Meanwhile, in November in Germany, another pair
of brothers, Max and Emil Skladanowsky, projected
short films in Berlin. Coincidentally, in France, two
brothers (teams of brothers figure significantly in
this story), Auguste and Louis Lumière, invented
the Cinématographe, a far more sophisticated
device than either the Kinetoscope or the Eidolo-
scope. In December 1895, they used it to project a
movie on a screen set up in a small room inside a
public café that was converted into a theater. (They
had in fact already projected it throughout Europe
for small, invited audiences). Although that movie,
Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory(1895), which
the Lumières called an actualité(a documentary
view of the moment), was only 1 minute in length,
it captivated the audience with its depiction of a
spontaneous event. The Cinématographe—a hand-
cranked device that served as camera, projector,
and film printer—was equally amazing. In 1896, Edi-
son unveiled his own projector, the Vitascope, in a
New York City theater.
The projection of moving pictures to a paying
audience ended the prehistory of cinema and freed
it to become the art form of the twentieth century.
Aesthetically, the work of the first filmmakers can-
not compare in any way with today’s movies, yet
they managed, in a few years time, to establish the
basic types of movies: short narratives, documen-
tary depictions of real life, and experimental
movies with special effects that foreshadow today’s
animation. In addition, they recognized that the
movies—like the contemporary steam engine, elec-
tricity, and the railroad—would attract paying cus-
tomers and make them a great deal of money. What
they probably did not envision was the power of the
movies to shape attitudes and values.
After a few years of experimenting with very
short movies, a minute or two in length and hardly
more than a novelty, Edison, the Lumière brothers,
and other new filmmakers realized that the cinema
needed new forms and conventions. It was clear
that the movies needed to be less a curiosity, with
which the public would soon become tired, and
more of a durable and successful commercial
entertainment, one that could compete with—and
draw from—other popular art forms, such as liter-
ature and theater.
Paramount among the early innovators of film
form was a Frenchman, Georges Méliès, who in the
late 1890s began to make short narrative movies
based on the theatrical model of short, sequential
scenes shot from a fixed point of view. The only
editing within these self- contained scenes were
cuts or in- camera dissolves. Rudimentary as these
movies were, according to film historian David A.
Cook, Méliès was “the cinema’s first narrative
artist,”^7 famous for innovating many technical and
narrative devices. He is best known for his use of
special effects—still captivating today—in suchReal life as seen through the artists’ lensAt first
glance, Auguste and Louis Lumière’s Children Digging for
Clams(1896) may seem similar to Edison’s Seminary Girls as
a simple record of an ordinary activity. But the differences
between them show that the Lumières were artists with a
natural sense of style. Not only was it longer (44 seconds)
and shot outdoors (with a stationary camera), but it also
employs a deep composition. Across the foreground, in a
diagonal line, we see the clam-digging children; in the middle
ground, we see adults, probably their parents, keeping an eye
on them; and in the background, we see other people, the
shoreline, and the horizon. As far as composition goes,
nothing could be simpler; but by shooting it out of doors in a
natural landscape, the Lumières provide an aesthetically
pleasing interpretation of an actual event rather than just a
documentary record.(^7) David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 4th ed. (New York:
Norton, 2004), p. 14.
A SHORT OVERVIEW OF FILM HISTORY 439