The history
Two centuries from spinning paper discs and a galloping horse to Baahubali's VFX and RRR's Oscar.
People learned to trick the eye with spinning discs long before they could photograph anything that moved. Photographers then caught motion one frame at a time, inventors built cameras and projectors, and in 1895 audiences paid to watch moving pictures on a screen. Sound, colour, widescreen and visual effects followed, and India became the world's busiest film industry. Now computers render whole films, cameras record to cards, and the phone in your pocket can shoot a movie.
1832–33
Moving drawings on a spinning disc
Joseph Plateau, Belgium; Simon Stampfer, Austria
1878
Fast motion cut into a photo sequence
Eadweard Muybridge, USA
1888
Oldest surviving motion picture
Louis Le Prince, England
1895
Projected films for a paying audience
Lumière brothers, France
1913
Indian feature film (widely credited)
Dadasaheb Phalke, India
1927
Feature with synchronised dialogue scenes
The Jazz Singer, USA
1931
Indian sound film
Ardeshir Irani, India
1995
Fully computer-animated feature
Pixar, USA
1830 – 1894
Spinning toys make drawings seem to move. Photographers learn to freeze motion, and inventors race to build a camera that can film it.
1833
1832–1833
Plateau's phenakistiscope was a disc of drawings with slits round the edge. Spin it in front of a mirror, look through the slits, and the drawings seem to move. Stampfer made a similar disc in Vienna at almost the same time.
Why it mattered. It proved that a quick series of still pictures, glimpsed one at a time, looks like motion.
1834
Horner described a drum with slits in its side and a strip of drawings inside, which he called the daedaleum. Several people could watch at once. It was sold as a toy from the 1860s under the name zoetrope.
Why it mattered. The slits work like a camera's shutter: you see one picture, then darkness, then the next.
1878
15 June 1878
Muybridge set up a row of cameras beside a track, each fired by a thread as the racehorse Sallie Gardner galloped past. The photographs showed that all four hooves leave the ground at once. He later projected his sequences with his own zoopraxiscope.
Why it mattered. It was the first time a fast motion was cut into a series of photographs, frame by frame.
1882
The scientist Marey built a chronophotographic gun that took 12 pictures a second on a rotating plate, to study birds in flight. He went on to record motion on strips of film.
Why it mattered. One camera, not a row of them, could now capture a sequence of moments.
1888
October 1888
Le Prince filmed his family walking in a garden with his single-lens camera. The Roundhay Garden Scene lasts about two seconds. In 1890 he vanished from a train before he could show his work in public, and was never seen again.
Why it mattered. It is widely considered the oldest surviving motion picture.
1893
1891–1894
Dickson and his team built the Kinetoscope, a cabinet in which one person at a time watched a loop of 35 mm film. To make films for it they built the Black Maria, a tar-papered studio that turned to follow the sun. Kinetoscope parlours opened in 1894.
Why it mattered. It set the 35 mm film width, with holes along the edges, that cinema used for a century.
1895 – 1927
Films are projected for paying audiences. Film-makers invent editing, trick effects and storytelling, and India makes its first features.
1895
28 December 1895
The Lumière brothers' Cinématographe could film, print and project. In a basement room of a Paris café they showed ten short films to a paying audience, including workers leaving their factory.
Why it mattered. It is widely counted as the birth of cinema: many people watching one big projected picture together.
1896
7 July 1896
Just months after Paris, a show of Lumière films opened at Watson's Hotel in Bombay (now Mumbai). The shows were a hit and ran for weeks.
Why it mattered. It began India's love of cinema, which grew into the world's biggest film industry.
1899
Bhatavdekar, a Bombay photographer, bought a film camera from London and filmed a wrestling match. He is widely considered the first Indian to make a motion picture.
Why it mattered. Indians were filming their own country within four years of cinema's birth.
1902
The stage magician Méliès built a glass-walled studio and invented trick effects: stopping the camera to make things vanish, double exposures and painted sets. His 14-minute film sends astronomers to the Moon in a shell fired from a cannon.
Why it mattered. It showed that films could tell invented stories with special effects, not just record real life.
1903
The Great Train Robbery cut between different places, following the robbers and then the posse, and was a huge hit. Film-makers everywhere learned that the cut itself could build suspense.
Why it mattered. It helped turn editing into the language of cinema.
1912
The psychologist Wertheimer flashed two lights one after the other. With the right gap between them, people saw pure movement, which he called the phi phenomenon. It helped show that film motion is made by the brain, not by images lingering in the eye.
Why it mattered. It explains why 24 still frames a second look like motion, and why 'persistence of vision' is a myth.
1913
3 May 1913
Phalke learned film-making in London, then wrote, directed, shot and edited a feature based on a story from Indian epics. Women did not act on screen then, so the queen was played by a man, Anna Salunke. Shree Pundalik (1912) came earlier, but is often left out as a filmed stage play.
Why it mattered. It is widely called India's first full-length feature film, and India's top film honour is named after Phalke.
1926
Reiniger cut her characters from black card and moved them frame by frame under the camera for The Adventures of Prince Achmed. It took about three years to make.
Why it mattered. It is the oldest surviving animated feature film, made by one of animation's first great directors.
1927 – 1965
Films learn to talk and sing, turn to colour and stretch to widescreen. Studios in Hollywood and Bombay turn out hits, and new voices like Satyajit Ray appear.
1927
6 October 1927
The Jazz Singer played its songs and a few lines of speech from discs kept in sync with the film. Audiences were thrilled, and within a few years almost every film had sound. A soundtrack needs a steady speed, so 24 frames a second became the standard.
