Cinema of West Germany

Cinema of Germany
The Berlin Wintergarten theatre was the site of the first cinema ever, with a short movie presented by the Skladanowsky brothers on 1 November 1895
No. of screens	4,637 (2014)
• Per capita	6.2 per 100,000 (2011)
Main distributors	Warner (19.5%) Walt Disney (11.5%) Sony Pictures (11.1%)
Produced feature films (2011)
Fictional	128 (60.4%)
Animated	5 (2.4%)
Documentary	79 (37.3%)
Number of admissions (2014)
Total	121,740,690
• Per capita	1.50 (2014)
National films	32,100,000 (26,7%)
Gross box office (2014)
Total	€980 million

The Cinema of Germany refers to the film industry based in Germany and can be traced back to the late 19th century. German cinema has made major technical and artistic contributions to film during the period from 1918-1933.

Germany witnessed major changes to its identity during the 20th and 21st century. Those changes determined the periodisation of national cinema into a succession of distinct eras and movements.

The history of cinema in Germany can be traced back to the years shortly after the medium's birth. On November 1, 1895 Max Skladanowsky and his brother Emil demonstrated their self-invented film projector the Bioscop at the Wintergarten music hall in Berlin. A 15-minute series of eight short films, it was the first screening of films to a paying audience in Europe. This performance pre-dated the first paying public display of the Lumière brothers' Cinematographe in Paris on December 28 of the same year, a performance that Max Skladanowsky attended and at which he was able to ascertain that the Cinematographe was technically superior to his Bioscop. Other German film pioneers included the Berliners Oskar Messter and Max Gliewe, two of several individuals who independently in 1896 first used a Geneva drive (which allows the film to be advanced intermittently one frame at a time) in a projector, and the cinematographer Guido Seeber.

In its earliest days, the cinematograph was perceived as an attraction for upper class audiences, but the novelty of moving pictures did not last long. Soon, trivial short films were being shown as fairground attractions aimed at the working class and lower-middle class. The booths in which these films were shown were known in Germany somewhat disparagingly as Kintopps. Film-makers with an artistic bent attempted to counter this view of cinema with longer movies based on literary models, and the first German "artistic" films began to be produced from around 1910, an example being the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation "The Student of Prague" (1913) which was co-directed by Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye, photographed by Guido Seeber and starring actors from Max Reinhardt's company.