Cinema by year

Edwin S. Porter transforms cinema with The Great Train Robbery (1903), Kalem get into trouble over their adaptation of Lew Wallace's Ben Hur (1907), and D.W. Griffith begins refining the technical aspects of film-making.

1910 sees Charles Ogle play the screen's first Frankenstein's monster, D. W. Griffith direct the first movie made in Hollywood and Florence Lawrence become America's first movie star.

In 1911. D.W. Griffith pushes to expand the length of his movies to two reels, while Essanay start the popular Alkali Ike series and New York Herald illustrator Winsor McCay releases Little Nemo.

In  1912 Lillian and Dorothy Gish make their debut, Sidney Olcott films the story of Christ in the Holy Land, and D. W. Griffith directs a gangster movie that influenced Scorsese.

Mack  Sennett's Keystone Kops make their screen debut in 1913, and Lois Weber directs Suspense while Traffic in Souls cashes in on public fears of the white slave trade.

1914  is a busy year: Charlie Chaplin transforms slapstick humour, D. W. Griffith leaves Biograph to start filming The Birth of a Nation and Cecil B. DeMille directs Hollywood's first feature.

The Birth of a Nation, Griffith's controversial Civil War epic, causes a sensation and provokes riots; Theda Bara introduces moviegoers to the  Vamp; Mary Pickford becomes a superstar and Douglas Fairbanks makes his debut. 

Two 'super-pictures' dominate 1916: D.W. Griffith's epic spectacle Intolerance, and Thomas H. Ince's flawed 'masterpiece' Civilization. Elsewhere, established stars like Pickford, Chaplin, Fairbanks and Hart consolidate their statuses.

Buster Keaton makes his screen debut in 1917, while, with the USA's entry into the Great War, the producer of The Spirit of '76 receives a ten-year jail sentence for attempting to cause a mutiny