

Most movie fans know that the first filmmakers liked to shoot trains entering stations. This example by Sussex film pioneer George Albert Smith illustrates why. The train's rush towards the audience brings movement and visual drama. The flurry of human activity offers plenty for the audience to engage with - who are these people and where are they going? And the time pressure exerted by the fact that the train must soon depart adds narrative tension - will everyone get on and off in time?

Most movie fans know that the first filmmakers liked to shoot trains entering stations. This example by Sussex film pioneer George Albert Smith illustrates why. The train's rush towards the audience brings movement and visual drama. The flurry of human activity offers plenty for the audience to engage with - who are these people and where are they going? And the time pressure exerted by the fact that the train must soon depart adds narrative tension - will everyone get on and off in time?
1897-09-22
5
A scene from the golden age of rail travel - all the hustle and bustle of a Victorian train station.
4.6A short black-and-white silent documentary film featuring one dog jumping through hoops and another dancing in a costume, which was considered lost until footage from an 1896 Fairground Programme was identified as being from this film.
"All sounds travel in waves much the same as ripples in water." Educational film produced by Bray Studios New York, which was the dominant animation studio based in the United States in the years surrounding World War I.
5.9Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions for his pardon. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie's congressman father and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch.
0.0The cement belt from Bath to Martins Creek and main line operations from Pen Argyl to Maybrook.
Finland’s first nature documentary. The filmmakers’ expedition leads them all the way to the Åland Islands and the Karelian Isthmus.
7.6A dramatized account of a great Russian naval mutiny and a resultant public demonstration, showing support, which brought on a police massacre.
7.1This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.
6.3The story of Jerry Lee Lewis, arguably the greatest and certainly one of the wildest musicians of the 1950s. His arrogance, remarkable talent, and unconventional lifestyle often brought him into conflict with others in the industry, and even earned him the scorn and condemnation of the public.
0.0Egypt's only modernist architect Hassan Fathy (1900-1989) was committed to ecology and sustainability in his architecture. This film takes us with slow steps, in still images, to two villages he created. Fathy's historically grounded, forward-looking designs prompt us to reflect on the past as well as contemplate new solutions for the future.
The Tsar visits the Russian embassy
0.0It's the oldest Brazilian movie that survived and the film that captured the first car race in Brazil.
Lucien Bull was a pioneer in chronophotography. Chronophotography is defined as "a set of photographs of a moving object, taken for the purpose of recording and exhibiting successive phases of motion."
It is a dramatic film, with its colossal explosion and smouldering remains. Within seconds of the chimney's collapse, crowds swarm in to inspect the site; issues of the crowd's health and safety are clearly not a concern, as people smile, wave and salute the camera.
5.2A documentary on the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam. Made by Istituto Luce, there is an understandable focus on Italian athletes, but it is the first Olympic documentary that describes the techniques of certain events.
9.0An adventure film with Benshi performers. Sometimes considered the 'first Japanese feature film', it survives today as a compilation of scenes from various different 1910s adaptations totaling nearly three hours in length. The bulk of the content comes from the 1911 adaptation by legendary Japanese filmmaker Makino Shozo.
A troupe of gypsies takes a traveler along with them on their day trip.
Also known as The Operation of Dr. Alejandro Posadas. Filmed with early orthochromatic film in the Hospital de Clínicas de la Ciudad in Buenos Aires.
5.0Canadian Pacific II is designed as a companion piece to Canadian Pacific I. Shot from a window two storeys higher and in the building adjacent to the artists’s studio of the previous year, one enters into a dream state… an involvement with a vocabulary of seeing and feeling by subtle transitions of the passage of time