1) What was the name of the first film made by the Lumiere Brothers and when was this?
Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory – 1895

2) What is the ‘Phantom Ride’?
An early genre of film, which shows a vehicle moving forwards by attaching a camera to the front of it.

3) What was ground-breaking about the silent films ‘The Sick Kitten’ and ‘The Life of an American Fireman’?
‘The Sick Kitten’ featured the first close-up shot, and ‘The Life of an American Fireman’ was the first film to cut to a different location – first it showed the outside of a burning building and then it cut to inside.

4) What the name of the first ‘film star’ in Hollywood?
Florence Lawrence

5) Who directed ‘Birth of a Nation’ and why is this film now considered to be controversial?
DW Griffiths – the film represents black people as unintelligent and the KKK as heroic, and it caused the rebirth of the KKK in America.

6) Which nation’s film industry does Cousins describe as ‘the best in the world’ in the 1910s and why?
Denmark, because they had an innovative way of constructing narratives.

7) Give an example of two films and two directors from this place and time cited by Cousins as remarkable.
Haxan (dir. Benjamin Christensen, 1922) and The Abyss (dir. Urban Gad, 1910).