1906 Movies

When the story begins, a man is called out of town after receiving some sort of letter. On his way to the train station, all sorts of problems happen....

There have been a lot of comedies about divorce, perhaps more than serious movies about the subject. This seems to be the earliest one I have seen/ As...

When his father dies, two brothers inherit his property but because of a woman who loves one of them, the other becomes jealous and enmity arises.

A child and her nurse are out walking. A band of desperate men and women knock the nurse down and abduct the child. Soon a ransom note is sent to the...

This maid breaks the dishes, so it's off to the employment office. The next one tries on her mistress's clothes and gets kissed by the master, so it's...

Riders at a cavalry school take the horses through their paces, jumping over fences and walls, descending steep slopes, and fording streams. Some hors...

Picking at random, we see the angry mob of peasants attacking the witch's home with pitchforks and fire; the use of chapter heading titles (at least f...

About a woman thrown out after she has a child out of wedlock, with the usual "go and darken my doorstep no more!" gesture.

When his wife gives to the ragman a pair of tan trousers in which all his money is kept, a man proceeds to rip the trousers off everyone he meets.

There are a lot of circular pans in this very long (for 1906) travelogue showing the waterfroot of Lucerne, followed by a long moving shot (taken from...

A man plays with three young women at the beach while his wife is alseep.

This Lubin actuality of the aftermath of the San Francisco Earthquake begins with a group of men, pans to the left, and the people vanish, leaving onl...

Despite the lurid title, no one gets shot in this long actuality from Lubin. Instead, it's another panorama, as indicated in the movie's alternative t...

A camera starts on a sloppy scene: people walking around, a building that's seen better days, palm trees, with fronds waving in the breeze. As the cam...

A huge throng of spectators watches a car race.

Views and pans among the ruins of San Francisco after the earthquake and fire.

Silent film.

This is, for 1906, a strikingly ambitious prototype-documentary travelogue filmed in and around the cities now called Kolkata and Mumbai. It's full of...

Catalogue in "The Big V: A History of the Vitagraph Company," by Anthony Slide & Alan Gevinson, 1987.