Modernity, World Wars and Dictatorships | 105Early film thus had a transnational historical dimension in a twofold
sense. For one, its rapid spread made it a worldwide attraction: from cities like
Buenos Aires, St Petersburg, Cairo, Bombay and Shanghai, to countries such
as Mexico, Japan and Australia, it was possible from 1896 to attend frequent
film screenings, often presented by the Lumières’ assistants (Vasey, in Nowell-
Smith 1996: 53; Abel 2005: 38, 216). Secondly, films from distant countries
would publicise spectacular events and (stereotypical) everyday scenes. Until
the First World War, the distribution of films remained on the international
level. Thanks to the Lumières and large film companies such as Gaumont,
Eclair and Pathé, which took over the Lumières’ rights in 1897, France was the
leading country in the film industry. Hence just under half of all films avail-
able in Germany before the First World War came from French production
companies or distributors, whereas a mere 13 per cent were from domestic
production companies, another 13 per cent from the United States, 8 per cent
from Italy and another 6 per cent from Great Britain (Birett 1991: XV). In the
United States, on the other hand, almost half of all films on the market before
1909 were European (Bakker 2005: 313), which meant that, through movies,
it was the great Western countries that had the power of visually propagating
their interpretations of the world. Until 1911 only one Japanese film was ver-
ifiably shown in Germany, compared to approximately fifty films about Japan,
which were produced primarily in France (list in Birett 1991: 327f.).
With regard to content, it has become common in film historiography
to distinguish the ‘Cinema of Attractions’ before 1906 from the subsequent
era of silent films, which lasted into the late 1920s. When considering the
change in programming contents, economic structures and screening loca-
tions, the years 1913/14 mark an important turning point of ‘Early Cinema’.
Silent films and talkies were characterised by film theorists as autonomous
media to be distinguished from one another: silent film as the first kind of
motion picture medium, and sound film as the first audiovisual medium to be
technologically reproduced (see Müller 2003: 385–89). On the basis of pro-
gramme guides, Herbert Birett counted close to seventeen thousand films for
the period between 1895 and 1911 for Germany alone; however the number
is assumed to be twice as high (Birett 1991: XVII). Their contents point to
the context in which they developed and their intermediality, i.e. the mass
press (current and historical events, everyday occurrences, national culture and
landscapes and the like), funfair attractions and music halls (comedy, exoti-
cism, acrobatics and the like), and fictional literature and theatre, as several
short movies were already portraying adventure, love and crime stories. Films
with longer narratives and of a more clearly defined genre emerged only after
1907 – succeeding the first film crisis and the structural change it triggered.
By portraying both everyday scenes and special events, early films offer
good, though seldom utilised, sources for historians. The Lumières’ films, for