|
Search By:
|
|
The Lumieres Take Pole Position...
“We had observed, my brother and I, how interesting it would be if we could project on a screen, and show before a whole gathering, animated scenes faithfully reproducing objects and people in movement.”
Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948) Lumière were born in Besancon to Antoine Lumière, owner of a struggling photographic portrait studio. Antoine moved his young family to Lyon in 1870, where he set up a new workshop and established a manufacturing plant for photographic plates. As soon as the brothers – the oldest of three boys and three girls – were old enough, Antoine set them to work in the family business, but the 1870s were difficult years, and by 1882 it looked as if the family business would fail completely. Then, upon Auguste’s return from military service, the brothers – who had both studied as research scientists - invented a sensitive photographic plate – the Etiquette Bleue - that produced a much finer photographic image then had previously been possible. They quickly began manufacturing the plate in volume – around 700 plates a day - and it was so successful that by 1884 the factory employed a dozen people. Ten years later, the family business employed 300 people, and was producing 840,000 plates daily.
It was in the autumn of 1894, while on a business trip to Paris, that Antoine saw an example of Edison’s Kinetoscope. Returning to Lyon with a length of Kinetoscope film, he encouraged his sons to come up with an apparatus that would go one step further than Edison’s invention by projecting the moving images that it filmed. Auguste’s attempts to design the camera met with little success until Louis suggested he used the same kind of mechanism used by a sewing machine for advancing cloth under the needle. Helping the brothers with the design of the apparatus was their chief mechanic, Charles Moisson, to whom they gave the task of constructing the prototype machine. Within months of Antoine’s suggestion, the brothers had successfully designed an apparatus for filming and viewing chronophotographic proofs and, on the 13th February 1895 they patented the machine as the cinématographe (a name previously used by Leon Guillaume Bouly, another early experimenter who had let his ownership of the patent lapse when he couldn’t afford the annual fee. The name was chosen by the brothers against the wishes of their father, who wanted to call their new invention the Domitor). The machine was not only a combined camera and projector, but also a printer. The film motion mechanism comprised of two pins that were inserted into sprocket holes on either side of the film; the pins (or claws) pulled the film downwards, and then retracted. The mechanism was further improved, and an addition to the registered patent lodged on the 30th March 1895.
The Lumières' cinematographe was a vast improvement on Edison’s Kinetograph. Operated by a simple hand crank rather than the unwieldy motor used by the Kinetograph, the cinematographe was remarkably compact, which meant it could be carried anywhere, unlike the Kinetograph which, because of its bulk and size, was confined to the studio.
The first public presentation of the Cinématographe – and probably the first ever screening of a motion picture - was given in Paris to the Societé d’Encouragement de L’Industrie Nationale on the 22nd March 1895 after the invited audience was first treated to a brief lecture by Louis on “The Photographic Industry” and a selection of colour stills with which the Lumières were also experimenting. The film they were shown, projected onto a screen using a Molteni lamp, was La Sortie des Usines Lumière (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory) , one of three versions to be filmed by Louis at their factory at Montplaisir in the suburbs of Lyon. The film pretty much showed what it said on the tin: an endless stream of people – mostly women – pouring through the gateway of the Lumiere factory after a hard day’s work. Obviously instructed beforehand, nobody glances at the camera. A couple of the men ride out on bicycles, one of them nearly running into a dog that briefly scampers into the frame. Finally, a horse-drawn carriage trots up to the gates before the screen goes black. All this lasts no longer than one minute, but is as fascinating today as it must have been when the film was only three days old (it was filmed on the 19th March, 1895).
La Sortie des Usines Lumière (1895)
See the film here.
At the Paris screening, Louis met Jules Carpentier, and suggested to Carpentier that he manufacture the Cinematographe. Carpentier agreed, and yet, little more than a week later, he filed a patent for his own camera – the Cynegraphe – which also used perforated film. Carpentier’s camera was inferior to the Lumières’, however, and in October 1895, he duly began manufacturing the Cinematographe.
The Lumières' next film presentation was on the 17th April at the Sorbonne for the Learned Society’s National Conference, nine days after the Cinématographe had been patented in Britain. Two months after that, on the 10th June, a third screening was presented to the Photographic Society Conference in Lyon. By now, Louis had filmed a further seven films. These included L’Arroseur Arrosé (The Waterer Watered), in which a mischievous boy steps on a hose used by a gardener to water some flowers, only to remove his foot when the gardener peers into the nozzle to see why the water has stopped flowing; and Repas de Bebe (Baby’s Dinner) in which Auguste Lumiere and his wife sit at a table in their garden, feeding their baby daughter.
A fourth presentation was held two days later, on the 12th June, at a restaurant owned by Berrier and Millet in Bellecour Square, Lyon. Ten films were shown at this presentation, one of which was of members of the Photographic Society at the conference.
Two more invitation-only screenings would be held, both in Paris, in 1895 – one on the 11th July held by the Journal of Pure and Applied Science in front of 500 guests, and the second on the 16th November, at a lecture given by physicist Gabriel Lippman at the Sorbonne.
The brother’s next screening would be on the 28th December 1895, and it was to be an occasion that would change the world forever. . . [ADD]
Further Reading:
© 2009-2010 moviemoviesite.com