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1911 Chronokey Chronomedia index
Numbers after entries link to the list of references.


links and notes
January 10  First photograph from an aeroplane is taken by Major Jimmie Erickson over San Diego, California.  
early  West’s Pictures buys the Australian branch of Pathé Frères.  
February   W G Barker's hour-long Henry VIII, starring Sir Robert Tree, Arthur Bourchier and Violet Vanbrugh, is offered on an 'exclusivity' basis—hired to exhibitors with a short-term geographical monopoly—an early instance of 'barring'.  
February   Charles Urban leases the Scala Theatre in London to exhibit Kinemacolor films.  
March   Amalgamated Picture Company formed in Melbourne, Australia by merger of industrial chemical company Johnson and Gibson with J & N Tait, following their collaboration on production of The Story of the Kelly Gang.  
April  In San Francisco, William Wadsworth Hodkinson, regional representative of the MPPC's General Film Company, implements a scheme whereby independent producers receive a cash advance for new productions in return for granting exclusive rights to distribute the films. The distributor may even pay the cost of prints and advertising (P&A). This is intended to replace the so-called 'states rights' system of producers selling prints outright (typically at $0.10 per foot) to any exhibitor, who can screen copies until unusable within a specified territory.
        This marks the beginning of the separation of production, distribution and exhibition.
 
June 15  Computing Scale Company of America, The Tabulating Machine Company and The International Time Recording Company of New York merge to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). > 1924
June 19  Pennsylvania establishes the first state film censorship board in the US.  
August   US release of first ‘feature’ film (ie, with running time of more than one hour): Italian production of Dante’s Inferno.  
August 8  First edition of Pathé Weekly is screened in the US.  
August 11  Première of first German feature-length film, In dem grossen Augenblick, directed by Urban Gad and starring Asta Nielsen and Hugo Hink.  
August 17  The Incorporated Association of Kinematograph Manufacturers (KMA) is formed in England as a limited company. > 1912
September 4  Release of first Danish feature-length film, Den sorte Drøm (The black dream), directed by Urban Gad for Deutsche Bioscop and starring Asta Nielsen and Valdemar Psilander.  
•  The Danish film Den hvide slavehandel II (The white slave trade II), directed by August Blom for Nordisk Film has a release print copy depth of 260.  
September 30  Gaumont opens its renovated 3,400-seat Gaumont-Palais cinema on the Place Clichy in Paris, the largest cinema in Europe, triggering the era of building cinema palaces in France.  
•  Alhambra Platz cinema with 2,000 seats opens in Berlin.  
November   Mutoscope production of Charles the Great has a running time of four days.  
November 7  A A Campbell-Swinton, in his presidential address to the Röntgen Society in London, suggests that high-definition television is possible with cathode ray tubes. The paper is not published until April 1924 in Wireless World.  
November 9  Parisian Georges Claude applies for a patent for neon signs.  
December 12  The coronation durbar of King George V is the subject of the first major colour film production, The Durbar at Delhi, shot in Kinemacolor. > 1912
December  Australian federal government appoints a Commonwealth Cinematographer to make official film records and promotional films.  
•  Pathé opens a production studio in the US.  
•  London has 94 cinemas with 55,000 seats, averaging 585 seats per screen. > 1931
•  First film studio in Sweden, built for Svenska Bio opens at Lidingö.  
•  Finland has 17 cinemas in Helsinki, 81 in the whole country.  
•  Gladys Sylvani, an actress at Hepworth’s Walton-on-Thames studios, is mentioned in promotion for Stolen Letters, premiered on 24 December. She is believed to be the first named ‘film star’.  
•  Theatrical star Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree appears as Cardinal Wolsey in Will Barker’s two-reeler production of Henry VIII, being paid £1,000 a day. Music for the film is by Edward German, the first time a reputed composer has written music for a British film.  
•  UK Copyright Act first mentions cinematograph film.  
•  First publication of two popular film magazines: Photoplay, founded in Chicago by James Quirk and containing promotional stories based on recent film releases, and Motion Picture Story, founded by J Stuart Blackton.  
•  Moy Gyro, invented in England for aerial reconnaissance photography, is the first 35mm film camera designed to be hand-held. It includes an electrically driven gyroscope 'to overcome nervous movements of the operator'. Two other 'firsts' are an internal electric motor with portable battery and pre-loaded internal film magazines.  
•  Adolph Zukor forms Engadine Corporation, to distribute imported French and Italian films in the USA. > 1912
•  Rob Roy, directed by Arthur Vivian for producer James Bowie, is the first three-reel movie made in Scotland.  
•  First dated film made in Greece: Quo Vadis Spiridion, directed by Spiros Dimitracopoulos.  
•  Rudolph Fischer advances du Hauron’s ideas for a triple-layer colour film by proposing inclusion of chemicals in each layer that would react during processing to form images of dyed reduced silver. The experimental substances prove to be water-soluble and produce diffused images of poor colour fidelity.  
•  John Logie Baird may already be conducting experiments in television in Glasgow and Alexandria, Scotland; certainly he is involved in experiments by 1915.  
•  Marcel Proust, lying in bed at home, hears Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande live from the Opéra Comique in Paris via the Théâtrophone service.  
•  First Lord Astor buys The Observer from Lord Northcliffe; Max Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook) first invests in the Daily Express.  
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Page updated 27 March 2009
© David Fisher