Movies & Film

The Library of Congress holds hundreds of early films that survived only by accident. Before 1912 there was no way to copyright a motion picture as such, so producers printed their films frame by frame onto rolls of paper and registered them as photographs. The film stock rotted or burned over the years, but the paper prints stayed in storage, and many have since been copied back onto film.

Moving pictures arrived in the 1890s. Thomas Edison's company showed short films in peep-show machines called Kinetoscopes, and in 1895 the Lumiere brothers in France projected films to a paying audience. By about 1905 small storefront theaters called nickelodeons were opening across American cities, charging a nickel for a program of short films. The audience was largely working people and immigrants, and the movies did not need a common language.

Mary Pickford was one of the first true movie stars. She was born in Toronto, started in films in 1909 and within a few years was among the best-paid performers in the world, known as America's Sweetheart. In 1919 she joined Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith to found United Artists, so that the artists could control their own work.

War films form a group of their own. During World War I the movies were drafted into service with patriotic features, newsreels and short films urging people to buy bonds. World War II brought the same effort on a much larger scale, with Hollywood studios and stars working closely with the government.

Worth noticing in the posters is that the stars were not always named in the earliest years. Studios held back performers' names at first, partly to keep salaries down. Audiences wrote in asking about the girl with the curls, and the star system was born from that demand. By the 1920s the star's name was often printed larger than the title. Look too at the printing. Many of these posters were made by stone lithography and are richer in color than anything that came later.