The 1900s saw the cinema break free from its origins. Look no further than Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery in 1903, which transformed the medium by using cross-cutting, location shooting, and a sophisticated narrative structure to thrill audiences. This creative leap sparked a massive commercial boom, most notably through the rapid proliferation of “Nickelodeons”, the first indoor exhibition spaces dedicated exclusively to screening motion pictures. As the decade progressed, production companies across the globe, from Pathé Frères in France to the early film pioneers in the United States, began moving toward a standardised studio system to meet the public’s insatiable demand for longer, multi-reel stories.

Directors born during this decade—such as Luis Buñuel (1900), Walt Disney (1901), Vittorio De Sica (1901), Yasujirō Ozu (1903), and Billy Wilder (1906), would go on to pioneer entirely new genres, spearhead radical movements like Italian Neorealism and Surrealism, and author some of the most enduring, critically acclaimed masterpieces in film history.