876
machine. The father of the Lumière brothers returned
to Lyon and told them that they could do better than
Edison. Antoine told his sons to get that image out of
the box and they did.
In February of 1895, the Lumières received a patent
for their invention of a lightweight (four kilos) motion
picture camera: the Cinématographe. (Just as the ety-
mology of photography is “light writing,” cinématog-
raphe is “writing the movement”). On the sunny day of
March 19, 1895, the Lumières managed to make the
fi rst fi lm and marked the beginning of cinema. Their
fi rst fi lm, La Sortie des Usines (Workers Leaving the
Factory), was limited to seventeen meters of fi lm and
a time of no longer than fi fty seconds, as was the case
with all of the 1,408 little movies that the Lumières
made with their Cinématographe. Shot by Louis (who
was the principal fi lmmaker of the brothers), the famed
brief movie features workers (mostly women) leaving
the family’s photographic glass-plate factory. Viewers
witness the fi rst characters, the fi rst stars of cinema.
Workers Leaving the Factory documented a simple
piece of life, as did all of the Lumière fi lms. Dramatic
as their invention was, the Lumière Brothers did not
see a big future with the Cinématographe. Like the
Montgolfi er Brothers and fl ight, the Lumière Brothers
had “the genius for laying the intellectual foundation
for a revolution” that would take place “elsewhere,” in
America (Gopnik, 151).
What was especially signifi cant about the Lumière
camera was that it could shoot, develop and, most
importantly, project images onto a large screen. “This
meant that the opérateur with this equipment was a
complete working unit: he could be sent to a foreign
capital, give showings, shoot new fi lms by day, develop
them in a hotel room, and show them the same night. In
a sudden global eruption, Lumière operators were soon
doing precisely that throughout the world” (Barnouw
1993, 6). Because they knew that most towns had no
electricity, an ether lamp was used for projection. View-
ers saw fl oods, crowds, men smoking opium, children
running behind a rickshaw, trains coming and going, a
gigantic ship, the drama and boredom of everyday life in
Chicago, Mexico, Moscow, Jerusalem, China, Vietnam,
Argentina, Algeria, Turkey, and Istanbul.
Not only did the Cinématographe give rise to the
fi rst newsreel, it also gave rise to the fi rst family movie:
as in the famous 1895 Le Repas de bébé (Baby’s Tea)
which features Auguste and his wife feeding their baby.
Furthermore, given the Charlie Chaplinesque quality of
many of their fi lms, the Lumières can be credited with
cinema’s fi rst comedies. Today audiences still laugh
uproariously at the 1895 Arroseur et arrosée (Watering
the Gardener): how funny the scene had to have been to
an audience uninitiated in the world of cinema. In the
1896 Démolition d’un mur (Demolition of a wall), Louis
made humorous use of what was originally an accidental
projection in reverse: a wall is knocked down only to
cinematically spring back up. Certainly, the youthful-
ness and lightness of the Lumière fi lms was generated
by the fi fty-second format, the joyful mood of the Belle
Époque, but also the spirit of two young inventors in
their early thirties making art.
Not to be overlooked is the magnifi cence and formal
precision of Lumière fi lms. Louis was a great photog-
rapher and we see this in the “art” of the fi lms that he
made with his brother. In the hands of Lumière, a pair
of opium smokers, tightly framed, shot with the camera
low to the ground, is a work of staggering beauty. With
its compelling use of a dramatic diagonal, Louis’s 1895
L’Arivée d’un train en gare (The Arrival of a Train)
is the fi rst cinematic masterpiece. “The Lumières and
their cameramen, utilized with glory the deep space
and receding movement available to the camera lens,
which had been ground in conformity with an idea of
perspective emanating continuously from the Renais-
sance” (Sitney, x).
While there is general agreement that the Lumière
Brothers can be credited with the invention of cinema,
the process of getting to that fi rst projection on March
22, 1895, (with the fi rst performance to a paying audi-
ence, taking place at the Grand Café, 14 boulevard des
Capucines on December 28, 1895), was a sorted and
complex affair. Ingenious devices that preceded the
Cinématographe (the term “cinématographe” is actually
owed to Léon Bouly, 1892–93) were already developed
earlier. Leading up to the invention of cinema were a
range of important devices that contributed to the Lu-
mières’ Cinématographe. Most obvious is the invention
of the camera obscura, the photograph itself and the
magic lantern, but perhaps as important are the optical
apparatuses that emphasized principles of movement.
Critical here are Sir David Brewster’s invention of the
kaleidoscope in 1815, with its multiplication of imagery
with precision, and Louis J. M. Daguerre’s refi nement of
the diorama in the early 1820s that led to the multimedia
diorama, “often sitting the audience on a circular plat-
form that was slowly moved, permitting views of differ-
ent scenes and shifting light effects.” (Crary 1990, 113)
In the early 1830s, Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau
invented the “phenakistiscope,” which consisted of two
spinning discs, one with a fi gure in a sequence of move-
ments, the other with slits to look through. Utilizing a
mirror and principles of retinal persistence, the observer
sees a fi gure in animation (a girl jumping rope, a bird
fl apping its wings). By 1834, the similar devices of the
stroboscope (invented by Simon Ritter von Stampfer)
and the zootrope, sometimes called “the wheel of life,”
were invented. Charles-Émile Reynaud made the fi rst
animated fi lms, which grew out of his 1877 “praxino-
scope,” projecting the fi rst animated fi lm in 1892. By