The Auteurs has just made available the first ever film adaptation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, released in 1903 by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow and recently restored by the British Film Institute's National Archive.
The film is in the public domain around the world and is available to watch for free at http://www.theauteurs.com/films/24647. It's a mind-blowing example of just how quickly cinema developed in the early years: it was made only eight years after the birth of the motion picture, and yet the narrative form and techniques like continuity editing and cross-cutting were already standard. Nearly all of the conventions of film were already in place by the 1900s and have remained pretty standard in the 100 years since.
But the best thing about watching films from the 1890s and 1900s is seeing special effects that, still, to me, are amazing. Alice in Wonderland uses the simple stop trick a lot (the sudden appearance of the table and door key in the rabbit hole; her baby's sudden transformation into a pig; etc.), but there are also a lot of dissolves and double-exposure shots... and this is 1903! I wouldn't have the feintest idea how to perform a simple dissolve on film, not that I'll ever have to in the age of digital edit suites, but Hepworth and Stow were using all kinds of wonderful double-exposure tricks to bring to life the fantastical journey of Alice in Wonderland. It's absolutely amazing to see.
Anyway, watching Alice sent me off on a journey to watch some of my other favourite early films, and discover a few more, which either introduced or perfected a lot of special effects techniques that would become standard for decades to come:
L'homme orchestre [One Man Band] (Georges Méliès, 1900): Multiple exposure shot allowing Melies to play seven musicians himself, 96 years before Michael Keaton would do the same. Also uses the stop trick to great effect.
What Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York City (Edwin S. Porter, 1901): Soft-core pornography, in this case a woman's ankles becoming visible below her skirt. (Ignore the incongruous jazz score; it's the best-quality version I could find).
Le Voyage dans la lune [A Trip to the Moon] (Méliès, 1902): Many special effects techniques, mostly involving matte painted backdrops, and a frickin' spaceship flying into the moon's eye. Hard to imagine what the world thought of space travel and a journey to the moon sixty years before it happened.
Life of an American Fireman (Porter, 1903): Cross-cutting and simultaneous action (also interesting to watch for the horse-drawn firefighting carts).
The Great Train Robbery (Porter, 1903): Cross-cutting and simultaneous action (and a shot of a bandit firing a gun directly at the camera, which must have been terrifying to audiences that lost their shit seeing an oncoming train in 1895).
The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915): Racism; popularised feature-length films.