The first paying audience in 1895
On 28 December 1895 the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, showed ten short films to a paying audience in a café in Paris. Each lasted less than a minute and showed ordinary things: workers leaving a factory, a baby being fed, a gardener being sprayed with a hose. It is usually counted as the birth of cinema as a public entertainment. A little earlier, Thomas Edison's company had built the Kinetoscope, a wooden cabinet that one person at a time peered into to watch a short loop of film. The first cinemas built only for films opened in America a decade later; one in Pittsburgh in 1905 charged a nickel and was called a nickelodeon.
A famous story says that when audiences first saw a film of a train pulling into a station, they panicked and ran from the screen. It makes a good tale, but historians have found no reliable report of it happening, and it is probably a legend.
Twenty-four still pictures a second
A film is a series of still photographs shown quickly one after another. When sound arrived, the industry settled on 24 frames a second as the standard, and it is still used for most films today. The brain blends the pictures into smooth movement. Too few frames and the picture flickers; the old silent films often look jerky now because they were shot at slower, varying speeds.
Sound came to feature films with The Jazz Singer in 1927, and within a few years silent films had almost disappeared. Colour took longer; black and white was common until the 1950s and 1960s. The first Academy Awards ceremony, in 1929, lasted about fifteen minutes, and the winners had been announced months in advance.
A film in Korean wins the top prize
In 2020 PARASITE, a South Korean film by Bong Joon-ho, became the first film not in English to win the Oscar for Best Picture, after more than ninety years of the awards. Its director asked audiences to overcome what he called the one-inch barrier of subtitles.
Many of the films in this grid play with how a story is told. MEMENTO runs mostly backwards, scene by scene, so the audience knows as little as its hero, who cannot form new memories. INCEPTION and DUNKIRK, by the same director, tell stories on several timescales at once. Our film directors page covers the people behind them.
The rest of the grid
The biggest earner of all is AVATAR, which took the record back in 2021 after a re-release in China, passing Avengers: Endgame. GRAVITY was filmed with its actors inside a box of tiny lights, while nearly everything around them was added by computer. The grid mixes a century of favourites: TITANIC and AVATAR, JAWS and ALIEN, GLADIATOR and BRAVEHEART, the MATRIX and GRAVITY, ROCKY and WHIPLASH, CASABLANCA and GOODFELLAS, JOKER and TWISTER, and the family films FROZEN, SHREK, COCO, UP and JUMANJI, with the musical GREASE.
Each has its own story of how it was made, and several of them have their own pages here, with a puzzle and the story behind the film.