Click a point to jump to its film.
On 25 October 1896 a Lumière operator put a camera in a gondola and let the boat do the moving. Alexandre Promio's strip went out in Lyon on 13 December 1897 as Panorama du grand Canal pris d'un bateau, and three reference works call it probably cinema's first tracking shot. All three hedge the word first: Italian Wikipedia has very probably, the English article most likely, and Who's Who of Victorian Cinema, the most careful, says Promio probably took the shot and that it has since been claimed as the first time anyone moved a camera. The date is not in question, nor the gondola, nor the canal.
A reasonable thing to have happened here, because there is no other way to film this place. The palaces come straight out of the water, with no pavement and no walkway along the 3.8 km, so their fronts face the water and there is nowhere else to look from.
Venice is filmed constantly and this water takes the credit for all of it. Death in Venice, The Talented Mr Ripley, The Merchant of Venice: not one of their own production records names the Grand Canal. Ombre sul Canal Grande, from 1951, is named after it and says nothing about where it was shot. Absence is not denial; it is where the trail stops.
David Lean got his 1954 summer here only after United Artists donated to the restoration of St Mark's and he promised the cardinal no bare arms near the holy places. A song from The Great Gambler went on a gondola on this water in 1979. For one August morning in 1988 the whole canal was closed to tourists for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Casino Royale came up it under sail in 2006.
And in 1943 a production paid for a regatta. The film was called Canal Grande after this water, and its producers wanted a colour finale with the Regata Storica; the war had suspended the regatta, so the company Sol staged and paid for one. The Agfacolor came out so badly that the finale was written off and the picture was reprinted end to end in black and white. That account comes from Italian Wikipedia, resting on a book by Giorgio and Maurizio Crovato we have not seen. The Regata Storica still runs every first Sunday in September, with the city watching from the banks.