MORE THAN A century has passed since an eager audience crowded into Koster & Bial's Music Hall in New York City and beheld an astonishing new invention. The April 23, 1896, demonstration of Edison's Vitascope marked the first time motion pictures had been projected onto a screen for a paying audience in the United States. The pioneering moviegoers were treated to a short black-and-white sequence showing ballet dancers. While a two- or three-minute silent film presenting a snippet of ordinary life would hardly hold the attention of today's sophisticated film fans, to people who had never seen moving images, the effect was stunning. And from such humble beginnings would grow a huge and lucrative entertainment industry.

Violence in early film

Inspired to use the new medium to tell a story, director and cameraman Edwin S. Porter put together an eleven minute...