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Topic: Watch the Film That Invented Cinema: Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895) (Read 155 times) previous topic - next topic

Watch the Film That Invented Cinema: Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895)

Watch the Film That Invented Cinema: Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895)

[html]The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière are often referred to as pioneers of cinema, and their 45-second La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, or Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895), is often referred to as the first film. But history turns out to present a more co*plicated picture. As previously featured here […]
                              




   



The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière are often referred to as pioneers of cinema, and their 45-second La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, or Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895), is often referred to as the first film. But history turns out to present a more co*plicated picture. As previously featured here on Open Culture, Louis Le Prince’s Roundhay Garden Scene predates the Lumière brothers’ work by six and a half years. But it is La Sortie that cinema historians regard as the more important picture, and indeed, as “the invention of movies for mass audiences.”


So writes Ryan Lattanzio at IndieWire, who goes on to explain that “the Lumière brothers were among the first filmmakers in world history, pioneering cinematic technology as well as establishing the co*mon grammar of film.”







In an essay re-printed on Senses of Cinema, the director Haroun Farocki frames La Sortie as having established the grand subjects like regimentation and individuality with which motion pictures have dealt ever since. “For over a century cinematography had been dealing with just one single theme,” he writes. “Like a child repeating for more than a hundred years the first words it has learned to speak in order to immortalize the joy of first speech.”






   



Farocki also draws an analogy with “painters of the Far East, always painting the same landscape until it beco*es perfect and co*es to include the painter within it.” And just as Hokusai painted several different versions of his famous The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the Lumière brothers didn’t shoot just one La Sortie, but three. Though each one may look the same at first glance to the eyes of twenty-first century viewers, they’re actually distinguished by many subtle differences, including the season-reflecting attire of the workers and the number of horses drawing the carriage. And so, if we choose to credit the Lumière brothers with inventing cinema as we know it, we must also credit them with  a more dubious creation, one we’ve co*e to know all too well in recent decades: the remake.


Related content:


Watch the Films of the Lumière Brothers & the Birth of Cinema (1895)


Iconic Film from 1896 Restored with Artificial Intelligence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Version of the Lumière Brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station


Pristine Footage Lets You Revisit Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Brothers


See 21 Historic Films by Lumière Brothers, Colorized and Enhanced with Machine Learning (1895–1902)


The Earliest Known Motion Picture, 1888’s Roundhay Garden Scene, Restored with Artificial Intelligence


The History of the Movie Camera in Four Minutes: From the Lumière Brothers to Google Glass


Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.


 

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