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lumière brothers

History of film and documentary

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Who are they, what did they invent?

Lumière brothers, French inventors and pioneer manufacturers of photographic equipment who devised an early motion-picture camera and projector called the Cinématographe. Louis worked on the problem of commercially satisfactory development of film; at 18 he had succeeded so well that with his father’s financial aid he opened a factory for producing photographic plates, which gained immediate success. By 1894 the Lumières were producing some 15 million plates a year.

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First Film

1895 This was the year that, on March 22, Auguste and Louis Lumière debuted La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (1895; “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”), to the mass audience, this is considered the first motion picture. This I am sure you have seen as was a huge milestone when it comes to film, after this he went on to do over 40 separate videos that year alone.

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Early films, along with first documentary

The Lumière apparatus consisted of a single camera used for both photographing and projecting at 16 frames per second. Their first films recorded everyday French life, the arrival of a train, a game of cards, a toiling blacksmith, the feeding of a baby, soldiers marching, the activity of a city street. The Lumières presented the first newsreel, a film of the French Photographic Society Conference, and the first documentaries, four films about the Lyon fire department. Beginning in 1896 they sent a trained crew of innovative cameraman-projectionists to cities throughout the world to show films and shoot new material.