The debate between whether audiences should prefer originality or familiarity in their movies is ongoing and irresistibly enduring. Many movie fans rave over films that try something daring and new with their plot and/or style, but general audiences rarely seem to be averse to cliches or plots they've seen a million times before if the box office performances of certain unnamed films are any indication (cough *Transformers* cough). Of course, neither side is necessarily right in this matter, as too little innovation is boring and too much is incomprehensible and unrelatable. For those moviegoers that appreciate an opportunity to see something new when watching a movie, imagine watching something almost no one had ever seen before of a type that would fundamentally change filmmaking for generations. Picture being one of the first people to see moving colour images, or even being the first person to see a moving images at all. The sensations must have been incredible and awesome in the oldest sense of the word, and a distilled version of the pleasure modern audiences experience when even the slightest innovation creeps in to their cinema experiences. The milestone movies described in this article might not be as slickly executed as most movies youre likely to see today - and in fact a few of them were ridiculed somewhat in their own time for their clumsiness or bad taste - but for sheer creative novelty, its difficult for movies today to come anywhere near their importance.
