Lumiere Brothers Show First Film
On 28 December 1895, in the basement Salon Indien du Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, Auguste and Louis Lumière screened a program of short films to a paying audience. The date is traditionally treated as the birth of commercial cinema. Moving pictures had been shown before, but this was a landmark in presenting projected film to a ticket-buying public as a form of entertainment, and the brothers' system proved practical enough to spread across the world within a couple of years.
The Lumières were sons of Antoine Lumière, who ran a successful photographic plate business in Lyon, and the brothers had grown up in the technical side of photography. Inventors across Europe and the United States were then racing to capture motion. Thomas Edison's company had developed the Kinetoscope, a peep-show cabinet that only one person could view at a time. Others, including Louis Le Prince, Max and Emil Skladanowsky, and William Friese-Greene, had made their own experiments. The Lumières' Cinématographe, patented in early 1895, was a compact, hand-cranked device that served as camera, printer and projector in one, and it was light enough to carry into the field.
The Paris program lasted roughly twenty minutes and consisted of about ten brief films, each only around a minute long. Among them was Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, a simple scene of employees streaming out of the family's works in Lyon. Another was The Gardener, often called L'Arroseur arrosé, a short comic gag in which a boy plays a trick on a man with a hose. These were everyday scenes and staged jokes, yet audiences were captivated by seeing motion reproduced on a screen. The audience that night was small, commonly reported as about thirty-three paying customers, though the figure comes from later accounts and should be treated with some caution.
Stories that early viewers fled in panic from the film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat are popular, but historians doubt they are accurate. The film may not even have been part of that first program. Still, the tale reflects the real sense of novelty people felt.
Word spread quickly, and the Grand Café screenings drew large crowds in the following weeks. The Lumières trained operators and sent them abroad to film and exhibit, building an early global catalogue of scenes from many countries. Louis Lumière is said to have regarded cinema as having limited commercial future, and the brothers eventually turned back to photography, notably color processes. But others took up the new medium, and within a few years filmmakers such as Georges Méliès were turning it toward fantasy and storytelling. The basement screening in Paris is remembered as the moment when cinema began to become a public art.