Happy 100th Birthday Cinema

I meant to do this the other day, but I got sidetracked by work and movies and social lives as you do. It may surprise some of y'all to know that Boxing Day 2006 was the 100th anniversary of feature length films. Uh-huh. I speak of Charles Tait's 1906 film The Story of The Kelly Gang. The world’s very first feature film was a 70-minute long production at a time when then French Lumiere brothers and others were pioneering cinema with titles like The Great Train Robbery and A Trip to the Moon that were under 15 minutes. The Story of The Kelly Gang, obviously a telling of the famous Ned Kelly story, had ten cast members, four of whom were from the director’s own family. Two of the film’s four producers were also Tait family members. The real Ned Kelly suit of armour was used on loan from the Melbourne Museum. It's budget was $2,250. It was initially banned in certain areas for glorifying these men, but it went on to screen around the nation for 20 years not only in Australia, but in New Zealand and Britain too. Ned Kelly was played by Godfrey Cass, who would go on to play Kelly again in another feature - 1920's The Kelly Gang. The film doesn't exist anymore, and all that's left of it are about 10 minutes of footage and several individual frames.


There's more about it at Wikipedia or the IMDb. I'd suggest going to the National Film & Sound Archive to look at all the restored film images, plus stuff like the promotional pictures below (which you can enlarge).