The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière (19 October 1862-10 April 1954) and Louis Jean Lumière (5 October 1864-7 June 1948), were manufacturers of photography equipment, best known for their Cinématographe motion picture system and the short films they produced between 1895 and 1905.
Their screening on 22 March 1895 for around 200 members of the Society for the Development of the National Industry in Paris was probably the first presentation of films on a screen for a large audience.
Their first commercial public screening on 28 December 1895 for around 40 paying visitors and invited relations has traditionally been regarded as the birth of cinema.
Either the techniques or the business models of earlier filmmakers proved to be less viable than the breakthrough presentations of the Lumières.
More information: National Geographic
The Lumière brothers were born in Besançon, France, to Charles-Antoine Lumière (1840–1911)and Jeanne Joséphine Costille Lumière, who were married in 1861 and moved to Besançon, setting up a small photographic portrait studio where Auguste and Louis were born. They moved to Lyon in 1870, where son Edouard and three daughters were born.
Auguste and Louis both attended La Martiniere, the largest technical school in Lyon. Their father Charles-Antoine set up a small factory producing photographic plates, but even with Louis and a young sister working from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. it teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, and by 1882 it looked as if they would fail. When Auguste returned from military service, the boys designed the machines necessary to automate their father's plate production and devised a very successful new photo plate, etiquettes bleue, and by 1884 the factory employed a dozen workers.
They patented several significant processes leading up to their film camera, most notably film perforations, originally implemented by Emile Reynaud, as a means of advancing the film through the camera and projector. The original cinématographe had been patented by Léon Guillaume Bouly on 12 February 1892. The cinématographe -a three-in-one device that could record, develop, and project motion pictures- was further developed by the Lumières. The brothers patented their own version on 13 February 1895.
The date of the recording of their first film is in dispute. In an interview with Georges Sadoul given in 1948, Louis Lumière tells that he shot the film in August 1894.
This is questioned by historians (Sadoul,
Pinel, Chardère) who consider that a functional Lumière camera didn't
exist before the end of 1894, and that their first film La Sortie de
l'usine Lumière à Lyon was recorded on 19 March 1895, and then publicly
projected 22 March 1895 at the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie
nationale in Paris.
The Lumière brothers saw film as a novelty and had withdrawn from the film business by 1905. They went on to develop the first practical photographic colour process, the Lumière Autochrome.
Louis died on 6 June 1948 and Auguste on 10 April 1954. They are buried in a family tomb in the New Guillotière Cemetery in Lyon.
The Lumières presented their invention with a screening on 22 March 1895 in Paris, at the Society for the Development of the National Industry, in front of an audience of 200 people, one of whom was Léon Gaumont, then director of the company the Comptoir géneral de la photographie. The main focus of the conference by Louis Lumière concerned the recent developments in the photograph industry, mainly the research on polychromy (colour photography). It was much to Lumière's surprise that the moving black-and-white images retained more attention than the coloured stills. The American Woodville Latham screened works of film 2 months later on 20 May 1895. The first public screening of films at which admission was charged was a program by the Skladanowsky brothers that was held on 1 November 1895 in Berlin.
More information: DW
The Lumières gave their first paid public screening on 28 December 1895, at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. This history-making presentation consisted of the following 10 short films.
-La Sortie de l'usine Lumière à Lyon, 46 seconds.
-Le Jardinier (l'Arroseur Arrosé), 49 seconds.
-Le Débarquement du congrès de photographie à Lyon, 48 seconds.
-La Voltige, 46 seconds.
-La Pêche aux poissons rouges, 42 seconds.
-Les Forgerons, 49 seconds.
-Repas de bébé, 41 seconds.
-Le Saut à la couverture, 41 seconds.
-La Places des Cordeliers à Lyon, 44 seconds.
-La Mer (Baignade en mer), 38 seconds.
Each film is 17 meters long, which, when hand cranked through a projector, runs approximately 50 seconds.
The Lumières went on tour with the cinématographe in 1896, visiting Brussels (the first place a film was played outside Paris on the Galleries Saint-Hubert on 1 March 1896), Bombay, London, Montreal, New York City, Palestine, and Buenos Aires.
In 1896, only a few months after the initial screenings in Europe, films by the Lumière Brothers were shown in Egypt, first in the Tousson stock exchange in Alexandria on 5 November 1896 and then in the Hamam Schneider in Cairo.
The moving images had an immediate and significant influence on popular culture with L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de la Ciotat and Carmaux, défournage du coke. Their actuality films, or actualités, are often cited as the first, primitive documentaries. They also made the first steps towards comedy film with the slapstick of L'Arroseur Arrosé.
More information: The Guardian
but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever.
Auguste Lumière
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