1893 — Edison patents the kinetoscope — a device for watching films one viewer at a time
Description: The kinetoscope let only one viewer at a time watch a film through an eyepiece; it did not project the image onto a screen.
USA, Europe, Asia, USSR–Russia and the rest of the world — from the kinetoscope to global streaming. Each of the 200 events opens on click. Pick a region below and its lane lights up; the others recede. Zoom in (the + / − buttons, or Ctrl + mouse wheel) and titles appear on the lanes.
Description: The kinetoscope let only one viewer at a time watch a film through an eyepiece; it did not project the image onto a screen.
Description: The film runs only 12 minutes, but is considered the first to use editing to build a coherent plot.
Description: Hollywood was chosen in part for its constant sunlight, which made shooting possible without electric lighting.
Description: The Lumière brothers’ first screening lasted less than an hour and included only about a dozen short scenes.
Description: Méliès was a professional magician before he turned to film, and he used stage tricks to create special effects.
Description: In the early twentieth century Pathé produced more films than all other countries in the world combined.
Description: Early color-film experiments required projection through two color filters at once.
Description: The first screenings in India showed short Lumière documentaries of everyday European life.
Description: The film was made by an independent Australian filmmaker before a developed studio system existed anywhere in the world.
Description: The film is based on a song about the outlaw Stenka Razin and was shot in a single day.
Description: Mexico’s first screening took place only a few months after the Lumière brothers’ Paris premiere.
Description: The film set a box-office record that stood for decades, despite the picture’s scandalous reputation.
Description: The film ran more than three hours — an unprecedented length for a theatrical screening at the time.
Description: The studio let stars and a director control their own films — a rarity in the studio-system era.
Description: The sign originally advertised a housing development and only later became a symbol of the entire film industry.
Description: The film was shot with thousands of extras, unprecedented for Italian cinema of the time.
Description: The film’s sets were deliberately distorted and askew, creating a sense of psychological madness.
Description: The director played all the principal female roles himself, because women were forbidden to appear on screen.
Description: Mingxing became one of the first truly large Chinese film companies.
Description: Starevich brought insects to life with stop-motion animation, attaching the finest wire to their legs.
Description: Nationalization made the Soviet state the country’s only legal film producer and distributor.
Description: The famous Odessa Steps sequence became one of the most quoted scenes in world cinema.
Description: Early Latin American animation developed almost independently of Hollywood and European techniques of the time.
Description: Although the film includes sound sequences, most of the picture is still silent.
Description: Mickey Mouse became one of the first cartoon characters with synchronized sound.
Description: The first ceremony lasted only 15 minutes, and the winners were announced in advance.
Description: The Code remained formally in force until 1968, when it was replaced by the modern ratings system.
Description: The film’s special effects were achieved with stop-motion animation, not computer graphics.
Description: The animation took three years to complete, and the budget far exceeded the original estimate.
Description: Both films came out in the same year and are still counted among the greatest in cinema history.
Description: Metropolis was the first feature-length science-fiction film in cinema history.
Description: Joan of Arc was played by an actress who appeared in almost no other films before or after this role.
Description: The film lasts only 17 minutes, yet remains one of the most influential surrealist works in history.
Description: The adaptation of Wells’s novel was made with the author’s direct involvement.
Description: For decades Egyptian cinema was the dominant film industry of the entire Arabic-speaking world.
Description: The cartoon was made in response to the success of Disney’s Snow White, to prove what Chinese animation could do.
Description: The film experimented with a montage technique later called the Kuleshov effect.
Description: The film consists entirely of documentary footage of city life, with no actors and no script.
Description: Many later world-famous directors and cinematographers graduated from VGIK.
Description: Socialist realism required depicting life not as it was, but as it was supposed to become under communism.
Description: The film became one of the first Soviet pictures to create a mass-culture cult of a hero.
Description: The comedy combined the musical genre with the state ideology of the time.
Description: The film was shot in parallel with a real war — some scenes had to be finished after it ended.
Description: The Golden Age of Mexican cinema coincided with a weakening of Hollywood competition during World War II.
Description: The chanchada genre combined musical numbers with political and social satire.
Description: Early sound cinema in Latin America developed almost in parallel with Hollywood’s transition to talkies.
