The Lumière brothers' cinema

The story

Moving pictures

At the end of the 19th century photography was already fifty years old, but the pictures stood still. Many inventors were trying to give them movement. It was known that the eye, when it sees many still pictures in rapid succession, blends them into a single moving picture: this was already the principle behind optical toys, such as the zoetrope, a cylinder with a series of drawings that seem to come to life as it spins. In 1878 the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge had photographed a galloping horse with a row of cameras, showing its movements.

In the United States, around 1891, the great inventor Thomas Edison and his collaborator William Dickson built the “kinetoscope”: a wooden box with a small peephole, through which only one person at a time could watch a short film for about half a minute. It was a success, but it was an individual show: you had to queue and look one at a time.

The Lumière brothers

In Lyon, in France, Antoine Lumière owned a factory making photographic plates, the biggest in Europe, which was run by his two sons, Auguste and Louis. Auguste, born in 1862, was an administrator and a man of science; Louis, born in 1864, was a brilliant inventor, who at seventeen had already perfected a new kind of plate. The two brothers had seen the kinetoscope and realised that they could do better: a machine able to project pictures onto a screen for a whole audience.

In 1894 Louis, who was ill, stayed at home and, in one night of work, had the idea for a mechanism able to move the film forward in jerks, like a sewing machine: the film stops for an instant in front of the lens, then jumps forward. The “cinématographe” was born, and was patented on 13 February 1895. It was a light wooden machine weighing 5 kilos, worked by a hand crank: it served as a film camera, as a projector and for printing copies. By turning the crank it took sixteen frames a second.

28 December 1895

On 22 March 1895 the Lumières held a first private screening for a group of scientists in Paris, and others followed. On 28 December 1895 came the first public screening with paying customers, in the basement of a Paris establishment, the Grand Café, on the boulevard des Capucines. There were about thirty spectators, with a ticket costing one franc. The programme lasted about twenty minutes and included ten short films, each about fifty seconds long.

They were scenes of everyday life. The most famous, “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”, showed the men and women workers streaming out of the factory. In “The Sprinkler Sprinkled”, perhaps the first comedy in history, a boy plays a trick on a gardener by stepping on the water hose. In 1896 another famous film, “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station”, showed a train coming towards the camera. It is said that, seeing it, some frightened spectators moved out of the way: perhaps it is only a legend (historians have found no accounts of any panic), but it shows how strong the amazement was at those living pictures.

Success and the magician Méliès

Success was immediate: after a few weeks the queues to get in were very long. The Lumières sent their operators all over the world, to film landscapes, festivals and ceremonies, and to organise screenings. In Italy the first took place in Rome and Milan in 1896. It is said that Louis Lumière called the cinema “an invention without a future”, because he thought that, once the curiosity had worn off, people would get tired of it.

He was wrong. Among the spectators at the Grand Café was a French illusionist, Georges Méliès, who asked to buy the machine, but the Lumières refused. Méliès had one built for himself, and realised that the cinema could tell fantastic stories: with editing tricks, painted sets, explosions and disappearances, in 1902 he made “A Trip to the Moon”, one of the first science-fiction films, with the famous image of the capsule stuck in the Moon's eye. In a short time the cinema went from a fairground curiosity to a new form of entertainment, with the first permanent cinemas. In Italy, in 1914, “Cabiria” was a great epic.