LUMIERE BROTHERS

The Lumiere brothers, Louis and Auguste, invented a projection system that helped make the cinema a commercially viable enterprise internationally. Their family company Lumeire Freres, based in Lyon, France, was the biggest European manufacturer of photographic plates. In 1894 a local Kinetoscope exhibitor asked them to produce short films that would be cheaper than the ones sold by the Edison. Soon they had designed an elegant little camera, the Cinematographe, which used 35 mm film. The camera could serve as a printer when the positive copies were made. Then , mounted in front of a magic lantern, it formed part of the projector as well. One important decision that Lumieres made was to shoot their films at 16 frames per second rather than the 46 frames per second used by Edison; this rate became the standard international film speed for about 25 years. The first film made with this system was ―Workers Leaving the Factory‖ , apparently shot in 1895. On December 28, 1895,one of the most famous film screenings in the history took place. The location was a room in the Grand Café in Paris. In those days, cafes were gathering spots where people sipped coffee, read newspapers, and were entertained by singers and other performers. That evening, fashionable patrons paid a franc to see a twenty-five minute program of 10 films, about a minute each. Among the films shown were a close view of Auguste Lumiere and his wife feeding their baby, a staged comic scene of a boy stepping on a hose to cause a puzzled gardener to squirt himself(later named ―The Waterer Watered‖) and a shot of the sea. Although the first shows did moderate business, within weeks the Lumiere were offering twenty shows a day, with long lines of spectators waiting to get in. They moved quickly to exploit this success, sending representatives all over the world to show and make more short films. The Lumieres early screenings were successful, but the brothers believed that film would be a short-lived fad. As a result, they moved quickly to exploit the Cinematographe. They initially avoided selling their machines, instead sending operators to tour abroad, showing films in rented theatres and cafes. Although the Lumiere brothers are usually remembered for their scenics and topicals, they also produced many staged films, usually brief comic scenes. The history of cinema in many nations begins with the arrival of the Cinematographe. Of course, the Lumiere brothers and their rivals concentrated on the more lucrative markets and avoided some smaller countries. The Lumieres continued producing films, but gradually more innovative rivals made their films seem old-fashioned. Their firm ceased production in 1905, though Louis and Auguste remained innovators in the area of the still photography.