Auguste and Louis Lumière

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The Lumière Brothers Les frères Lumière
Auguste Lumière (left) and Louis Lumière (right)
Place of birth	Besançon, France
Auguste	Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière (Lyon, France)
Louis	Louis Jean Lumière (Bandol, French Riviera)
Occupation	Filmmakers
Education	La Martiniere Lyon
Parents	Charles Antoine Lumière (1840-1911)

The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas (19 October 1862, Besançon, France – 10 April 1954, Lyon) and Louis Jean (5 October 1864, Besançon, France – 6 June 1948, Bandol), were among the earliest filmmakers. (Appropriately, "lumière" translates as "light" in English.)

Early cinema

The Lumières held their first private screening of projected motion pictures on March 22, 1895. Their first public screening of movies at which admission was charged was held on December 28, 1895, at Paris's Salon Indien du Grand Café. This history-making presentation featured ten short films, including their first film, Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory). Each film is 17 meters long, which, when hand cranked through a projector, runs approximately 46 seconds.

It is believed their first film was actually recorded that same year (1895) with Léon Bouly's cinématographe device, which was patented the previous year. The cinématographe— a three-in-one device that could record, develop, and project motion pictures— was further developed by the Lumières.

Even though Max and Emil Skladanowsky, inventors of the Bioskope, had offered projected moving images to a paying public one month earlier (November 1, 1895, in Berlin), film historians consider the Grand Café screening to be the true birth of the cinema as a commercial medium. The reason is the Skladanowsky brothers' screening used a dual system motion picture projector which was extremely impractical and was immediately supplanted by the Lumiere cinematographe.

See also

• 1895 in film
• 1896 in film
• 19th century in film
• History of film

Notes

Sources

• Chardère, B.; Borgé, G. and M. (1985). Les Lumière, Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts. ISBN 2-85047-068-6 (Language: French)
• Chardère, B. (1995). Les images des Lumière, Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 2-07-011462-7 (Language: French)
• Cook, David (2004). A History of Narrative Film. 4th ed., New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-97868-0.
• Rittaud-Hutinet, Jacques. (1985). Le cinéma des origines, Seyssel: Champ Vallon. ISBN 2-903528-43-8 (Language: French)
• Mast, Gerald; and Bruce F. Kawin (2006). A Short History of the Movies. 9th ed., New York: Pearson Longman. ISBN 0-321-26232-8.

External links

• Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale
• The films shown at the first public screening (Quicktime format) — December 28, 1895. Also includes a program for the event.
• Le musée Lumière — Lumière Museum .

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