In the summer of 1894, the Lumière Brothers’ father Claude-Antione (an artist, photographer and entrepreneur) observed a demonstration of Edison’s Kinetoscope. Sufficiently impressed by the device’s potential, he returned to his sons in Lyon, stating that they could do better than Edison – and their aim should be to ‘get that image out of the box’.
On 13th February 1895, the Lumières registered a patent for a device they called the Cinématographe (which can be seen in the picture above). They made two significant improvements on Edison’s device. Firstly, it was a lot lighter than the Kinetograph – which was a bulky piece of machinery that was resigned to the studio. This allowed the Lumière’s Cinématographe to be portable – and allowed them to have a far greater range of subjects and locations to shoot. Secondly, Edison’s peephole Kinetoscope meant that it could only be viewed by one person at a time. The Lumière brothers had invented a device which combined a camera with both a printer and a projector – allowing for the first commercial exhibition of on 28th December at the Grand Cafe on Paris’s Boulevard de Capuchines – a date widely acknowledged as the day on which cinema was born. (They also used a film width of 35mm, and a speed of 16 frames per second, which would be accepted as the industry norm until the talkies.)
On 13th February 1895, the Lumières registered a patent for a device they called the Cinématographe (which can be seen in the picture above). They made two significant improvements on Edison’s device. Firstly, it was a lot lighter than the Kinetograph – which was a bulky piece of machinery that was resigned to the studio. This allowed the Lumière’s Cinématographe to be portable – and allowed them to have a far greater range of subjects and locations to shoot. Secondly, Edison’s peephole Kinetoscope meant that it could only be viewed by one person at a time. The Lumière brothers had invented a device which combined a camera with both a printer and a projector – allowing for the first commercial exhibition of on 28th December at the Grand Cafe on Paris’s Boulevard de Capuchines – a date widely acknowledged as the day on which cinema was born. (They also used a film width of 35mm, and a speed of 16 frames per second, which would be accepted as the industry norm until the talkies.)
After he succeed with with Cinematograph device, Lumiere brother were thinking about shooting film.
The first film has been started on the 19 March, 1895 , and is described by Tavernier as the date when the history of invention stopped and the history of film making began. It documents workers (mostly female) leaving the Lumière factory in Lyon.
The film “la Sortie des Ouviers de L'Usine Lumière à Lyon ’’ very impress the audiences in that time. This film was shoot and projected by 16 images by second.
As with many of the Lumières’ films, the interest you derive from this film goes beyond that of historical documentation. The movement of the workers is random, chaotic and hypnotic. It is also a prime example of the observer effect, the idea that the act of observation influences the subjects being.
Georges Méliès (whose films we shall look at next) was one of the audience members who was impressed: "I must admit we were all stupefied as you can understand. I immediately said, 'That's for me. What an extraordinary thing.'"
This film is Lumière’s most famous and well-recieved work, and has been described by many a film scholar as the first masterpiece of cinema. It also attracted cinema’s first urban legend: that upon the first screening of the film, the audience was so overwhelmed by the image of the train bearing down upon them that they fled the room in terror.
As shown in the picture above, in this film; a young boy creeps up behind a man who is watering a garden with a hose pipe, and for several seconds he stands with his foot directly above the pipe. He then stamps on the hose pipe, and once the gardener points the pipe at his own face, he releases his foot from the pipe, subsequently spraying the man with water over his face. It is during this ten second span that the film truly excels. The comedic timing of the whole prank is slightly off-tempo and the man’s subsequent chasing of the boy feels forced. But from the moment where the boy places
his foot above the hose pipe, there is a sense of the aforementioned Hitchcockian anticipation, exhilaration even, that will be repeated over feature length movies for the next 115 years and beyond.
This film involves a couple who are lying on a carpet and sharing an opium pipe in Japan. The viewer is immediately struck by the peculiarity of the camera’s extremely low setup in comparison to the films viewed so far; providing a glimpse of the relationship shared between this couple. The moment where their hands brush when the male character passes the pipe to the female character - see the picture below- is acutely intimate. For the first time in cinema, the viewer is acting as a voyeur.
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