Lumiere Brothers and Experimental Film Making

Lumière brothers, French inventors and pioneer manufacturers of photographic equipment who devised an early motion-picture camera and projector called the Cinématographe (“cinema” is derived from this name).

‘The cinema is an invention without a future’, declared Louis Lumiere who together with his brother Auguste Lumiere pioneered what was to develop into an international cultural industry. The Lumiere brothers were the inventors of the ‘Cinematographe’ a compact and portable machine which with a few adjustments could be used as a camera or projector or printing machine. As professional photographers themselves, cinema for them was no more than an extension of photography; hence they sought to capture events from a static position and therefore from a single point of view, in brief ‘actualities’ such as: the arrival of a train, a train leaving the station, workers leaving a factory, etc. They narrated no story, but reproduced a place, time and atmosphere. These brief moving reproductions were therefore termed ‘actualities’.

First film screenings

Lumière brothers created the film La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (1895; “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”), which is considered the first motion picture. The American Woodville Latham had screened works of film seven months earlier, but the first public screening of films at which admission was charged was held on December 28, 1895, at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. This history-making presentation featured ten short films, including their first film, Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory). Each film is 17 meters long, which, when hand cranked through a projector, runs approximately 50 seconds.