photographic equipment factory and had been experimenting with a camera they called theCinématographe, which they actually demonstrated in March of 1895. The Lumières continuedpromoting the item as a scientific instrument, until debuting it at the Grand Café in Paris with tenfilms at the first commercial public exhibition of film. Although Max Sklandowsky’s screeningoccurred approximately 27 days before theirs, the Lumière’s combined business acumen andmarketing skill cemented their names in film history (Pearson “Early Cinema” 14). With theCinématographe, the Lumières had created a lightweight, hand-cranked machine that could notonly record motion photography, but throw the images onto a large screen using the concept ofthe magic lantern (Sklar 27).The most famous film of those shown at that historic debut was “La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière àLyon” (“Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”), a fifty-foot reel depicting exactly as its titleannounces. The early films of the Lumières, as with most early cinema, were known as actualities,films that simply depict regular everyday events as they unfold. Many of these were framedas a still photograph would be, with the camera motionless and the subject directly in front of it(“The European Pioneers”). As the Lumières began opening theaters in New York, Brussels,London and France, early filmgoers flocked, and by early 1896, the short actualities of theLumière Brothers were a part of popular culture. By 1903, the Lumières had created over two
thousand experimental films. The most famous of these in film lore was “L'Arrivée d'un Train en
Gare de la Ciotat” (“Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station”).
Created in 1895 or 1896, “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” is mostly known for its legend
more than its actual accomplishment. The footage is a single shot of a train in the distance approaching
the station, the camera never moving but allowing the train to hurtle past it. The attached
lore is that the train seemed to be hurtling off the screen into the audience, a visual phenomenon
never before experienced at the time, especially on such a large, intimidating screen.
Viewers allegedly fainted, ducked and screamed (Brownlow 2). The camera angle the filmmakers
selected created a sequence of events, varying from distant shot to close-up, and displayed a
new way of presenting the unstaged. In essence, the filmmaker directed the camera for the first
time, as opposed to simply sitting in front of the action. The Lumières continued to find success
and innovation with “Arroseur et arrosé” (“The Sprinkler Sprinkled”), a dramatization of a wellknown
newspaper cartoon sequence (Sklar 30). This short film is considered the first fully fictional-style
film projected in public and opened new doors in the film industry for creativity as
well as comedy (“The European Pioneers”).
The first projection of film in the US would also be washed away from mainstream history. Before
both Sklandowsky’s Bioscope and the Lumières Cinématographe, Major Woodville Latham
would project a boxing match onto a storefront window in May 1895 in New York City with his
Eidolscope, a projector based on the principles of the Kinetescope which was co-invented with
William Dickson, Edison’s former employee (Burns). Latham and his sons doubled the width of
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