The first public projection of a film in the United States took place in 1896 in New York. The projector had been developed by the inventor Thomas Alva Edison, whose company was also the producer of the cortometrajes. The paternity of the American fiction cinema usually is attributed to Edwin S. Porter, who in 1903 used a technical innovator of assembly in the film of 8 minutes Assault and robbery of a train by which different fragments coming from different takings from a same one film unites to form an all narrative one. This work turned the cinema a very popular artistic form, and gave rise to that in all the country they appeared small rooms of projection, the calls nickelodeones.

David Wark Griffith, disciple of Porter, developed the principles of this one using panoramic takings and first parallel planes, as well as assemblies, like expression means to maintain the tension dramatic, with which she became the most important pioneer of the dumb cinema in the United States. With its works the birth of a nation (1915) and Intolerancia (1916) initiated the tradition of historical cinema in its country.

Between 1915 and 1920, the industry of the cinema moved gradually from the coast this to Hollywood, where new studies arose. The cinematographic production became an important economic sector and imposed its dominion beyond the borders of the country. At that time the great sorts arose: western, the police cinema, of adventures, science fiction and terror, that lived a time on splendor with directors like Cecil B. Of Mille, John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler or King Vidor, like the most serious works of Ernst Lubitsch and Erich von Stroheim - the two directors better considered of the moment-- or documentary of Robert the Flaherty. A peculiarity of the North American cinema is slapstick, a sort of crazy comedy based on persecutions and gags or humorous situations. The person in charge of the appearance of this sort in 1912 was Mack Senett, in whose school Charlie formed Chaplin, author of the chimera of gold (1925). Other important representatives of slapstick were Buster Keaton (the machinist of the general, 1927), Harold Lloyd (the inexperienced student, 1925) and the pair formed by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (From soup to nuts, 1928).