The desire to time the 1874 transit of Venus led to the first automatic recording of a sequential series of photographs. Despite this pedigree early astronomical moving pictures are neglected by current historical accounts of the development of both cinema and astronomy. In this work we surveyed scientific astronomical moving picture attempts made before the end of World War I. One immediately realises that films were sparsely shot in the time interval studied and that solar observations were the driving force behind the majority of them. One had to wait until 1912 for the first simultaneous use of a large number of film cameras in a single astronomical observation. Following the 1912 April 17 solar eclipse the first astronomical hypothesis solely based on film data was proposed and several analyses of astronomical films were published in international journals. Despite this visibility these cinema attempts and results were quickly forgotten by the astronomical community. We suspect the wide range of professional backgrounds of early astronomical cinema pioneers did not help to establish the medium credentials at a time when the cinema role was still being defined within society. We conclude that movie cameras failed to become part of the standard astronomical observers toolkit. This was mainly a consequence of a lack of suitable observable subjects.