Light, camera, action: the 46 seconds with which the Lumière brothers revolutionized the history of cinema

It was a real shock. The first people who saw the film, which was less than a minute long, went out into the streets and invited acquaintances and strangers to witness this incredible phenomenon that saw the departure of a large group of workers from a factory. It was a realism they had never witnessed.

In another film, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotet Station, spectators got up from their seats and faced the exit as the locomotive approached the platform and seemed to come off the screen.

It was the beginnings of cinema and although at that time several were the ones who experienced, it was the Lumière brothers who took almost all the palms.

Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas and Louis Jean Lumière were born in Besancon on October 19, 1862 and October 5, 1864, respectively. Their destinies were so united that to tell the story of the moving image they lost their first names and “the Lumière brothers” was a registered trademark.

Louis was the inventor, the one who experimented, and Auguste took more care of the administrative issue.

They were children when their father Antoine, a portrait painter, ended a partnership with Emile Lebeau, the family settled in Lyon and set up a photographic workshop that became very popular. Then he set up an important factory for the production of photographic plates that gave him an excellent economic pass.

Auguste and Louis were trained at the La Martinière high school. As a teenager, Louis began experimenting with the image. When he was only 18 years old, he had already managed to stop the movement in the photos.

In 1894 his father was invited to a demonstration of the kinetoscope, an invention by Thomas Alva Edison, which offered a visual of films but individually. He returned home very impressed and proposed to his children to improve the invention.

The brothers, who had already been investigating and experimenting, picked up the glove and from that same year they began to test on a new machine: a wooden box with a lens, and with a crank that turned a 35-millimeter film. The device took photographs that, then passed continuously, formed a film that did not exceed one minute. The object weighed about five kilos and was patented in March 1895. They had created a machine that recorded and projected. The inventor brothers had also presented at the Academy of Sciences a method of photography in natural colors.

The first record was The Exit of the Lumière Factory in Lyon (La sortie de l' usine Lumière á Lyon), which is considered the first production in the history of cinema.

The 46-second short film shows how a hundred workers, most of them women, walk out the gate of Saint-Víctor street. The camera is located opposite the door and only some of the people who come out look at the lens. Although there were previous experimental records using different techniques, The departure of workers is considered by scholars as the starting point of cinema as we know it.

On March 22, 1895 it was screened for the first time. It was at a meeting at the National Society for the Promotion of National Industry in Paris before a small group of people. Public exhibitions began on December 28 of that year. They were at the Indien salon of the Grand Café des Capucines in Paris, located at 14 Boulevard des Capucines. Its owner, the Italian Volpini, who disregarded this innovation, charged the Lumières 30 francs per month. The ticket was worth a franc.

On the door of the premises, a poster had been hung with the explanation: “This device invented by M.M. Auguste and Louis Lumière allows to collect a series of instant evidence, all the movements that take place in front of the lens for a certain time and then reproduce these movements by projecting, in a life-size, their images onto a screen and in front of an entire room”.

The shorts followed, such as the one that recorded the arrival of a train or a comic one, The Regador Regado, in which a person inspects the mouth of a hose through which water stopped coming out, without noticing a child who was stepping on it and that, suddenly, stops doing so and the man gets wet.

The invention was quite a success, the brothers raised a fortune for the projections and from different parts of the country and the world they requested the device. They sent a team with an operator who recorded important public events.

The Grand Café des Capucines, where The Workers' Exit from the Factory was exhibited, still exists and pays tribute to those brothers who, with fear and uncertainty about something new, kicked off the wonderful adventure that is cinema.

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