Events: 1900 • Reulos, Goudeau & Co. invent Mirographe, a 21 mm amateur format. • The Lumière Brothers premiere their new Lumiere Wide format for the 1900 World Fair. At 75 mm wide, it has held the record for over 100 years as the widest format yet developed. • Raoul Grimoin-Sanson also creates a sensation at the 1900 World Fair with his multi-projector Cinéorama spectacle, which uses ten 70 mm projectors to create a simulated 360-degree balloon ride over Paris. The exhibit is closed before it formally opens, however, due to legitimate health and safety concerns regarding the heat of the combined projectors ons, and releases the format as La Petite. • Gaumont-Demeny release their own 15 mm amateur format, Pocket Chrono. • Release of the first film version of "Hamlet", an adaptation of the duel scene, with French actress Sarah Bernhardt playing the title rôle (sic.) and accompanying recorded sound. • Making of the first film to feature the detective character Sherlock Holmes, "Sherlock Holmes Baffled", by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. • "Jeanne d'Arc" becomes the first film of considerable length (10 mins) to be shown entirely in colour. • William N. Selig made The Chicago Stockyards-From Hoof to Market for Chicago-based Philip Danforth Armour, a prominent businessman in the meatpacking industry, showing the full meatpacking process from cattle being unloaded at the stockyards to canning. Studio lights didn't exist yet so stage spotlights had to be borrowed from the Richard Mansfield Theatrical Company to film inside the slaughterhouse. 1901 • Edwin S. Porter is put in charge of Thomas Edison's motion-picture production company. • Thomas Edison closes "America's First Movie Studio", the Edison's Black Maria. 1902 • March 10 – A Circuit Court decision in the United States ends Thomas Edison's monopoly on 35 mm movie film technology. • April 2 – Thomas Lincoln Tally opens the Electric Theater, the first permanent movie theater, in Los Angeles. Tally co-founds the First National Exhibitors Circuit in 1917. • August 9 – Georges Méliès' film "The Coronation of Edward VII" (a staged simulation with inserted actuality footage) is first shown in London on the evening of the Coronation itself. • September 1 – Actor/producer Méliès premières the first science fiction film, the silent "A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans La Lune)", at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris, France; it proves an immediate success. One scene features the animated human face of the moon being struck in the eye by a rocket. • William Wardell invents an 11 mm amateur film format, Vitak. 1903 • Thomas Edison demolishes "America's First Movie Studio", the Black Maria. • The three elder Warner Bros. begin in the exhibition business and open their first theater, the Cascade. • Gaston Méliès, Georges' brother, opens a branch of Star Film in New York to defend its production's copyrights. • Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew partner with Mitchell Mark to expand his chain of movie theaters. • William N. Selig's war film "A Soldier's Dream" is released. The film shows soldiers playing cards and music around a campfire. Scholars have speculated that the double-exposed image used to create one soldier's dream sequence may have been inspired by Méliès. 1904 • As shown in the film series "Westinghouse Works", some filmmakers begin to move away from eye-level filmmaking and use the camera to explore spaces from an angle usually inaccessible to the average person. • William Fox purchases his first Nickelodeon. • 23 June: Marcus Loew founds the theatre chain, the People's Vaudeville Company, which later was renamed Loews Theatres which was the oldest theatre chain operating in North America when it was merged with AMC Theatres in 2006 1905 • The Manaki brothers make the first motion picture in the Balkans, The Weavers. • Pathé Frères colors black-and-white films by machine. • Filmmaking takes an unexpected historical role by recording activities along Market Street, in the year preceding the destruction from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 (footage in the modern film Trip Down Market Street 1905/2005). • Aleksandr Khanzhonkov begins filming his first documentaries. • "The Misadventure of a French Gentleman Without Pants at the Zandvoort Beach", the oldest surviving Dutch fictional film is released by Alberts Frères. Later to be included in the canon of Dutch cinema as released by the Netherlands Film Festival. • June 19 – John P. Harris and his brother Harry in Pittsburgh open the first theater in the U.S. devoted exclusively to the exhibition of motion pictures. • December 16 – Variety, an entertainment trade newspaper that would later cover the film industry, is published for the first time in New York City. 1906 • December 26 – The world's first feature film, "The Story of the Kelly Gang", is released. • Carl Laemmle opens one of the first movie theaters in Chicago. 