The following is an overview of the events of 1896 in film, including a list of films released and notable births.
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| Years in film |
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| 19th century |
| 1870s |
| Month | Date | Name | Country | Profession | Died | |
| January | 20 | George Burns | US | Actor, Comedian | 1996 | |
| 20 | Rolfe Sedan | US | Actor | 1982 | ||
| 20 | Isabel Withers | US | Actress | 1968 | ||
| March | 3 | Willie Fung | China | Actor | 1945 | |
| April | 8 | Einar Juhl | Denmark | Actor | 1982 | |
| 26 | Ruut Tarmo | Estonia | Actor | 1967 | ||
| May | 16 | Gilda Langer | Germany | Actress | 1920 | |
| 17 | Ruth Donnelly | US | Actress | 1982 | ||
| 24 | Fernando Soler | Mexico | Actor | 1979 | ||
| June | 28 | Constance Binney | US | Actress, Singer, Dancer | 1989 | |
| July | 16 | Evelyn Preer | US | Actress, Singer | 1932 | |
| 25 | Jack Perrin | US | Actor | 1967 | ||
| August | 14 | Theodor Luts | Estonia | Director, Cinematographer | 1980 | |
| 18 | Jack Pickford | Canada | Actor | 1933 | ||
| 30 | Raymond Massey | Canada | Actor | 1983 | ||
| October | 1 | Abraham Sofaer | US | Actor | 1988 | |
| 6 | David Howard | US | Director | 1941 | ||
| 23 | Lilyan Tashman | US | Actress | 1934 | ||
| 30 | Rex Cherryman | US | Actor | 1928 | ||
| November | 16 | Lawrence Tibbett | US | Actor, Singer | 1960 | |
| December | 10 | Torsten Bergström | Sweden | Actor, Director | 1948 | |
The year 1900 in film involved some significant events.
The following is an overview of the events of 1895 in film, including a list of films released and notable births.
The following is an overview of the events of 1897 in film, including a list of films released and notable births.
The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device, designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time through a peephole viewer window. The Kinetoscope was not a movie projector, but it introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of video: it created the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter. First described in conceptual terms by U.S. inventor Thomas Edison in 1888, it was largely developed by his employee William Kennedy Laurie Dickson between 1889 and 1892. Dickson and his team at the Edison lab in New Jersey also devised the Kinetograph, an innovative motion picture camera with rapid intermittent, or stop-and-go, film movement, to photograph movies for in-house experiments and, eventually, commercial Kinetoscope presentations.
James Stuart Blackton was a British-American film producer and director of the silent era. One of the pioneers of motion pictures, he founded Vitagraph Studios in 1897. He was one of the first filmmakers to use the techniques of stop-motion and drawn animation, is considered a father of American animation, and was the first to bring many classic plays and books to the screen. Blackton was also the commodore of the Motorboat Club of America and the Atlantic Yacht Club.
Charles Francis Jenkins was an American engineer who was a pioneer of early cinema and one of the inventors of television, though he used mechanical rather than electronic technologies. His businesses included Charles Jenkins Laboratories and Jenkins Television Corporation. Over 400 patents were issued to Jenkins, many for his inventions related to motion pictures and television.
Thomas J. Armat was an American mechanic and inventor, a pioneer of cinema best known through the co-invention of the Edison Vitascope.
The Biograph Company, also known as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, was a motion picture company founded in 1895 and active until 1916. It was the first company in the United States devoted entirely to film production and exhibition, and for two decades was one of the most prolific, releasing over 3000 short films and 12 feature films. During the height of silent film as a medium, Biograph was the most prominent U.S. film studio and one of the most respected and influential studios worldwide, only rivaled by Germany's UFA, Sweden's Svensk Filmindustri and France's Pathé. The company was home to pioneering director D. W. Griffith and such actors as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, and Lionel Barrymore.
Vitascope was an early film projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. They had made modifications to Jenkins' patented Phantoscope, which cast images via film and electric light onto a wall or screen. The Vitascope is a large electrically-powered projector that uses light to cast images. The images being cast are originally taken by a kinetoscope mechanism onto gelatin film. Using an intermittent mechanism, the film negatives produced up to fifty frames per second. The shutter opens and closes to reveal new images. This device can produce up to 3,000 negatives per minute. With the original Phantoscope and before he partnered with Armat, Jenkins displayed the earliest documented projection of a filmed motion picture in June 1894 in Richmond, Indiana.
William Nicholas Selig was a vaudeville performer and pioneer of the American motion picture industry. His stage billing as Colonel Selig would be used for the rest of his career, even as he moved into film production.
The Selig Polyscope Company was an American motion picture company that was founded in 1896 by William Selig in Chicago, Illinois. The company produced hundreds of early, widely distributed commercial moving pictures, including the first films starring Tom Mix, Harold Lloyd, Colleen Moore, and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Selig Polyscope also established Southern California's first permanent movie studio, in the historic Edendale district of Los Angeles.
Edison Studios was an American film production organization, owned by companies controlled by inventor and entrepreneur, Thomas Edison. The studio made close to 1,200 films, as part of the Edison Manufacturing Company (1894–1911) and then Thomas A. Edison, Inc. (1911–1918), until the studio's closing in 1918. Of that number, 54 were feature length, and the remainder were shorts. All of the company's films have fallen into the public domain because they were released before 1928.
Actuality film is a non-fiction film genre that uses footage of real events, places, and things, in a similar way to documentary film. Unlike documentaries, actuality films are not structured into a larger narrative or coherent whole. In practice, actuality films preceded the emergence of the documentary. During the era of early cinema, actualities—usually lasting no more than a minute or two and usually assembled together into a program by an exhibitor—were just as popular and prominent as their fictional counterparts. The line between "fact" and "fiction" was not as prominent in early cinema as it would become once documentaries became the predominant non-fiction filmmaking form. Actuality as a film genre is related to still photography.
The decade of the 1890s in film involved some significant events.
Koster and Bial's Music Hall was an important vaudeville theatre in New York City, located at Broadway and Thirty-Fourth Street, where Macy's flagship store now stands. It had a seating capacity of 3,748, twice the size of many theaters. Ticket prices ranged from 25¢ for a seat in the gallery to $1.50 for one in the orchestra. The venue was founded by John Koster (1844-1895) and Albert Bial (1842-1897) in the late 19th century and closed in 1901.
The Phantoscope was a film projection machine, a creation of Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. In the early 1890s, Jenkins began creating the projector. He later met Thomas Armat, who provided financial backing and assisted with necessary modifications.
Manuel Trujillo Durán was a Venezuelan photographer who pioneered film in Venezuela. Trujillo was most successful as a photographer, though he dabbled in other industries and is best remembered for his connections to the fledgling film industry in Venezuela. He became one of the first people from Latin America to learn how to show films; he was thought for many years to be the director of Venezuela's first films, and traveled through Venezuela and Colombia with projectors to introduce cinema to this part of the South American continent.
Luis Manuel Méndez was a Venezuelan businessman and film presenter from the state of Zulia.
Norman C. Raff and Frank R. Gammon were two American businessmen who were known for distributing and promoting some of the Edison Studio films, and founding their own business, which was called The Kinetoscope Company.