2. Lumiere Brothers: Auguste and Louis
Lumiere
The Lumière brothers were born in Besancon, France to Claude-Antoine Lumière
and Jeanne Joséphine Costille Lumière. They moved to Lyon in 1870, where both
attended La Martiniere, the largest technical school in Lyon.
Louis had made some improvements to the still-photograph process, the most
notable being the dry-plate process, which was a major step towards moving
images.
It was not until their father retired in 1892 that the brothers began to create
moving pictures. They patented a number of significant processes leading up to
their film camera, most notably film perforations (originally implemented by Emile
Reynaud) as a means of advancing the film through the camera and projector.
3. The First Film
The Lumiere brothers created one of the first films in 1895 and it was of a train entering a station and
passengers boarding and departing the train. Consequently this film had no narrative and included no editing.
It was simply a single continuous long shot that showed actual events unlike modern films that would have
cut from cameras outside the train to inside and showed the train arriving from different angles. Modern films
would also be more likely to add in unrealistic aspects to the trains arrival for example the people getting on
and off would be choreographed now-a-days but in the Lumiere film people are just being filmed and
probably don’t even know that its happening.
We as a modern audience would have also expected there to be a narrative but what most people in the
modern audience don’t realise is that in 1895 this was an incredible feat to have an image that moved.