While Edison continues to market a peephole machine, in France, the Lumieres develop a projector of their own.
EPISODE 17: THE LUMIERES
Hi. I’m Alan and this is the podcast MATINEES ON MAIN STREET. We are telling the story of the history of the movies through the people who started the industry, the people who made the movies, those who ran the theaters and all of us who watched the movies.
Today’s story takes place in Eastern France, in the industrial city of Lyon. Its where a young man and his family, who were refugees from the Franco-Prussian War, started one of Europe’s important photographic supply companies. That company would eventually create a camera/projector that in some ways, was more important than the Edison’s projector in promoting movies to the world.
There are similarities between the two companies, such as the importance they have to the development of movies within their country, as well as the companies’ primary interest in profit over art. Still, Edison made a lot more wrong assumptions over the direction and success of the movies, than did the Lumiere family.
It’s delightful to see that the last name of the family that brought the cinema to the world is actually French for light. Yes, its just a coincidence, and nothing intentional, unless the family patriarch, Antoine Lumiere had decided to become a photographer simply because of the family name. Then again, I don’t know a single person with the last name of Smith who ended up becoming a blacksmith, although some distant ancestor of theirs undoubtedly had.
The Lumiere family, lived in the departmente of Haute-Saone, near the small French city of Besançon in eastern France. The French departmentes were primarily named after geographic attributes, so the Haute-Saone region is the departmente formed around the waters of the upper Saone River. The river flows south until it merges with the larger Rhone River, in Lyon, where the Lumieres would eventually settle. The Haute-Saone is half of a territory that was once part of the kingdom of Burgundy. Known as the Franche-Comté, they had been part of the Hapsburg Empire up until the late 1600s, when French king Louis XIV grabbed it through a treaty. Franche-Comté includes both the departmentes of Haute-Saone and the neighboring Doubs.
The major city in Franche-Comté is Besançon. That’s where Antoine Lumiere set up a photography studio. Why he did so is not known. Besançon was originally a Roman town that was established at a bend in the river Doubs, and like Lyon, was heavily influenced by its nearness to Switzerland. Antoine married Jeanne Josephine Costille when he was 19, and a year later they moved to Besançon. Ten years later, with the Lumieres now a family with two young boys, one named Auguste, and the other named Louis, the disastrous Franco-Prussian War broke out. The Prussian army invaded most of the northeastern part of France, and that included Besançon. The Lumiere family became French refugees and traveled south to Lyon, where they established a new home, and Antoine gave up photography to start up a photographic supply company.
Lyon was France’s urban industrial giant. The city was a major industrial center by the end of the Middle Ages, due to its silk textile industry. Lyon made lots of money from silk, and it soon became France’s financial as well as industrial heart. Lyon is situated between Paris, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, and these days, many major corporations have their head offices there. Lyon has now positioned it self as France’s technology capital, a French Silicon Valley, so to speak.
The Lumiere factory started producing glass plates for photography before expanding into selling other types of photographic equipment. You can find similarities between a company like the Lumieres and American photographic supply companies such as Eastman Kodak, and, particularly Blair. Blair started out selling camera equipment, and expanded into producing its own cameras. Kodak would do the same.
The Lumiere company was family operated with Antoine’s sons working with him full time. For a number of years, the company struggled just to avoid bankruptcy, as the market for glass plates seems to have been glutted. Still, Antoine managed to send both of his sons to Martinière, the major technical school in Lyon. Auguste, the older of the two boys, seems to have been a physically active young boy, and his scientific interests involved medicine. He would later use his discoveries in cinema to help advance research in the medical field. Louis, a few years younger than Auguste, seems to have been more sickly. He suffered from headaches, and insomnia, but also managed to be the top student at Martinière, with his scientific interests laying more towards physics. As adolescents, Louis and his sisters worked long hours at the factory, while Auguste, the oldest, was called into the military. He returned home in 1882 with the family business still struggling. Louis developed a coating that could be applied mechanically to glass plates and, when dried, was a superior dry plate for photography. The two brothers designed the machinery to do the coating and drying. The processed plates were marketed under the name “Etiquette Bleu,” meaning Blue Label. With the sudden success of the dry plates, the company transferred its headquarters to the then Lyonnaise suburb of Monplasir.
