Harvard's Suggested Film Viewing: Narrative Films

A train arrives at La Ciotat station.

La Sortie des usines Lumière is one of the first films in the history of cinema and a milestone. Three different versions of the film exist.

The earliest known instance of film comedy and the first film known to have a fictional narrative. At less than one minute long this marks an important beginning moment in the history of film. A gardener has a trick played on him when his hose is stepped on by a young boy. He catches on, pursues the young man and gives him a spanking.

As part of a maiden public film screening at the Salon Indien, on December 28, in Paris, Auguste Lumière pivots the centre of attention around his baby daughter, as he tries to feed her from a spoon.

Georges Méliès makes a woman disappear, then reappear.

A Trip to The Moon is a science fiction film from the French film pioneer Georges Méliès from the year 1902 about a trip to the moon. The film was the first film with a self-contained plot and was the beginning of the Science Fiction genre.

At the royal court, a prince is presenting the princess whom he is pledged to marry when a witch suddenly appears. Though driven off, the witch soon returns, summons some of her servants, and carries off the princess. A rescue party is quickly organized, but the unfortunate captive has been taken to a strange, forbidding realm, from where it wil...

Two impish clowns construct a magic lantern. They prop it up at an angle, and use it to project pictures onto a wall. When the picture show ends, they open up the lantern to reveal a group of dancing girls inside - and this is only the first of the indications that this lantern really is magical.

Using every known means of transportation, several savants from the Geographic Society undertake a journey through the Alps to the Sun which finishes under the sea.

In a long, diaphanous skirt, held out by her hands with arms extended, Broadway dancer Annabelle Moore performs. Her dance emphasizes the movement of the flowing cloth. She moves to her right and left across an unadorned stage. Many of the prints were distributed in hand-tinted color.

They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time.

“This film is remarkable in several respects. In the first place, it is full life-size. Secondly, it is the only accurate recent portrait of the great inventor. The scene is an actual one, showing Mr. Edison in working dress engaged in an interesting chemical experiment in his great Laboratory. There is sufficient movement to lead the spectator ...

Film depicting the killing of Topsy, an elephant employed to help build Luna Park on Coney Island.

Ojo and Unc Nunkie are out of food, so they decide to journey to the Emerald City where they will never starve. Along the way, they meet Mewel, a waif and stray (mule) who leads them to Dr. Pipt, who has been stirring the powder of life for nine years. Ojo adds plenty of brains to Margolotte's Patchwork servant before she is brought to life with...

Our presidential hunter runs across the landscape and falls down in the snow, gets up with his rifle, and gazes upward at a treed animal which isn't in the camera's view. He fires a shot into the tree, then leaps on the ground to grab the fallen prey, a domestic cat, finishing it off with wild blows of his hunting knife while his companions, a p...

A most interesting picture at the Pan-American Exposition. The picture was taken from the north side of the Electric Tower. It presents the most perfect and diversified views of the Transportation Building, Mexican Plaza, the Stadium and the north side of the Electric Tower. (Edison Catalog, 1902)

A great feature of the Pan-American Exposition, as unanimously conceded by all visitors, was the electric illumination of the Exposition grounds at night. After a great deal of experimenting and patience, we succeeded in securing an excellent picture of the buildings at the Pan-American as they appeared when lighted up at night.

Porter's sequential continuity editing links several shots to form a narrative of firemen responding to a house fire. They leave the station with their horse drawn pumper, arrive on the scene, and effect the safe rescue of a woman from the burning house. But wait, she tells them of her child yet asleep in the burning bedroom...

Country rube thinks what he sees on the movie screen is real. He jumps out of his seat to try to stop a kissing scene.

Based on the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe: Eliza, a slave who has a young child, pleads with Tom, another slave, to escape with her. Tom does not leave, but Eliza flees with her child. After getting some help to escape the slave traders who are looking for her, she then must try to cross the icy Ohio River if she wants to be free. Meanwhile, T...

A woman being fitted for shoes exposes her ankle to the shoe clerk, who is intrigued. He kisses her, but her chaperone hits him with her umbrella.

An engaged couple, dressed in white, meet each other at a train station. When the train arrives, they board, and later they enjoy the sights from their car's platform. They are married by a minister and soon, arrive at their destination.

After the train station clerk is assaulted and left bound and gagged, then the departing train and its passengers robbed, a posse goes in hot pursuit of the fleeing bandits.

A combination of the story of Goldlocks and the Three Bears with the true story of how Teddy Roosevelt spared a bear cub after killing its mother while hunting, an event which led to the popularization of the teddy bear. Goldilocks goes to sleep in the bears' home after watching six teddy bears dance and do acrobatics, viewing them through a kno...

