1897 in film
overview of the events of 1897 in film
The following is an overview of the events of 1897 in film, including a list of films released and notable births.
Events
January 1 - The first set of films was shown in the Philippines for the first time using 60 mm Gaumont Chrono-photograph projector at the Salon de Pertierra No. 12 Escolta, Manila. The first film shown was Espectaculo Scientifico and followed by other four movies, namely, Un Homme Au Chapeau (Man with a Hat), Une scène de danse japonnaise (Scene from a Japanese Dance), Les Boxers (The Boxers), and La Place de L' Opéra (The Place L' Opéra).
January 28 – The first Venezuelan-made films are screened at the Baralt Theatre in Maracaibo, two locally made actuality shorts, Un célebre especialista sacando muelas en el gran Hotel Europa and Muchachos bañándose en la laguna de Maracaibo.
May 4 – During a film screening at the Charity Bazaar in Paris, a curtain catches on fire from the ether used to fuel the projector lamp. The fire spreads and becomes catastrophic, ultimately resulting in 126 deaths.
June 20 – Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee procession filmed.
The American Vitagraph Company is founded by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith in Brooklyn.
Mitchell and Kenyon go into a film-making partnership at Blackburn in the north of England.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q766134. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1897.
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This entry incorporates text from “1897 in film” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.