A still from Kalem’s Dr. Skinnem’s Wonderful Invention (1912).
Long before the advent of trailers, television, and the internet to publicize movies, photographic stills sold motion pictures and stars to the general public. Scene stills were originally simply used as illustrations to sell movies to theatre owners through exhibitor bulletins and to suggest genre and action to potential audiences. Over the next couple of decades, studios developed new ways to organize and produce the images, as well as forming stills departments to organize the production and development of photos.
A new form of entertainment at the dawn of the twentieth century, moviemaking possessed no rules or regulations in how to create, market, or exhibit films. Early pioneers made it up as they went along, finding the best practices and tools in how to organize their industry. Producers and studios at first copied publicity and selling tools of theatre, the circus, and vaudeville, creating eyecatching lithographic posters to attract consumers and shooting photographs of important scenes more as marketing tools to exhibitors. Continue reading
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