THE BIRTH OF FILM

       

          It begins in France with two brothers, whose very name means "light." And depending on how you look at it, film may be said to begin in France perhaps 10,000 years ago or more, as shown on cave walls such as in Lascaux depicting a sort of proto-animation with additional legs on animals apparently to indicate motion.

          Auguste and Louis Lumiere are the shamanic brothers of a century and a quarter ago whose February of 1895 patent registered for the Cinematograph sets the art and business of movies into motion. December 28 of that year marks the first film screening with 10 short films shown to a paying audience in a Paris café.
          The 1996 documentary The Lumiere Brothers' First Films bestows illuminating perspective on the 2-year period (1895-1897) wherein they made the films which form the bedrock of cinema.
          The world's first film is of workers exiting a factory. Women, mostly. Plus two horses, one dog, and a bicyclist.
          Comparable to Twitter today which allows tweets of no more than 164 characters, the Lumiere Brothers' first films are only 50 seconds long. They show crowds and the working class. The brothers film in the street, recording daily life with striking composition and tremendous movement.
          The brothers make the first film, the first re-make, the first home movie, the first comedy, the first commercial. They invent the tracking shot. And diagonal perspective.
          Film's first masterpiece is of a train's arrival. The first cat in film appears as the star of a cat food commercial. "Wild Boys of the Road" shows urchins playing marbles. Everyday people were clearly hyper-conscious of being recorded, and overacted at every opportunity, comparable to the selfie in social media today.
          In the words of narrator Bertrand Tavernier, the brothers were "interested in everything that could be exciting and entertaining." Their films are even Post Modern, referring to films in their films. They have the first film of someone filming, and that guy is protected by a policeman trying to get into the shot.
          An illuminating fact: the men of 1896 look at the camera much more than do the women, and are generally more selfish and less professional.
          Because Auguste and Louis sent operators all over the world, we can see Indo-China opium smokers, Irish firemen, the Pyramids of Egypt and the Sphinx--all priceless documents from the 1890s. They went to Turkey and Japan, Moscow and Berlin. In New York and Chicago, because of the Lumiere Brothers, we can see that literally almost every man has the same mustache!
          Many of the films were lost for a century. Luckily, we can see "The Grotesque Roller-Skater," featuring a fat guy skating. Fortunately also the brothers filmed a tribute to their contemporary, the first great director, French magician George Melies, chiefly notable for his groundbreaking A Trip to the Moon. (Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011) features Ben Kingsley as Melies in a brilliantly imaginative love-letter to the movies.)
          Long before the Brothers Cohen, Wachowski, or Farrelly, the Lumieres brought the light of cinema to the world. To see the first documents displaying motion, sometimes with accidents, a quick search will reveal the freely available 1996 documentary online.



Stewart Kirby writes for
THE INDEPENDENT
and
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE