INVENTING THE CINEMA

Inventing the Cinema, The Lumiere Brothers

Louis and Auguste Lumiere invented the cinema. Now, 120 years later, a new exhibition is being held in Paris at the Grand Palais to celebrate and pay homage to their achievement.

The exhibition entitled 'Lumiere! Inventing Cinema' will be on view until June 14th, and showcases all of the Lumieres' early films which have been pain-stakingly restored.  The show also seeks to put the Lumieres in historical context. Many inventors at that time were experimenting with recording images, including Thomas Edison, but it was the Lumieres, who in 1894, invented the cinematograph, a compact device that united all the existing technology to capture 17-minute films on 35mm film strips and project them. Their cinematograph was patented in 1895.

As soon as the technology took hold, the Lumieres sent novice filmmakers all over the world to document what they saw. Additionally, their cinematograph had early adopters, who began making movies on their own, so that by the early 1900s the first 'feature films' were being made and distributed for projection to the masses, and by 1914, Hollywood had started to form entities which we now refer to as movie studios.

The Lumieres made over 1500 films, which included fiction, as well as, reporting and documentaries. For this tribute to the Lumieres, all 1500 films will be exhibited on large cinema screens.  The first known cinema screening was held at the Salon Indien, inside the Hotel Scribe - Paris in 1895, where 10 Lumiere films were exhibited to a paying audience, thus ushering  in the cinema as we know it today.