Why it mattered. Synchronised sound changed how films were acted, shot and edited.
1931
14 March 1931
Irani shot Alam Ara with the sound recorded on the film itself, mostly at night to avoid street noise. Its songs were such a hit that songs became part of almost every Indian film.
Why it mattered. It began Indian sound cinema and its song-and-dance tradition.
1932
1932–1935
Technicolor's three-strip camera split the light into red, green and blue records on three films. Disney's cartoon Flowers and Trees (1932) used it first, and Becky Sharp (1935) was the first feature made entirely with it.
Why it mattered. It gave cinema rich, lasting colour, the ancestor of the colour grading done today.
1937
Kisan Kanya, a story about farmers, was filmed in the Cinecolor process and is usually called the first colour feature made in India.
Why it mattered. Colour began its long road into Indian cinema, which turned mostly to colour in the 1960s.
1953
September 1953
The Robe premiered in CinemaScope. A special lens squeezed a wide picture onto normal 35 mm film, and another lens stretched it back out on a much wider screen.
Why it mattered. Wide screens helped cinemas compete with television, and wide frames are still the standard.
1955
26 August 1955
Ray, a commercial artist, made his first film on a tiny budget with mostly new actors, shooting in real villages. It won an award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956 and made Ray famous around the world.
Why it mattered. It showed the world a new, realistic Indian cinema, and Ray later received an honorary Oscar in 1992.
1975 – 1998
Special-effects companies and computers change what can be shown. Computer graphics grow from a few shots to a whole animated feature.
1977
25 May 1977
Lucas set up his own effects company, ILM, in 1975 because no studio could make his space battles. Its team built a computer-controlled camera that could repeat the same move exactly, so separately filmed models could be layered together.
Why it mattered. It launched the modern visual-effects industry and the age of the effects blockbuster.
1993
Jurassic Park mixed life-size animatronic dinosaurs with dinosaurs made entirely in the computer. The digital animals looked real in daylight, among real actors.
Why it mattered. It convinced film-makers that computer graphics could show almost anything.
1999 – today
Digital cameras and projectors replace film, LED walls replace some locations, streaming brings films to phones, and Indian films win the world's attention.
1999
1999–2005
In 1999 a few cinemas showed a feature from digital projectors. Star Wars: Episode II (2002) was one of the first major films shot entirely on digital video, and the big studios agreed a digital-cinema standard in 2005. Within about 15 years most of the world's screens had gone digital.
Why it mattered. Cameras now record to cards and films arrive at cinemas as files, not heavy reels.
2009
For Avatar, actors wore suits and head cameras that recorded their bodies and faces, and the director watched a rough computer version of the scene live through a virtual camera.
Why it mattered. Actors' performances could now drive fully digital characters.
2015
2015–2017
Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) and Baahubali 2 (2017) were Telugu epics released in several languages. The second film had close to 2,500 VFX shots made by about 35 studios, and was the first Indian film reported to earn over ₹1,000 crore worldwide.
Why it mattered. It proved Indian films could build huge visual effects and reach audiences across India and abroad.
2019
The Mandalorian was filmed inside a ring of LED screens showing computer-made landscapes that moved with the camera. Actors could see the world around them, and the screens also lit the scene.
Why it mattered. Virtual production brings visual effects onto the set, during the shoot.
2020
12 June 2020
With cinemas shut by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hindi film Gulabo Sitabo, starring Amitabh Bachchan, premiered directly on a streaming service. It was among the first big Indian films to skip cinemas.
Why it mattered. Streaming became a major way Indian films reach their audience and earn money.
2023
12 March 2023
“Naatu Naatu” from the Telugu film RRR won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. That same night the Tamil-language The Elephant Whisperers won Best Documentary Short Film.
Why it mattered. It was the first Oscar for a song from an Indian film production, a sign of Indian cinema's worldwide reach.
By the numbers
India's yearly film output kept climbing, and it has ranked first in the world for decades. The counts use different measures, as labelled.
Did you know?
At 24 frames a second, a two-hour film is 172,800 separate still pictures.
In Raja Harishchandra (1913) the queen was played by a man, because acting on screen was not thought respectable for women then.
Toy Story's 114,240 frames took about 800,000 computer-hours to render.
Louis Le Prince boarded a train in 1890 and was never seen again, so he never showed his films in public.
Persistence of vision is a myth: a lingering image would smear frames together. Your brain's motion detectors make the movement.
The people
1830 – 1904 · Photographer · England and USA
Froze a galloping horse in a series of photographs.
1841 – c. 1890 · Inventor · France and England
Shot the oldest surviving film, then vanished.
1873 – 1968 · Director and producer · France and USA
One of the very first directors of story films, from 1896, and later ran her own studio.
1861 – 1938 · Magician and film-maker · France
Invented many trick effects and made A Trip to the Moon.
1870 – 1944 · Film-maker · India
Made Raja Harishchandra, widely called India's first feature.
1892 – 1983 · Actor and director · India
Became India's first woman film director with Bulbul-e-Paristan (1926).
1899 – 1981 · Animator · Germany
Made the oldest surviving animated feature from paper silhouettes.
1886 – 1969 · Producer and director · India
Made India's first talkie and its first home-made colour feature.
1921 – 1992 · Director · India
Made Pather Panchali and received an honorary Oscar.
born 1973 · Director · India
Directed the Baahubali films and RRR.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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