Gone: The First Feature Film
Several of the shows I worked on at Parcast, Spotify were mini-series that had shorter run times than the typical format. “The First Ever Feature Length Film” belongs to the mini-series “Gone” which detailed moments of history that are only somewhat recorded…but otherwise lost to time.
Every film student is introduced to “The Arrival of a Train” — an 1896 film clip, produced by the Lumiere Brothers, of a train pulling into the station. The first viewers of this film ran out of the theater because they were so terrified that they would be run over.
However, the historic moment this episode covers isn’t “The Arrival of a Train.” It’s a work that came out slightly later, in May 1907, in Australia. Unfortunately, due to the government banning of films in the 1910s, the scraps of the original reel got separated and forgotten. That was, until an electrician stumbled upon several reels in an old house.
