FAMILIAR with widescreen and colour, the internet and YouTube, the modern cinemagoer could be inclined to treat the flickering black-and-white figures of men and women coming out of a gate with a certain mocking disdain.

Nevertheless, the film Workers Leaving the Factory which lasts less than a minute remains a historic document. It is, quite simply, the first cinematographic work ever produced.

Its authors were August and Louis Lumiere. The technique of photography had already been invented but the two brothers worked on the idea of printing continued images on a transparent celluloid strip with perforated sides and running it quickly on the spiked wheels of a hand-powered projector, thus creating the illusion of motion on the screen.

Workers Leaving the Factory was shot in March 1895 in the city of Lyon and screened before a select audience in Paris three months later. Assured of their accomplishment, the Lumiere brothers made nine additional films, each lasting 50 seconds, and projected the whole lot in Grand Cafe of Paris on Dec 28 the same year. This time the spectators paid for their entries and applauded enthusiastically at the end of the show. Cinema was born!

August and Louis did not hesitate when invitations from abroad started pouring in. Their world tour in March 1896 took them to Brussels, London, New York, Montreal, Buenos Aires and, yes, to Bombay where they showed their films and spoke about their invention.

Aware of the powerful impact moving images produced on the spectators’ minds, the brothers carefully introduced drama and slapstick comedy into their works. The film showing a train arriving at the station of Ciotat has all the ingredients of suspense that Alfred Hitchcock would be famous for, more than half a century later. In The Sprinkler Sprinkled a boy stepping on a gardening hose and having his father take the full blow of water in his face makes you laugh. In another film a baby catching a goldfish in a bowl proves to be a cute and moving spectacle.

Ironically enough the brothers whose name, Lumiere, literally means light, were unable to foresee that their invention would later be turned into a multibillion-dollar industry by Hollywood. They worked on films for less than ten years before moving on to other things.

One man who was convinced from the beginning of the great artistic and commercial potential of film-making was another Frenchman named Georges Melies. Lacking the financial means that the Lumieres possessed, he created many films in which he himself played all the roles.

Though today we are used to computerised imagery in the movies, it is nevertheless surprising to see films made by Melies. In one he fills air into his own head with a bicycle pump, blowing it ten times its size and finally exploding it. In another, he is seen conducting an orchestra with parts of all the musicians performed by his own self.

But his chef d’oeuvre remains A Trip to the Moon, a 12-minute film released in 1902 which uses colour and trick camera work at an astonishing degree, even seen by today’s standards. Hugo, the 2011 film by Hollywood director Martin Scorsese is his homage to the genius of Melies.

Paris is currently celebrating the 120th year of the birth of cinema in an unprecedented exhibition at the Grand Palace on the Champs Elysees. One can see here the 1,400 short films created by the Lumieres during their relatively brief career, as well as those by Melies and other French moviemakers like Charles Pathe and Leon Gaumont.

It is interesting to note that while the Lumieres and Melies are forgotten, the descendants of Pathe and Gaumont have continued in film production and distribution business even today.

One can also see in the exhibition hundreds of cameras, lenses, projectors and film editing devices belonging to the earliest age of cinema. Spending a whole day at the Grand Palace is an exciting experience.

—The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, May 10th, 2015

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