Invention of the Cinema: It is 125 years old now
The first public demonstration of a movie by Lumière Brothers took place in Paris 125 years ago today.
In 1870, Antoine Lumière, a French portrait painter and award-winning photographer, moved his family to Lyon, France. In his new home, he started a small business of photographic plaques. Auguste and Louis, two of Antoine’s sons, grew up interested in and intrigued by their father’s trade. In 1881, 17-year-old Louis started to take a keen interest in the photographic plates created by his father. He improved the photographic technology of his day, and in mid-1890s the Lumière family ran the largest photographic factory in Europe.
In 1894, Antoine attended a Paris demonstration of the Kinetoscope, a film-viewing system sometimes referred to as the first movie projector, by Thomas Edison and William Dickson. The Kinetoscope was, however, able to display a motion picture to only one person at a time. The individual viewer had to watch through a peephole. Antoine wondered if it was possible to create a technology that could project film onto a screen for an audience and he persuaded his sons to start working on a new invention when he returned home from Paris.
One year later, the brothers were successful and the Lumière Cinématographe was patented. Besides extending the one-person peephole view of Edison to an audience, the Cinématographe was also lighter and could be carried. The extent of recording capability of the Kinetoscope meant that films could only be shot in a studio, but the invention of Lumières gave operators the flexibility and spontaneity to record candid footage outside the walls of a studio.
The Cinématographe, a three-in-one device that could capture, build and project motion pictures, would go down as the first viable film camera in history. Using it, the Lumière brothers shot footage of employees leaving at the end of the day at their plant. The short black-and-white silent documentary film La sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory) is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made.
After several other private screenings, the Lumière brothers unveiled the Cinématographe in their first public screening on December 28, 1895, at the Grand Cafe on Paris’ Boulevard de Capuchines. The clarity and realism of the black-and-white, 50-second film created a sensation. In early 1896, they would open Cinématographe theatres in London, Brussels, Belgium and New York.
The day after the first public screening of the Lumières’ film in 1895, a local gazette trumpeted, “We have already recorded and reproduced spoken words. We can now record and play back life. We will be able to see our families again long after they are gone.’’ Indeed, the Lumières not only made history with their culture changing camera and new photographic processes; they preserved it.
The Cinématographe, their pioneering motion photo camera, later lent its name to an innovative new medium of art (and entertainment): cinema.
