THE cinema as we know it today began in 1895, when the first public exhibi-
tions of motion pictures were held in New York and in Paris. Exhibitions in
the first few years of the cinema were of short films, often of incidents of every-
day life, like the 'Arrival of a train at a station' or a 'Bathing beach', and were
generally exhibited in a café or as a side-show of a fair. Then subjects were chosen
from current happenings of dramatic interest, one successful experiment of this type
being Meliè's series of films of the Dreyfus case produced late in 1898. Then came the
introduction of the story. These early films generally lasted from about five to twenty
minutes. I well remember seeing my first film in 1904 in a marquee in a fair at Nailsea
near Bristol. Although I was a very small boy at the time that film is more vivid to
me now than many I saw last year. The title eludes my memory, but the film showed
a man and a woman in a railway carriage. The man was smoking a pipe and the
woman had a dog on the seat. The woman objected to the man's smoking. The man
thereupon objected to the woman's dog. The woman asked the man to put his pipe
out and as he refused she seized it and threw it out of the window. The man there-
upon threw the woman's dog out of the window. Their annoyance with each other
was demonstrated by violent gesticulations which gradually subsided. On reaching
the station they discovered the dog sitting on the platform with the pipe in his mouth.

Films of this kind and depictions of current events of dramatic interest were fairly
common in the early years of the century. They varied a good deal in technical
excellence, the French films of Meliè being, in the opinion of many competent judges,
the most important early pioneer works in Europe. Producers were constantly
experimenting, and many in France, Germany, Italy, America, and the Scandinavian
countries very early saw the possibilities of the film as a dramatic and expressional
medium. Quite early, productions began to acquire characteristics that were asso-
ciated with different producers and countries. Thus in the German films from the
beginning of the century could be noted that attention to details, obtained often
by shots from unfamiliar viewpoints, and the making of these details significant.
We in England were not so early aware of the possibilities of the film as in the other
countries mentioned, and that is perhaps the main reason why British films have
never been in the forefront until towards the end of the Second World War. It may
be that the mind of Puritan England was fogged by some of the early phases of film
development, when subjects of a sexual character suggested by certain types of
picture postcard were produced. The inability to take the art of the film seriously
meant that for its best exhibitions the British cinema depended on foreign pro-
ductions, chiefly those of America, Germany, and France.

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