Description: Welles was only 25 when the film was made.
Description: The film flopped at the box office on release and became a cult classic only decades later.
Description: The film was shot on the real streets of postwar Rome, not on studio sets — a hallmark of neorealism.
Description: The Cannes Festival was first held soon after the end of World War II as a symbol of Europe’s cultural revival.
Description: The bicycle in the film stands as a metaphor for the entire life of a poor postwar Italian family.
Description: The film is considered one of the first examples of the noir genre in British cinema.
Description: Cantonese films of this period were made in huge numbers on tiny budgets and tight schedules.
Description: The film remained unfinished — the second part was banned by Stalin himself, and the third was never shot.
Description: Some industry figures who were blacklisted continued to work under other names.
Description: The ruling required studios to sell their theater chains, breaking the industry’s vertical integration.
Description: The film is shot almost entirely within a single apartment and the view from its window.
Description: The film was shot almost entirely on studio sets meant to evoke medieval Sweden.
Description: The film won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and first opened Japanese cinema to the world.
Description: Cairo was called “Hollywood on the Nile” for the scale and influence of its film industry.
Description: The film tells the story of a family’s unraveling with almost no major dramatic plot twists.
Description: The original Godzilla film was in large part a metaphor for the nuclear bombing of Japan.
Description: The film became the first Indian picture nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Description: The film transposes the plot of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to medieval Japan.
Description: The film remains one of the highest-grossing Indian films in the country’s box-office history.
Description: The film remains the only Soviet picture to receive the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize.
Description: The film was shot with amateurs and non-professional actors, including real street children in Mexico.
Description: The famous shower scene lasts only 45 seconds of screen time but took a week to shoot.
Description: Both films came out in the same year and are seen as the symbolic beginning of the New Hollywood era.
Description: A small budget and location shooting without major stars became the hallmark of the entire New Wave movement.
Description: Both films came out in the same year and are seen as symbolic manifestos of a new European directing style.
Description: The film was shot in the Jordanian desert at extremely high temperatures.
Description: The film’s title became a byword for the way perspective distorts when a photograph is enlarged.
Description: Czechoslovak New Wave films were banned immediately after Soviet troops crushed the Prague Spring.
Description: The Bollywood formula traditionally combines drama, romance, comedy, and musical numbers in a single film.
Description: The studio released dozens of films a year and trained a whole generation of future martial-arts stars.
Description: Tarkovsky made the film as his diploma project at VGIK.
Description: Lines from the film became catchphrases and entered everyday speech for decades.
Description: The battle scenes required tens of thousands of Soviet Army soldiers as extras.
Description: The film was heavily recut by censors and reached theaters only years after shooting was finished.
Description: The film remains one of the most recognizable Soviet comedies, endlessly quoted.
Description: Sembène’s film is considered one of the first feature-length fiction films made by an African director about Africans.
Description: The Iranian New Wave developed in parallel with the country’s modernization under the shah.
Description: Cinema Novo means “new cinema” and was a direct manifesto against the Hollywood production model.
Description: The manifesto compared colonial exploitation to the work of blast furnaces, hence the documentary’s title.
Description: The concept set commercial Hollywood cinema and European art-house film against a third, revolutionary path.
Description: The film is based on a novel, but the screenplay substantially reworked the source at the studio’s direction.
Description: The huge mechanical shark kept breaking down on set, which doubled the shooting schedule.
Description: The film was made on a budget the studio considered risky and became one of the most profitable in history.
Description: Shooting in tropical jungle brought typhoons, an actor’s heart attack, and a colossal budget overrun.
Description: The film draws heavily on Fellini’s own childhood memories of his hometown, Rimini.
Description: The film was heavily censored in Britain and officially banned from exhibition for nearly 30 years.
Description: The title alludes to the surrealist tradition of unfinished dinner parties interrupted by outside events.
Description: The film was banned in many countries for its explicitly violent content and remains controversial to this day.
Description: Herzog made the film as an homage to the 1922 silent film on the same subject.
Description: The film made Bruce Lee a worldwide star only a few years before his early death.
Description: The film remains one of the most frequently rewatched and quoted in the history of Indian cinema.
