Lumière Brothers' First Film Screening (1895): Birth of Cinema

The Lumière brothers’ first film screening, held on 28 December 1895 at the Grand Café in Paris, was the first paid public showing of projected motion pictures with the Cinématographe. That evening Louis and Auguste Lumière showed ten short films to a small audience, and the event is widely regarded as the birth of cinema as a shared, public entertainment.

Background: a photographic family from Lyon

Louis (1864–1948) and Auguste (1862–1954) Lumière were the sons of Antoine Lumière, a painter and photographer who founded a successful business in Lyon making photographic plates. Louis, the more inventive of the two, developed a fast “Étiquette bleue” dry plate that made the family firm one of Europe’s leading photographic manufacturers.

Moving pictures were a lively field of invention in the 1890s, building on still photography that had begun with Niépce’s first photograph and the daguerreotype. In 1894 Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, a peep-show cabinet in which one person at a time watched a short film, was exhibited in Paris. Antoine Lumière saw it and urged his sons to create something better, in particular a machine that could project films onto a screen for an audience.

The Cinématographe

The brothers patented the Cinématographe on 13 February 1895. It was a remarkably compact, hand-cranked wooden box that worked as camera, film printer and projector. Its key feature was an intermittent mechanism, reportedly inspired by the movement of a sewing machine, which pulled the film forward one frame at a time and held it still while it was exposed or projected.

The machine used 35 mm film with a single round perforation on each side of the frame and usually ran at about 16 frames per second, slower than Edison’s system and therefore needing less film. The Paris engineer Jules Carpentier refined the design and manufactured the production models.

The Lumières first showed their invention privately on 22 March 1895 in Paris, at a meeting of the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, projecting Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. Over the following months they gave further demonstrations to scientific and photographic societies.

The screening of 28 December 1895

For the first public, paying show, Antoine Lumière rented the Salon Indien, a basement room of the Grand Café at 14 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Admission cost one franc. According to the usual accounts, only about 33 people came on the first evening.

The programme consisted of ten films, each about 17 metres of film and lasting under a minute, for a show of roughly 20 minutes. It included:

• La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory)
• Le Jardinier, later known as L’Arroseur arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled), an early comedy
• Le Repas de bébé (Baby’s Meal), showing Auguste and his family
• La Voltige (horse trick riders), La Pêche aux poissons rouges (fishing for goldfish) and Les Forgerons (the blacksmiths)
• Le Débarquement du congrès de photographie à Lyon, Le Saut à la couverture (blanket tossing), La Place des Cordeliers à Lyon and La Mer (bathers in the sea)

The Lumière films were shot from a single fixed camera position and show one continuous scene, with no editing. Many feature members of the family, employees of the factory and the streets of Lyon, which makes them a rich record of everyday life in the 1890s as well as the starting point of film history.

The scenes of everyday life, with leaves moving in the wind and waves breaking on the shore, astonished viewers. Within days word had spread, and queues formed in the street; soon the show was drawing thousands of people a day.

Admission was modest, but the receipts grew rapidly as the show became the talk of Paris. The Lumières soon added screenings throughout the day and changed the programme regularly with new films, a pattern that later cinemas would follow.

Key people

• Louis Lumière, chief inventor of the Cinématographe and director of most of the early films.
• Auguste Lumière, his elder brother and partner, who later turned to medical research.
• Antoine Lumière, their father, who organised the Paris screening.
• Jules Carpentier, the Paris engineer who refined the Cinématographe and built the production machines.
• Georges Méliès, a theatre owner who attended an early show, tried to buy a Cinématographe and was refused, and went on to become a pioneer of film fantasy and special effects.

Spreading around the world

The Lumières trained camera operators and sent them across the world to show films and record new scenes. In 1896 Cinématographe shows opened in London, New York, Bombay (Mumbai), St Petersburg and many other cities, and operators filmed events such as the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II.

The company’s business model was distinctive. Instead of selling projectors at first, it kept control of its machines and sent its own trained operators, who could both film and project, to give shows with local partners. This let the Lumières record scenes in each country their operators visited and send the footage back to France for exhibition. Alexandre Promio’s views of Venice, filmed from a moving gondola in 1896, are often cited as among the first moving-camera shots. Only later did the firm begin selling Cinématographes more widely.

Their catalogue grew to well over a thousand short films, today known as “actualités”, or views of real life. The famous L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat), filmed in 1895, was shown publicly from January 1896.

Myths and facts

• Myth: The audience fled when the train arrived on screen. Fact: The train film was not in the first programme, and there is no reliable contemporary evidence of panic; the story grew in later retellings.
• Myth: The Lumières were the first to project films. Fact: Others, including the Skladanowsky brothers in Berlin in November 1895, had projected films to paying audiences, and Edison’s company was showing films in peep-show machines. The Lumière system was simply better and spread faster.
• Myth: Louis Lumière dismissed cinema as “an invention without a future”. Fact: The phrase is often attributed to the family, but the source is uncertain.

Legacy

The Lumières stopped producing films for public exhibition in the early 1900s and concentrated on photography; in 1903 they patented the Autochrome, the first commercially successful colour photography process, marketed from 1907. Cinema itself grew rapidly into a mass industry, as earlier sound inventions such as Edison’s phonograph had done for recorded music.

A plaque on the building at 14 Boulevard des Capucines marks the site of the first screening, and the Institut Lumière in Lyon preserves the family’s legacy.

Timeline

• 1894: Edison’s Kinetoscope is exhibited in Paris.
• 1895, 13 February: The Lumière brothers patent the Cinématographe.
• 1895, 22 March: First private projection in Paris of Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.
• 1895, 1 November: The Skladanowsky brothers project films in Berlin.
• 1895, 28 December: First paid public screening at the Grand Café, Paris.
• 1896, January: Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat is shown to the public.
• 1896, February: The Cinématographe is shown in London.
• 1896, June–July: Lumière shows open in New York and Bombay.

Why it matters

The screening at the Grand Café turned moving pictures from a scientific curiosity into a shared public experience. It marked the beginning of cinema as an art form and industry that would shape the culture of the twentieth century.