In its original form, the movies have always been about illusions. Unlike many other art form, movies strive hard to fool the audience into believing what they're seeing, and nothing has exemplified that mission more than the ongoing evolution of visual effects. Throughout movie history, some movies have pushed the envelope - and some of them deserve singular recognition.
Alfred Clark's 1895 picture The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots is believed to be the movie that began cinematic visual effects history, with its innovation of… stopping the camera to replace a human actor with a dummy, and then resume filming to create the illusion of Mary's beheading by an executioner. It's crude and primitive by modern standards, but hey, that's how history works. Someone's gotta be the first.