Description: The film is based on a novel by Stanisław Lem, though the author was unhappy with Tarkovsky’s interpretation.
Description: The series ran for several decades and remains a cult favorite to this day.
Description: The film has traditionally been shown on television almost every New Year’s Eve since its release.
Description: Shooting stretched over years because of constant conflicts between the director and Soviet censors.
Description: The series became one of the most rewatched Soviet television films about postwar criminal Moscow.
Description: The film was shot at the real Hanging Rock in Australia, which spawned legends about the site’s mystical influence.
Description: Many Argentine filmmakers were forced to emigrate during the military dictatorship of 1976–1983.
Description: State funding allowed Australia, for the first time in decades, to build a competitive film industry of its own.
Description: The VHS format overtook rival Betamax largely because it allowed longer recording times.
Description: The alien was voiced by an elderly woman who smoked cigarettes — for a distinctive vocal timbre.
Description: Burton turned a superhero movie into a dark Gothic drama, breaking previous genre expectations.
Description: The film was shot almost at the same time as martial law was imposed in Poland.
Description: The original title alludes to the fall of the Berlin Wall — a metaphor of angels watching over a divided city.
Description: The film is considered one of Almodóvar’s best-known works outside the Spanish-speaking world.
Description: The genre was known for virtuoso gunfights choreographed like ballet.
Description: Kurosawa made the film late in life, and it is considered one of the peaks of his work.
Description: Both Ghibli films were released together as a double bill on the same program.
Description: The anime is based on the director’s own manga and became one of the first Japanese animation hits in the West.
Description: The film became the first Soviet picture to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Description: The film is known for a wealth of catchphrases that entered everyday Russian speech.
Description: The film was made during the Georgian SSR’s movement toward independence and addressed Stalin’s repressions.
Description: The easing of censorship let Soviet directors address sharp social subjects freely for the first time in decades.
Description: The film caused a public scandal because of scenes that were frank by Soviet standards.
Description: The film is considered one of the symbols of musical and cultural freedom in the perestroika years.
Description: The film’s post-apocalyptic aesthetic defined the visual language of dozens of imitators around the world.
Description: The film addressed AIDS and political oppression in Latin America at the time.
Description: The dinosaurs were brought to life with computer graphics almost at the last minute — the original plan was to use only animatronics.
Description: The screenplay was built largely on a nonlinear chronology, unusual for mainstream cinema at the time.
Description: The film was made by a studio later bought by Disney that became one of the key animation brands.
Description: The film remained the highest-grossing in cinema history for more than a decade, until it was overtaken by another film by the same director.
Description: Staging the rotating-room special effects required building a giant mechanical structure.
Description: All three parts of the trilogy are shot in the colors of the French flag, each standing for one of the Revolution’s mottos.
Description: The Dogme 95 manifesto required films to be shot without artificial lighting, special effects, or extra-diegetic music.
Description: The film combines a tragic Holocaust story with elements of comedy — a rare and controversial mix of genres.
Description: The film was shot in strict accordance with Dogme 95 rules, including a complete rejection of staged lighting.
Description: The film is known for its nonlinear narrative structure and became the director’s calling card.
Description: The handover of Hong Kong was accompanied by fears about the future of the local film industry under the new jurisdiction.
Description: The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature — a rarity for non-Hollywood animation at the time.
Description: The collapse of the USSR led to a sharp cut in state funding and the collapse of the old film-production system.
Description: The film became the second Russian picture to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Description: The film is considered one of the main manifestos of post-Soviet Russian cinema about life in the 1990s.
Description: Campion became the first woman director to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Description: The film brought international recognition to the then-young New Zealand director Peter Jackson.
Description: The title alludes to a Persian tradition — the protagonist seeks someone who will bury him after his suicide.
Description: The film was among the first to address the legacy of apartheid openly in South African cinema.
Description: The first film in the franchise came out only three years after the book was published.
Description: The film’s success launched one of the largest commercial film projects in history — a cinematic universe of dozens of connected pictures.
Description: On release the film was the most expensive in cinema history.
Description: The film became one of the most successful French-language pictures in worldwide theatrical release.
Description: The film is based on the true story of a Stasi officer in East Germany.
