1895: The First Film is a Remake

La Sortie des Usine Lumiere (“Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory”)
Directed by Louis Lumiere
46 sec, France, 1895, Black and White, Silent

To begin this new blog I've decided to start at the beginning by viewing the first film ever screened for a paying public audience. It is short. It is fuzzy. But it was first! Yet, as so often happens in the world of cinema, all is not as it seems because the first film is actually a remake.

In 1894 Antoine Lumiere, a manufacturer of photographic plates in Lyon, France, saw an exhibition of Thomas Edision’s Kinetoscope in Paris. He encouraged his sons August and Louis to improve on Edison’s idea and move motion pictures outside of the Kinetoscope box so that an audience could watch them together. In response, the brothers invented the cinematographe, a projection system that spawned the word cinema and allowed film to become a commercially viable business. Unlike other early cameras, the cinematographe was lightweight, it moved film via sprocket holes in the filmstrip, it could shoot motion pictures, develop the film, and serve as a projector as well.

The first film by the Lumieres, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, was made on March 19, 1895 and screened for a private audience three days later. On December 28 of that year, ten films were screened by the Lumieres (Lumiere means “light” in English, by the way) with the cinematographe for the first paying public motion picture audience in history at Grand Cafe in Paris. The show was a success and encouraged the Lumieres to send cameramen all over the world to make and screen more films. Among the motion pictures screened that December day was Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory.

So, how good is the first film an audience paid to see? The whole thing, which is only 46 seconds long (a dream come true for those we hear complaining about how long movies are), consists of just a single shot of...well, workers leaving the Lumiere’s photographic factory! In it we see a couple of filmmaking essentials. The angle of the shot helps to create the illusion of three dimensional space and there is enough depth of field to allow us to see the cobblestone street outside the factory, the people leaving from two doors, and silhouettes moving inside of the building. The general appeal of the film is the realistic portrayal of this working class crowd actually moving. Most of the workers are women dressed in long skirts, aprons, simple blouses and feathered hats (see photo above); the men wear suits and hats—people really dressed up to do factory work in those days! Adding interest, and a bit of comedy, to the scene is an unexpected sequence in which a dog chases a factory worker out of the building and upsets a man riding a bicycle. Although the Lumieres have taken pains to convince us that this scene represents reality, we can tell that it is actually staged. The people either rather obviously avoid looking at the camera or make simple pranks (one of the workers tugs on a friend’s skirt, for example. Why is it human nature to try to be funny once a camera is pointed at you?) as they pass in front of it. We can see that the dog is led outside of the factory and encouraged by a worker to disrupt the cyclist. Even at this embryonic stage the elements of surprise and realism in cinema attempt to convince us that what we’re viewing is a real event.

Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory also provides a bit of cinema controversy. The film was made not once but at least three times. We know that the version shown in December is not the same as that screened for the private audience previously in March because the earlier screening was described by a journalist as including horses. The version shown in December is the only of the three without a horse in it. Therefore, the first film viewed by a paying audience is actually a remake of a film shot and screened the previous Spring.

Film of the Year is written by Thom Ryan.
This essay © 2006 Thom Ryan. Some rights reserved.

Comments

[goatdog]

Do you read the comments this far back? If you haven't seen Lumiere and Company, you should see it. It's a few dozen modern filmmakers each making a 51-second film with the Lumiere brothers' original equipment. Worth watching, not for the David Lynch one (which seems to be everyone's favorite), but for the Wim Wenders one.

[Thom]

Gad, my earliest post. I'm so embarrassed. Yes, I remember seeing a few parts of the film at a screening in the basement of the Lumière Institute in Lyon when I toured it last summer. I must have missed Lynch's part though 'cause I have a feeling I would have remembered seeing that!