A gang of thieves lure a man out of his home so that they can rob it and threaten his wife and children. The family barricade themselves in an interior room, but the criminals are well-equipped for breaking in. When the father finds out what is happening, he must race against time to get back home.

On a whim, a greedy tycoon decides to corner the world market in wheat. This doubles the price of bread, forcing grain producers into charity lines and others further into poverty. The film contrasts the differences between the lives of those who work to grow the wheat and the life of the man who dabbles in its sale for profit.

A Confederate officer is called off to war. He leaves his wife and daughter in the care of George, his faithful Negro servant. After the officer is killed in battle, George continues in his caring duties, faithful to his trust.

A young woman takes over her sick father's role as telegraph operator at a railway station, and has to deal with a team intent on train robbery.

To fulfill a dying mother's bequest for her daughter, the town pastor purchases the daughter a stylish hat, and gossip spreads through the town.

A man recognizes the thief who had previously robbed him as one of the men involved in an unrelated mob shootout.

Two young girls are sent away to live with their uncle, which sets off a chain of events resulting in an Indian attack on the town.

A brief fantasy tale involving a strange fairy who can produce and deliver babies coming out of cabbages. Note: This is a LOST film; the existing film of the same name is the remake from 1900.

A married couple, suspecting one another of infidelity, decide to "live separately together."

Young Cabiria is kidnapped by pirates and sold as a slave in Carthage. Just as she's to be sacrificed to Moloch, Cabiria is rescued by Fulvius Axilla, a good-hearted Roman spy, and his powerful slave, Maciste. The trio are broken up as Cabiria is entrusted to a woman of noble birth. With Cabiria's fate unknown, Maciste punished for his heroism, ...

Inspector Juve is tasked to capture the infamous criminal genius Fantômas who, ruthless and particularly elusive, changes his appearance and holds Paris' high society in a crippling grasp.

The Birth of A Nation is a silent film from 1915 and the highest grossing film in film history. The film tells a romance story during the American civil war.

Les Vampires is a 10-part silent film serial. It was written and directed by Louis Feuillade and stars Musidora as "Irma Vep" a femme fatale whose name is a suspicious anagram of "vampire." The serial is set in Paris, France and follows the exploits of a gang of master criminals who call themselves "Les Vampires."

Four historical tales depict the ongoing human struggle against prejudice and inhumanity.

A venal, spoiled stockbroker's wife impulsively embezzles $10,000 from the charity she chairs and desperately turns to a Burmese ivory trader to replace the stolen money.

Charlie is an immigrant who endures a challenging voyage and gets into trouble as soon as he arrives in America.

A stranger comes to work at widow Halla's farm. Halla and the stranger fall in love, but when he is revealed as Eyvind, an escaped thief forced into crime by his family's starvation, they flee and become two of the many outlaws of Iceland's mountains.

Broken Blossoms is an American silent film from director D. W. Griffith. This melodrama tells the love story of an abused English woman and a Chinese Buddhist in a time when London was a brutal and harsh place to live.

An overworked farmhand who works also at the adjacent hotel dreams of marrying the village belle.

Francis, a young man, recalls in his memory the horrible experiences he and his fiancée Jane recently went through. Francis and his friend Alan visit The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an exhibit where the mysterious doctor shows the somnambulist Cesare, and awakens him for some moments from his death-like sleep.

An alcoholic, abusive ne'er-do-well is shown the error of his ways through a legend that dooms the last person to die on New Year's Eve before the clock strikes twelve to take the reins of Death's chariot and work tirelessly collecting fresh souls for the next year.

Professor Griggs, teaching at the college, doesn't get paid a living wage; his next door neighbor, successful shoemaker Olsen, has money and plentiful food, while the Griggses have hardly any. When the professor's rich student Phil West falls for beautiful Griggs daughter Amelia and also befriends the poor Reverend Gates (a young man who is also...

Although the critics in 1922 didn’t find the film to be anything special, a few years after it’s release it was called innovative and a landmark in cinema history. German director Murnau’s vampire film holds claim to one of the most, if not the most important German expressionist film and a foundation for horror films.

After a man kills two members of his Yukon gold prospecting team, the other two surviving members struggle to keep him subdued for the next several months until they can turn him over to the law.

Haxan is a study about how superstition and the misunderstanding of diseases and mental illness could lead to the hysteria of the witch-hunts. The film was made as a documentary but contains dramatized sequences that are comparable to horror films.

"Count" Karanzim, a Don Juan is with his cousins in Monte Carlo, living from faked money and the money he gets from rich ladies, who are atracted by his charmes and his title or his militaric aristocratic behaviour. He tries to have sucess by Mrs Hughes, the wige of the new US ambassador, but he has bad luck.