Description: The film’s staged fights were choreographed by one of cinema’s best-known martial-arts fight directors.
Description: The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes for a brutal, labyrinthine detective plot.
Description: The wave of South Korean cinema coincided with growing worldwide interest in Asian film as a whole.
Description: The film set a box-office record in South Korea among domestic pictures of its time.
Description: The film won a BAFTA and eight Oscars, despite a mixed reaction from Indian audiences to its depiction of the country’s poverty.
Description: The Indian film industry releases more films each year than Hollywood, though revenues are still smaller.
Description: The film combined urban fantasy with special effects on a scale unprecedented for Russian cinema.
Description: The film’s box-office success exceeded previous domestic records several times over.
Description: The sequel to the New Year comedy came out more than 30 years after the original.
Description: The film brought international fame to Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Description: The trilogy took 274 shooting days and turned New Zealand into a tourist destination thanks to its landscapes.
Description: The film is shot with almost documentary brutality and depicts life in Brazilian favelas without gloss.
Description: The film is based on the young Che Guevara’s real journey across South America.
Description: The film is shot almost entirely in Spanish, despite the director’s English-language fame.
Description: Netflix began as a DVD-by-mail rental service before moving into streaming and content production.
Description: The film capped more than a decade of interconnected pictures in a single cinematic universe.
Description: The film consists almost entirely of a single conversation between spouses in the closed space of an apartment.
Description: The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for its frank depiction of a relationship.
Description: The film is largely autobiographical and based on the director’s own experience.
Description: The film unexpectedly became one of the most profitable Korean hits on international streaming.
Description: The film’s cast prompted widespread discussion of representation in Hollywood.
Description: The film became the first non-English-language winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture in the history of the awards.
Description: Parasite’s Oscar success was called a turning point for worldwide recognition of Asian cinema.
Description: The film received an Oscar nomination and provoked a mixed reaction inside Russia itself.
Description: The film is based on a real disaster and became one of the highest-grossing Russian films of its year.
Description: The film addresses the breakdown of a family against a backdrop of public indifference and was awarded at Cannes.
Description: The film became one of the first large-budget science-fiction blockbusters made in Africa and about Africa.
Description: The film is based on a real court case involving a murder charge in contemporary Iran.
Description: The film won seven Oscars, including a Best Director nomination for Cuarón.
Description: The film is based on the true story of an American who survived a bear attack.
Description: The film addresses a family drama against a backdrop of immigration in contemporary Iran.
Description: Nollywood releases thousands of films each year on relatively modest budgets compared with Hollywood.
Description: The film was shot on black-and-white film stock and is based on Cuarón’s own childhood memories.
Description: The opening of cinemas was accompanied by large-scale investment in new multiplexes across the country.
Description: The film follows a child who takes his own parents to court.
Description: Latin American content became one of the fastest-growing segments of global streaming catalogs.
Description: Major Hollywood premieres were delayed by anywhere from several months to more than a year.
Description: The writers’ strike lasted nearly five months — one of the longest in Hollywood history.
Description: Major streaming platforms began competing for rights to local European content.
Description: The film is the first adaptation of the novel shot in German.
Description: The film addresses domestic violence and became the subject of wide public debate in France.
Description: The film’s superhero is based on a comic-book character with more than forty years of history.
Description: The ban on movie theaters in Saudi Arabia lasted more than 35 years before it was lifted.
Description: The film’s success made music from Indian cinema a focus of Hollywood awards for the first time in many years.
Description: Japan’s animation industry grew into one of the country’s largest cultural exports.
Description: Indian cinema remains the world’s largest film industry by number of releases.
Description: Russian content began appearing in large numbers on the world’s biggest streaming platforms shortly before they left the market.
Description: The studios’ departure did not stop film production, but it significantly changed the repertoire of Russian movie theaters.
Description: African online platforms faced the problem of limited audience access to a stable internet connection.
Description: The film became one of the first major Hollywood productions devoted entirely to African culture and heritage.
Description: Turkish series gained particular popularity in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Latin America.
Description: The film tells the story of the trial of Argentina’s military juntas of the 1970s and 1980s.
Description: Streamers’ investment in the region was driven in part by these markets’ growing, young populations.