera allowed directors to film close-ups without physically moving the camera.
1915	William Fox led a successful fight against Thomas Edison's Motion Pictures Patents Company (the Edison Trust). A federal court declared the Patents Company (and its subsidiary, the General Film Company) to be an illegal restraint on trade and an illegal monopoly, and fined over $20 million. It was soon officially dissolved and disbanded in the face of anti-trust legislation. The trust's appeal was dismissed in 1918.
1915	In Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, the Supreme Court ruled that states may censor films, encouraging scrutiny of movies during future decades.
1915	Theda Bara (an anagram for "Arab Death", but born as Theodosia Goodman) starred in A Fool There Was, personifying the "vamp," the female temptress and sex symbol, and became an overnight sensation. She was one of the first "sex symbols" or stars.
1915	Writer Louis Feuillade directed the epic, nightmarish crime serial The Vampires (aka Les Vampires, Fr.), an almost seven-hour silent film masterpiece (in 10 episodes of varying lengths) that told about an exotic, cross-dressing Parisian gang leader and temptress named Irma Vep (an anagram for Vampire) played by Musidora, whose group of gangsters terrorized the city. It was shot on location in Paris during the war years, and was banned from showings because of its depictions of crime.
1915	Prolific American film director Lois Weber released her feature-length lyrical parable The Hypocrites. She played multiple roles in the production of the film - as actress, director, writer, and producer. The film was controversial for its depiction of full female nudity. The character of the Naked Truth (literally a nude woman), reminded people of their hypocritical greed for money, sex and power. The film was also praised for its use of multiple exposures and complex film editing.
1915	The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation was founded in Boston, Massachusetts. The company pioneered the development of color film processes known as Technicolor, beginning to be regularly seen in Hollywood films in the 1920s and continuing for many decades.
1916	D.W. Griffith's expensive follow-up film to The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the monumental historical and dramatic epic Intolerance, told with parallel cross-cutting between its four stories, symbolically linked by the image of Lillian Gish rocking a child. Each story told of intolerance and injustice in four different historical periods -- a Modern Story, a French story, a Babylonian story (with the largest set in film history up to its time), and a Biblical story. Its film-making techniques would be adopted and displayed in the works of future film-makers, such as Eisenstein and Coppola. With a budget of almost $2 million (the most expensive film of all time), it became the first multi-million dollar box-office 'bomb' in film history.
1916	The Jesse L. Lasky Company merged with its friendly rival, Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Film Company, to form the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. The corporation consolidated its production and distribution divisions with Paramount, and audiences began seeing "Paramount Pictures".
1916	Samuel Goldfish (later renamed Samuel Goldwyn) and Edgar Selwyn established Goldwyn Company.
1916	The salary of Charlie Chaplin, filmdom's first major star, went from $125 to $10,000 weekly, when he signed on with the Mutual Film Corporation.
1916	The first autobiography of a movie star was silent screen star Pearl White's Just Me, published in 1916..
1916	The earliest vampire feature film was director Arthur Robison's German silent film Nachte des Grauens (1916), aka Night of Terror, with strange, vampire-like people.
1916	Lois Weber's controversial drama Where Are My Children? was about the subject of abortion, in a story about a district attorney (Tyrone Power in an early role) who discovered that his wife had used illegal abortion services.
1917	The first African-American owned studio, the pioneering The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, was founded.
1917	Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope to streamline the frame-by-frame copying process. It was a device used to overlay drawings on live-action film.
1917	The first feature-length motion picture produced in two-strip Technicolor in the US was The Gulf Between. It was also the third feature-length color movie. It is considered a lost film, with only a few frames surviving.
1917	Famed westerns director John Ford made his first film, the two or three-reel The Tornado, now considered a lost film.
1918	The independent African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux formed the Micheaux Film and Book Corporation. His first feature films were released the following year.
1918	The four Warner brothers, Jack, Albert, Harry and Samuel, opened their first West Coast studio.
1918	The first Tarzan film, the black and white Tarzan of the Apes, premiered at the Broadway Theater in New York, with the first actor to portray Edgar Rice Burroughs' 'Lord of the Jungle', Elmo Lincoln. It was the first film adaptation with the Tarzan character, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' original novel Tarzan of the Apes.
1918	The US Supreme Court ordered the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), known as the "Edison Trust", to disband.
1918	Early cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay's 12-minute propagandistic, documentary-style The Sinking of the Lusitania, an animation landmark, was the first serious re-enactment of an historical event - the torpedoing of the RMS Lusitania by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, resulting in the loss of almost 2,000 passengers. It was one of the earliest films to utilize cel animation.
1919	Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford established United Artists in an attempt to control their own work. UA would distribute and produce their own films. Pickford starred in Daddy-Long-Legs, her first film as an independent producer.
1919	The technique of test screenings of films to obtain audience feedback was pioneered by Harold Lloyd.
1919	Producer/director Oscar Micheaux released his first film The Homesteader, starring pioneering African-American actress Evelyn Preer, thereby becoming the first African-American to produce and direct a motion picture feature film. He also directed the feature-length Within Our Gates (1920) the following year, his earliest surviving directorial effort.
1919	Walt Disney teamed with Ub Iwerks to form Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists (later known as Ub Iwerks), to create cartoon animations.
1919	Germany's silent expressionistic landmark classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, was released - by director Robert Wiene. It told about a ghost-like hypnotist-therapist in a carnival named Dr. Caligari (Werner Kraus) who called from a state of sleep his performing somnabulist (and haunted murderer) -- a pale-skinned, lanky, black leotard-wearing Cesare (Conrad Veidt). The shadowy, disturbing, distorted, and dream-nightmarish quality of the macabre and stylistic 'Caligari,' with twisted alleyways, lopsided doors, cramped rooms, overhanging buildings, and skewed cityscapes, was shot in a studio. It was brought to Hollywood in the 1920s, and later influenced the classic period of horror films in the 1930s - introducing many standard horror film conventions.
1919	Max and Dave Fleischer's "Out of the Inkwell" series premiered, introducing KoKo the Clown, one of the first animated characters.
1919	Felix the Cat first appeared. Originated by young animator Otto Messmer, the (unnamed Felix) cat's first two cartoons were the five-minute Feline Follies (1919) and Musical Mews (1919), when Felix was known only as "Master Tom." Feline Follies was a segment of the Paramount Magazine, a semi-weekly compilation of short film segments that included animated cartoons. By the third Felix cartoon, The Adventures of Felix (1919), Felix took his permanent name.
1919	Different From the Others (Germany) (aka Anders als die Andern) by director Richard Oswald was reportedly the first representation of male homosexuality ("the third sex") in a feature-length film, and the first screen depiction of a gay bar (with gay males and butch females) - it was notable for sympathetically portraying homosexuality; the two ill-fated lovers were prominent pianist Paul Korner (Conrad Veidt) and his young music student, Kurt (Fritz Schulz); the film had a tragic ending (suicide for Korner) due to the effects of blackmail (threats of exposure), jail time for violating anti-homosexuality statutes, and the social stigma of being outed; the film was banned by the Nazis and all prints were ordered destroyed, although one incomplete print surfaced; the film's themes were repeated in Victim (1961, UK), with Dirk Bogarde..