What was the first feature film ever made?
Cinema has been such a staple part of the cultural diet for so long that the true history makers and trailblazers are often taken for granted or overlooked, but nothing can take away The Story of the Kelly Gang‘s status as the first feature-length film that ever existed.
That’s literal in more ways than one, too, with director Charles Tait’s story following the titular outlaws being captured on 4,000 feet of film, with the original cut running for over an hour. At the time, shorts were largely the order of the day, so there was naturally great interest in a movie breaking through the 60-minute barrier.
Given the technological limitations of the time, it was an unsurprisingly arduous undertaking. Production on The Story of the Kelly Gang unfolded over the course of six months, while friends and family of the various cast and crew members were drafted in to play background roles and help in any way they could to try and make the ambitious production run as smoothly as possible.
Most films only ran for somewhere between five and ten minutes, but making something that was at least half a dozen times lengthier than the industry standard wasn’t viewed as being made for intentionally groundbreaking purposes. Instead, Australia’s collective obsession with the Kelly gang convinced the filmmakers that audiences would be willing to commit to a full-length feature regardless of whether or not it was the first, considering stage productions that ran for similar lengths of time consistently played to packed houses.
What made the gamble even more remarkable was how little precedent existed to guide it. There were no templates for pacing, narrative structure, or audience engagement over such a long runtime, leaving the filmmakers to rely largely on instinct. Every creative decision was effectively an experiment, testing how far viewers could be drawn into a sustained story without the novelty wearing thin.
That sense of trial and error would go on to define early cinema as a whole. Before studios, genres, and formal rules took shape, filmmakers were discovering the language of film in real time. The Story of the Kelly Gang sits at the centre of that discovery process, not because it set out to rewrite the rulebook, but because it helped create one where none had existed before.
Co-writer and director Tate – along with brother Nevin – were concert promoters and film producers with backgrounds in theatre, while Millard Johnson and William Gibson were pioneers in the area of film exhibition, photography and processing. Putting their heads together, the quartet served as the driving forces and technical experts of crafting cinema’s first-ever hourlong adventure.
Holding its world premiere on December 26th, 1906, The Story of the Kelly Gang was a huge hit among local audiences, who were understandably captivated by a movie that unfolded over such an extended period of time compared to everything else that had ever been made up to that point.
Unfortunately, much of it has been lost to history, with less than 20 minutes of footage existing to this day, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, who would also inscribe it on the organisation’s ‘Memory of the World Register’ in 2007, where it was celebrated for being the world’s first feature-length narrative work of cinema.
Thanks to continued research and additional fragments, though, there is a version of The Story of the Kelly Gang that runs for around half an hour, offering an insight into a genuine moment of history that will endure forever as a film that changed the game forever.
