|
Milestones and Turning Points in Film History The Year 1911 |
 Timeline of Greatest Film History Milestones and Turning Points (by decade and year) Introduction | Pre-1900s | 1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s |
| Event and Significance | |
| The first US 'feature film' was released when the two parts of D. W. Griffith's Enoch Arden were screened together, running twice the normal length of films at the time. The two parts became a two-reel featurette shown in its entirety - an industry first. | |
| The first feature-length film to be released in its entirety in the US was the 69-minute fantasy/horror epic Dante's Inferno (1911, It.) (aka L’Inferno), inspired by Dante's 14th century poem The Divine Comedy. It opened in New York on December 10, 1911 at Gane’s Manhattan Theatre. It was made by three directors Francesco Bertolini, Giuseppe de Liguoro, and Adolfo Padovan, took two years to make, and cost over $180,000. It was also the first non-erotic film to feature full-frontal male nudity - which wouldn't reappear again until Women in Love (1969, UK). | |
| Pennsylvania became the first state to pass a film censorship law. | |
| New York Herald comic-strip animator Winsor McCay (and James Stuart Blackton) debuted his first cartoon, Little Nemo (with 4,000 hand-drawn cels, and hand-colored). Two of the film's ten minutes were animated. The semi-autobiographical film brought to life his cartoon characters from his popular comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland (also titled In the Land of Wonderful Dreams in the Hearst papers). | |
| The first US fan magazine Motion Picture Story Magazine debuted in February. The Moving Picture World and The Motion Picture News also offered interviews and gossipy columns about the personal lives and careers of the stars. | |
| IMP star Florence Lawrence was interviewed in 1911 in Motion Picture Story Magazine - often considered the first movie star interview. | |
| The Nestor Company built the first full-time studio in a district of Los Angeles known as Hollywood. It was the first movie studio based in Hollywood. As a result of the independents desire to escape the restrictions of the MPPC, Hollywood was soon to become the motion-picture capital of the world. | |
| Credits began to appear regularly at the beginning of motion pictures. | |
| Pathe's Weekly was the first regularly-released US newsreel. | |
| The first dramatic film in natural color was the Kinemacolor production of Checkmated (1911, UK), directed by Theo Frenkel (aka Theo Bouwmeester), who also played the lead role of Napoleon. |
