Where was the first movie theatre?

In the age of streaming services and direct-to-video releases, it’s almost quaint to remember a time when movies could only be viewed in a public space.

The birth of cinema is often pinpointed as December 28th, 1895, when Auguste and Louis Lumière screened several of their short films to a small audience of paying guests. However, they didn’t build a specific theatre for the occasion; instead, they used the basement of a Parisian salon.

Not surprisingly, given the novelty of the medium, public demand for film screenings increased rapidly, leading filmmakers and entrepreneurs to make venues specifically for motion pictures. The first permanent venue to open its doors to the public was the Eden Theater in La Ciotat on the southern coast of France. Built in 1889, it was originally used as a venue for music, boxing, and Greco-Roman wrestling before being converted into a cinema. Although it closed in 1995, it was refurbished and reopened in 2013 and remains open to this day.

As far as the Guinness Book of World Records is concerned, however, the Korsør Biograf Teater in Korsør, Denmark, is the oldest continuously operating cinema in the world. It opened its doors in August 1908 and has remained open ever since.

In the UK, the first venue to show a movie was the Regent Street Cinema in London, which opened in 1896. It was the first location in the country to screen a movie and ended up becoming the first venue to screen an X-rated film as well, with the 1951 war movie La Vie Commence Demain.

Where was the first movie made?

Like many new technologies, filmmaking was being pioneered in multiple parts of the world simultaneously, making it difficult to identify the first-ever motion picture.

In the Victorian era, photographers were able to capture a set of photographs of moving objects (usually animals) to record movement. Chronophotography, as it was known, became an early form of moving pictures, with Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion being the most famous example. 

It wasn’t until the late 1880s and early 1890s that the technology for filmmaking was invented. Thomas Edison and his associate William Kennedy Dickson are often credited with making the first movies, but others argue that it was a man named Louis Le Prince. The French inventor filmed the three-second short Roundhay Garden Scene on October 14th, 1888, which is considered to be the first surviving motion picture. 

Despite his nationality, Le Prince filmed the movie in Leeds at Oakwood Grange in Roundhay. The garden has since been replaced with Georgian-style houses.

…and what was the first movie with sound?

Edison was determined to create motion pictures that could be synchronised with his phonograph, but even though he combined the technologies to create the Kinetophone in 1894, historians allege that they were never physically combined or synchronised, and that Edison merely hid a phonograph in the cabinet where viewers watched the films.

Inventors struggled to synchronise movies and sound for decades, and while there were many attempts to present the two together throughout the late 1890s and 1910s, the first feature film to achieve synchronisation from start to finish was 1926’s Don Juan. Using the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system developed by the Warner Bros subsidiary, Western Electric, the film featured a musical score and sound effects but no dialogue. 

The technology would later be used for 1927’s The Jazz Singer, which was the first film to feature both synchronised music and lip-synchronised dialogue.

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