What was the first-ever independent movie?
Ever since the creation of the moving image back in the late 19th century, when cinemas were used as fascinating sideshows at carnivals, the world of cinema has been seen as predominantly a money-making business. Decades later, when Hollywood was given proper foundations, studios such as 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros reared their heads, making some of the greatest movies of the era under their carefully controlled corporate identity.
Such remains the case to this very day, too, with the likes of Disney creating a number of movies every year that reflect their brand ideals, keeping directors and other creatives rigorously in check. Yet, despite classic films having been made under the studio system, creative freedom is undoubtedly limited. The long-standing antidote to this artistic tussle is independent movies; low-budget flicks funded by no major production company.
For decades in the 20th century, the necessary equipment to make a movie was simply too expensive for the everyday aspiring filmmaker, but this all changed in the late 1960s when Kodak released amateur Super 8mm film cameras. Suddenly, anyone and everyone could make home movies. This became even easier when video cameras were released to the mass consumer market in the mid-1970s.
Consumer technology gave voice to a bounty of new creatives, with such innovative independent films being promoted at Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival, founded back in 1978. Originally named the Utah/US Film Festival, the annual event was set up to highlight American movies and the staggering potential of independent cinema, screening such titles as Deliverance, A Streetcar Named Desire, Midnight Cowboy and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, with the latter being one of the first and most influential indie films.
With the indie industry steadily flourishing, many other filmmakers jumped on board, with American eccentric Jim Jarmusch announcing himself in the early 1980s with his movie Stranger Than Paradise, released in 1984. Breaking countless traditional conventions of Hollywood filmmaking, Jarmusch’s film is iconic in its own right, providing a road map for how independent cinema would thrive in the following decades.
In the years that followed, seminal independent movies created a hot-bed for American culture, with Spike Lee releasing She’s Gotta Have It in 1986, Steven Soderbergh making the seminal Palme d’Or winner Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Kevin Smith revolutionising the landscape once more with Clerks in 1994, a film that brought the monochrome indie style of new-wave indie American cinema to the masses.
But, for evidence of the first-ever independent movie, we have to go back to the 1910’s and the creation of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and United Artists, a studio formed and owned by filmmakers looking to move away from the power of the contemporary Hollywood system. In 1916, the very same year in which the studio was created, they released The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition, a silent short film directed by Harry A. Gant. Despite the film’s title being undoubtedly problematic in a modern context, the film featured an all black cast and told the story of a man who leaves his family home to find success in the oil trade, finding love in his pursuit of the American dream.
The debut film from the very first independent film organisation, Gant’s movie would surpass its humble beginnings, becoming the first ever truly independent release ever made. As clips from Lincoln Motion Picture Company’s debut aren’t available, check out their 1921 film By Right of Birth below.
