December 28, 1895, marks a historic day in the history of the cinema, but you won't find the movies that premiered on this day among the Christmas schedules or in anyone's Top 10 list.
At the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris, cinematography pioneers the Lumiere Brothers effectively opened the first cinema box office, charging the public to see 10 short films they had filmed earlier that year projected onto a big screen.
Eager Parisians paid one franc to watch the 48-second clips in the communal setting. Fellow pioneer Thomas Edison's coin-operated Kinetoscope had been around for some five years before Auguste and Louis Lumiere began their operations, but its peephole operation – akin to the later 'What the Butler Saw' machine – meant it was hardly the shared experience the Lumieres envisaged for their cinema.
The first of the 10 films to be shown at the performance, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (above), was recorded in March of that year and is believed to be the first true motion picture. It was filmed on the same cinématographe device (developed by Auguste) as it was projected on, and showed employees leaving the brothers' film factory in Lyon.
Other films on the bill, all directed by Louis, featured a clip of a gardener using a sprinkler, one of Auguste,his wife and his daughter Andrée having breakfast (below) and another of Andrée trying to catch goldfish in a bowl.
The Lumieres took their films on tour over the next few months, visiting Brussels, Bombay, London, New York and Buenos Aires to show off their mini-documentaries.
[April 10, 1953: Cinema enters a new dimension as 3D horror film House of Wax hits the screen]
[June 20, 1975: Jaws hits cinemas and the summer movie blockbuster is born]
[December 27, 1977: Star Wars arrives in the UK – heralded by a wave of hype]
- Auguste and Louis Lumiere worked at their father's photographic firm in Lyon, taking charge on his retirement in 1892 and starting work on moving pictures.
- Their most significant contribution was to perforate the edges of film to advance it smoothly through the camera and projector.
- The 35mm film used to make the movies was only 17 metres long. At a hand-cranked frame rate of around 16 frames per second, this gave a maximum running time of around 50 seconds.
- Edison later conceded defeat to the Lumiere Brothers, admitting that he hadn't considered moving pictures to be a mass-market entertainment medium, rather a personal education device.
- To celebrate the centenary of cinema in 1995, 80 of the Lumieres' 1,425 surviving films went on a world tour and were projected using recreations of the cinématographes. The event, titled 'The First Picture Show', ended with a 1995 recreation of their very first film, with a few dozen film directors walking out of the same Lumiere factory instead of a Victorian workforce.
- The brothers later stated that “the cinema is an invention without any future” and declined to sell their camera to other filmmakers. Instead they concentrated on colour photography and in 1907 they launched their colour photography process, Autochrome Lumiere, onto the market.
- French cinema writer Georges Sadoul picked up an original cinématographe in a junk shop in the 1940s. It worked first time, testament to the quality of the Lumieres' product.
- The Lumiere Brothers' legacy was to be tainted by associations with fascism. Louis was enlisted by Mussolini to create propaganda films, while Auguste sat on Lyon City Council in support of the Vichy regime in World War II France. When it was suggested that the pair appear on a 200-franc note in the 1990s, the public outcry forced a rethink.