![]() ![]() “It enriches people.”Ĭinema’s first sight gag … Arroseur et Arrosé (1895). “The cinema amuses the world,” said Louis Lumière. You can pop these gems like tiny chocolates, but there is much more nourishment inside. Watching all 114 films in one sitting takes the same time as a feature film, but it’s a very giddy, addictive experience. Happily, these 50-second snippets of life in the 19th century have been restored (often from the original negative), digitised (to an astonishingly sharp 4k) and made available on a lavishly packaged French DVD and Blu-ray. Just like watching later, more apparently complex movies, a closer look at these “actuality” films reveals wonders. Happily, only 18 of those are considered lost (a very good ratio for early cinema), and some of what remains can be viewed on a new DVD, Lumière, le Film!, revealing an oft-forgotten world of film-making, and snapshots of our ancestors at work and play. The Lumières shot more than 1,400 films between 18. That way, while the first films they made were shot in and around their base in Lyon, they soon had reels full of material from further afield. While overseas on this promotional tour, the Lumière team also shot scenes of local colour. By July, a Lumière representative was projecting their films in Mumbai. They appeared in London, Milan and Amsterdam in March 1896, and Berlin and Dublin the following month. ![]() The Lumières continued to shoot short films, and demonstrated their Cinématographe all over the world. It’s an incident so famous that British film pioneer RW Paul popped it in a film, The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901), although the crowd at the Grand Café were unlikely to resemble his guffawing hick.Īugust (left) and Louis (right) Lumière. As the story has it, some of those assembled were so alarmed by the sight of a train moving toward the camera that they panicked and started to run. At the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, on 28 December 1895, the Lumières revealed their device, and nine of their films, to a paying audience. They demonstrated the machine privately in March that year, but it is the first public outing of the Cinématographe that has passed into legend. In February 1895, the Lumières patented their Cinématographe, a handsome, portable instrument that could both shoot and project moving images. ![]() The trouble with Edison’s system was that only one person could watch the images at a time, and the bulk of the associated camera, the Kinetograph, meant that films could only be shot in a studio. The Lumières were responsible not just for a successful invention but a huge number of films, which experimented with techniques that were necessarily new and roamed across a rapidly changing landscape, from their factory in Lyon and across Europe to America and east Asia.Īuguste and Louis Lumière were photographers by trade, who were inspired to attempt moving pictures after seeing a demonstration of Edison’s Kinetoscope, a “peephole” machine for viewing a loop of film. But while many cinephiles could tell you that the pioneering inventors of the Cinématographe filmed trains entering stations and workers leaving factories, the true scope of their work is often overlooked. O n strips of celluloid 17 metres long and 35mm wide, the Lumière brothers made some of the world’s first and most famous films.
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