Passage de Venus

This is the oldest thing listed on the entire IMDb. I'm glad to have discovered this neat trick where you can literally look at any submission on the entire website. You just type in a keyword and then get rid of the check in the box. This website has literally 5.3 million entries! It's quite nice to get to see the first one. I believe "Roundhay Garden Scene" was technically the first movie ever made.

This is actually a series of photographs, so it probably doesn't count as a movie. It's only 5 seconds long, but it's great to see history in motion! Of course, it's very low quality. I imagine this would be in the public domain so it shouldn't be hard to find. Weird when I make a review longer than the actual entry! I'm sure you have time to see this. ***

This film won every award at the 1874 Oscars.

The very first moving picture was of the planet Venus.... taken from a time when we though every planet in the solar system could contain life... the person who filmed this must have wondered if anything was looking back at him from Venus....

To most this may look simply like a home movie. But it's labeled the first movie ever actually made on IMDb. That's no small accomplishment. This 1-2 second movement of Venus across the sun is not only mentally exciting, but also incredibly groundbreaking. I myself cannot confirm if it's actually Venus going across the sun, but if it is, it also showcases an excellent appearance of space movement, which was still in its relative infancy in photography.

I doubt this was actually filmed frame by frame. They could've most likely just took a few photographs on a standstill camera and wrapped them all together to create the illusion of movement. But hey. Isn't that what stop motion is about? So not only is it the first movie ever, the first movie to show the sun looking good, it's also the first stop motion movie ever made. Isn't that incredible?

I probably would've given this a lower rating if it was newer, but since it's the first of it's kind, I think it's well deserving of a 9.

This hits hard

the way venus transits across the sun just hits very different nowadays and i can't believe that this was only 5 seconds and deserves to be way longer.

This is probably the oldest film on IMDB. Whether this is a film or not, it's hard to say, as this is 6 seconds of images put together. This technique may have been performed before by other men, but this is the oldest record we have. The initial intentions were not to catch movement for its own sake, but multiple shots were required because you were unable to specify the exact time of the Venus passing in the sky. It still makes me think, though, how far we have come 145 years later. It brings a combination of joy and sadness to see these images, it makes me wonder what was that day in Jules Janssen's mind. When listening to Alexander Graham Bell capturing his own voice, projecting to the future, this set of pictures makes you feel like history was made on that very day.