1907 • January 19 – Variety publishes its first film review. • The Kalem Company founded in New York City by Frank J. Marion, Samuel Long, and George Kleine. • May 7 – Seattle film maker William Harbeck sets up a camera at the front of a B.C. Electric streetcar and films the downtown streets of Vancouver, British Columbia. Pieces of the film, the earliest surviving footage of the city, have disappeared, only about 7 minutes remain. • May 29 – "Salaviinanpolttajat", also known as "The Moonshiners", the first fictional film made in Finland, is released. • June 20 – "L'Enfant prodigue", the first feature-length motion picture produced in Europe, opens in Paris. • Peerless Film Manufacturing Company was founded in Chicago by George K. Spoor and Gilbert M. Anderson. On August 10, the studio name was changed to Essanay Studios ("S and A"). • November 28 - In Haverhill, Massachusetts, scrap-metal dealer Louis B. Mayer opens his first movie theater (in a few years he had the largest theater chain in New England and in 1917 he founded his own production company, which eventually became part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). • December 7 – First "Ben-Hur" film, directed by Sidney Olcott and produced by the Kalem Company, released. • Carl Laemmle, later of Universal, experiments with combining audio from phonographs with film. Laemmle's experiments lead to the German development of "Syncroscope." Syncroscope had several successful demonstrations, but was eventually abandoned. 1908 • July 3 - Malhabour Theater, the first film house in Iloilo City was opened to the public. • July 14 – D. W. Griffith becomes a director at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in New York City. Between 1908 and 1913, Griffith will direct nearly 500 films starting with the release of "The Adventures of Dollie". • October 28 – The Russian Film Industry begins with the release of Russia's first fictional narrative film "Stenka Razin". • November 18 – Release in France of "The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (La Mort du duc de Guise)", the first film with a screenplay by an eminent man of letters, the playwright Henri Lavedan; it is also directed by two men of the theatre, Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes, features actors of the Comédie-Française, and is accompanied by a score from Saint-Saëns. • December - Thomas Edison forms the Motion Picture Patents Company, with goals of controlling production and distribution, raising theater admission prices, cooperating with censorship bodies, and preventing film stock from getting into the hands of nonmember producers. • Pathé invents the newsreel that was shown in cinemas prior to a feature film. 1909 • Carl Laemmle founds the Independent Moving Pictures Company (IMP). • Selig Polyscope Company establish the first permanent movie studio in Los Angeles in Edendale, Los Angeles. • The New York Motion Picture Company is founded and also open a movie studio in Edendale. The studio is later used by Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios and then Mascot Pictures who become part of Republic Pictures. • February 4 – The Paris Film Congress begins, an attempt by leading European producers to form a cartel similar to that of the Motion Picture Patents Company in the United States. • May 12 – Mr. Flip is released and is the first film to feature someone being hit in the face with a pie. • May 23 – The first news cinema, The Daily Bioscope, opens in London. • June 17 – "In the Sultan's Power" is the first film ever completely made in Los Angeles, California. It is filmed by director Francis Boggs. • October 25 – IMP release their first film, "Hiawatha", based on the 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. • November 5 - "A Nature Movie" by Arthur C. Pillsbury using film to explore the wonders of Yosemite. This first showing was for John Muir, a friend, and associate of Pillsbury's. Included was footage of the Hetch Hetchy. This film was then shown for the 1910 season at the Pillsbury Studio in Yosemite, advertised using postcards. • December 2 – Matsunosuke Onoe, who will become the first superstar of Japanese cinema, appears in his first film, "Goban Tadanobu". • December 20 – James Joyce opens the Volta Cinematograph, the first cinema in Dublin.