Films

Edwin S. Porter’s landmark Western helped establish narrative editing, location shooting, action spectacle, and the screen outlaw as popular cinema attractions.

A major early screen adaptation of Lew Wallace’s bestseller, notable for bringing Biblical spectacle and the famous chariot race into American cinema.

A landmark early Griffith drama involving a kidnapped child and river rescue

An early American literary adaptation that demonstrated cinema’s growing ambition to dramatise famous works of literature.

An early one-reel Biograph comedy that marked Mary Pickford's first appearance on the screen.

An early Griffith Biograph drama based on a story by French writer François Coppée

The first appearance on the screen of Gilbert M. Anderson's hugely popular Western hero, Broncho Billy.

Edison’s pioneering screen version of Mary Shelley’s novel is an early horror landmark, remembered for its imaginative monster-creation effects.

Griffith's early Western is widely considered to be the first movie filmed entirely in Hollywood.

Griffith’s adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s bestseller exemplifies early cinema’s growing interest in adapting prestigious literary properties.

Long considered the earliest surviving film directed by a Native American, although James Young Deer may have been a mulatto.

Helen Gardner’s independently produced historical spectacle was an important woman-led feature production and an early screen treatment of the Egyptian queen.