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Lumiere Brothers

Lumiere Brothers

It was a cold December night three days after Christmas in 1895 when guests filed curiously into the dimly lit basement at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. It was the age of marvels, of new inventions, and what the people had come that night to see was a magic show performed by Auguste and Louis Lumière.

The Lumière Brothers had set up a box of tricks called Le Cinematographe and, after a brief introduction, the lights were extinguished and the audience sat with breath held waiting in the darkness. The machine in its wooden case with brass fittings was cranked to life and, what those people saw projected on the wall was a low-angle close-up of a train looming down the tracks in a swirling cloud of steam. There was no sound but, so realistic was this magic trick, as the train drew closer, the people threw themselves under the tables and chairs screaming with fear.

The lights were lit again. The members of the audience quickly regained their composure, such are the effects of magic, and watched the rest of the show. The Lumière Brothers screened ten short films lasting twenty minutes, and those people that December night in 1895 were without their knowing witnesses to a moment in history. The cinema had begun.

Scene from the first short ever screened

Auguste and Louis Lumière had been on the trail of the moving image for most of their adult lives. They had attended a technical school in Lyon and had grown up surrounded by the paraphernalia in their father's photographic studio. During the last years of the 19th century, photographers and inventors across Europe and the United States had been trying to film and reproduce motion, but it was Le Cinematographe, a hand-held, relatively lightweight device functioning as a camera, projector and printer all in one, that was the first to screen what can accurately be called short films to an audience.

The Lumière Brothers had taken their camera out into the street and shot what they called actualities - scenes of everyday life, the steaming train being the best known. Being techies, they didn't immediately grasp the potential for creating entertainment. Louis Lumière famously said: 'The cinema is an invention without a future,' a remark that was to transform from irony to paradox through the years of his pioneering work as a filmmaker. Even before aircraft were seen in the skies, the Lumière Brothers had captured the first aerial shots and, in the coming years, they would go on to shoot almost 1,500 short films, and created the first short film catalogue.

Louis Lumière lived long enough to regret his slip of the tongue. Far from having no future, the movies had an instant appeal to the public imagination. Fine art and literature habitually serve an educated elite. The theatre requires actors on stage being paid day in day out. But a cinema program can be shown eight or ten times a day and, with such economies, every factory worker and housemaid at the turn of the 20th century could afford a ticket. Finally, we had an art form/entertainment/business, call it what you will, that had mass appeal and, more, could reach the entire world. James Cameron's Titanic took $1.8 billion at the box office and has been seen by hundreds of millions of people.