Actuality Film - Beginnings

Beginnings

The first actuality films date to the time of the very emergence of projected cinema. The Lumière Brothers in France were the principal advocates for this genre and also coined the term -- "Actualités" -- and used it as a descriptor in the printed catalogues of their films. La sortie des usines Lumière (1895) -- the first film exhibited by the Lumières—is by default the earliest actuality film; it might have not been the first one made, but it was definitively the first one shown publicly, on December 28, 1895.

Although the Edison Company in the United States was producing films and exhibiting them via the Kinetoscope going back to 1893, the films themselves were studio-bound creations made in Edison's makeshift movie studio the Black Maria; although Bucking Broncho (1894) was the first Edison subject to be filmed outdoors, it necessitated the construction of a special pen next to the Black Maria. The Edison, and early Biograph, motion picture cameras were bulky, engineering-heavy designs that could not be lifted or carried by a single person and required transport by way of horse cart. The Lumière cameras—from the very start—were small, light and also functioned as projectors. The Paul-Acres camera, registered in Britain in 1895, was likewise a smaller and more readily portable device than the Edison model, and Birt Acres filmed The Derby (1895) on it in May. But this, and Paul's other films, were not projected in public until January 1896.

Edison's first principal film producer W.K.L. Dickson broke away from the company late 1895 in order to act as partner in his own concern, American Mutoscope and Biograph, which by 1899 had a founded a British subsidiary that Dickson headed. Although their cameras were even bulkier than Edison's at first, utilizing 68mm film, Biograph's very first subjects—a series of views of Niagara Falls—were actualities, although studio bound subjects dominate the Biograph's years before 1900. Other pre-1900 concerns such as Selig (Chicago), Lubin (Philadelphia), Vitagraph (New York), Méliès Star-Film, Pathé Frères and Gaumont (France) and Warwick Trading Company (UK) all made actuality films, though in varying degrees in relation to films made in other genres.