10 Facts about Cinema

Ten must know facts about the history of Cinema:

1. The Great Train Robbery, a 1903 American film directed by Edwin S. Porter. ‘The Great Train Robbery’ (1903) is considered to be the first real full length movie, the first narrative Western film with a storyline, and the first real smash hit.
2. A year after Thomas Edison’s invention of the Kinetoscope the Holland Brothers opened the first Kinetoscope Parlor in New York. This was the first commercial exhibition of movies.
3. The praxinoscope was an animation device, the successor to the zoetrope. It was invented in France in 1877 by Charles Emile Reynaud invented the Praxinoscope, a mirrored drum that gives the illusion of movement using strips of pictures.
4. In 1895 Louis and Auguste Lumiere patented Cinematographe, a device that could project movies to several spectators at the same time. December 28 1895 they presented the first commercial display of a movie to an audience, running 20 minutes, consisting of 10 short stories.
5. The very first motion picture to be ever made was The Horse in Motion in 1878, and the first home movie was Roundhay Garden Scene in 1888.
6. The first theater in the world exclusively devoted to showing motion pictures was the Nickelodeon, which was opened on June 19, 1905 in Pittsburgh.
7. The first machine patented in the United States that showed animated pictures or movies was a device called the “wheel of life” or “zoopraxiscope”. Patented in 1867 by William Lincoln, moving drawings or photographs were watched through a slit in the zoopraxiscope.
8. Mickey Mouse’s official birthday is November 18, 1928 when he made his first film debut in Steamboat Willie. This was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon released.
9. Raja Harishchandra is a 1913 Indian silent film, directed and produced by Indian icon Dadasaheb Phalke, and is the first full-length Indian feature film.The film was based on the legend of Raja Harishchandra, recounted in the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
10. The Dadasaheb Phalke Award, for lifetime contribution to cinema, was instituted in his honour, by the Government of India in 1969, and is the most prestigious and coveted award in Indian cinema.