The birth of cinema

 Week 4 : Mathilde Fourgeot

Today is the 150th anniversary of Auguste Lumière (born on the 19^th October 1962 in Besançon), the elder from the Lumière Brothers (the youngest is Louis, born in 1964), the original brothers of film and the inventors of the cinématographe.

After Thomas Edison’s invention, the Kinetoscope, in 1891, the Lumière Brothers went past than Edison with their invention. 1895 marked the official beginning of a new era. In December 1895 took place at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris the first showing of their shorts films. Those short films dealt with banal themes and without plot or scenario like for example “Workers leaving the Lumière Factory”. There were above all considered like experimentations. But nobody knew in those days that this invention would take so much importance in our conception of arts and in our imagination. 

Contrary to all expectations, it was the birth of a new art, the cinema.