By Marissa Fessenden

The first motion pictures were simple image sequences — like that captured by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge using a series of cameras tripped by a horse galloping in 1878. Even the first films with plot were short (like George Méliès's 1902 A Trip to the Moon, which has a run time of about 14 minutes).

The first full-length feature films (films that run for forty minutes or more) didn't come about until The Story of The Kelly Gang, from Australia in 1906 and the infamously racist The Birth of a Nation from American D.W. Griffith in 1915. But perhaps less well known, is the fantastical L'Inferno, an adaptation of Dante's Inferno, created in Italy in 1911.

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Source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/