Having made a jump start into the dry plate coating market, the Lumieres’ business took off. By the end of the 1880s, with Antoine nominally in charge, Auguste acting as a kind of production manager, and Louis working as the head of R&D, the Lumieres were the premier glass plate provider for photographers in Europe. It was at this time that Antoine started to buy massive properties as he indulged in what Auguste would later called his father’s “stone addiction.” He bought his first major property along the Mediterranean at that time, a vineyard of over 220 acres. Several miles east of Marsailles, and several miles west of the famous French naval yard at Toulon, it was near the French village of La Ciotat. It was at La Ciotat where the Lumieres filmed their most famous film clip, L’ARRIVEE D’UN TRAIN EN GARE DE LA CIOTAT (THE ARRIVAL OF THE TRAIN IN LA CIOTAT). This was a film about an arriving train that soon was the subject of a legend. Supposedly audiences panicked when they first watched the arriving train coming towards them. Whether it was true or not, the film clip certainly created a greater legend than that of any other of film of its time.
One of the Lumieres more prestigious customers was French physicist Etienne Jules-Marey, and through him, they became acquainted with his attempts to capture images of movement using the photographic gun. Over time, they also came to understand how these processes worked through Marey’s assistant Georges Demenÿ and his early attempts to patent and market his supervisor’s ideas.
Still, the idea of the Lumieres making cinematic machines did not come from Marey or Demenÿ. While a few sources say that the idea was first conceived by Auguste Lumiere, its generally believed that his father Antoine was the man who visited Paris at the time that the kinetoscopes were appearing in the fall of 1894.
At the time, Antoine was not that busy a man. His sons were primarily running his company, and they were the ones who had turned the business around. While he did work, he could also be found playing cards in the park with Felicien Trewey, a well regarded French magician, who used magic lanterns and even early film projectors in his shows. Besides his trips to La Ciotat, where he regularly relaxed and vacationed, Antoine also occasionally visited Paris. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to purchase film footage, or even have some given to him, after viewing the kinetoscope. He brought the strip of positive kinetoscope film back to his sons, suggesting that they might be able to take advantage of this new market.
So remember the last episode when I talked about the problems between Thomas Armat and Charles Francis Jenkins? Now might be a good time to remember that, due to their animosity towards the each other, it was impossible to tell who did what when they developed the Phantascope. Well, its also hard to tell what happened between the Lumiere brothers for the opposite reason. Early on, the two brothers agreed to share all credit on everything they developed. This included their mechanical inventions, their experiments with early films, and especially, their work creating the world’s first marketed color film. They did tell reporters and historians about their accomplishments, but they didn’t reveal who did what.
The Lumieres’ movie machine is quite remarkable in a number of ways. It definitely was different from the cameras and projectors that were being developed by others. The most important feature was that they could use their cinematographe to both record images and play them back. Also, the machine was capable of making movie positives from the negative. Every other camera that was developed, operated separately from its projector. Some were very large and heavy, but the Lumiere machine was quite compact and light in comparison. The difference was what the Lumieres chose to include and exclude from their machine.
Everyone who was developing movie projectors and cameras understood the basic needs and processes for building one. The cameras and projectors were all built to use camera film, as it was the only way to photograph images consecutively. The images had to be shot at a rate that was near twenty frames a second, although a standard rate had not yet been settled upon. Edison and Dickson were shooting at a rate as high as forty images a second, and others were shooting in the twenties or up to thirty images a second. The Lumieres were shooting just under twenty frames a second. And don’t forget, you needed illumination to project your films. Most of the cameras had some kind of projecting light.
At the same time, there were four major problems that existed with the systems that were developed at that time. The first was mechanical presicion or more appropriately, the lack of it. As everyone understood, the intermittent device was based on a mechanical concept used in the sewing machine. Due to the inexperience of the machinists, the intermittent mechanisms should have been manufactured by companies who were experienced in making such intricate machine work. This was definitely the case in America. Unfortunately, some inventors couldn’t afford such precision in their gears and purchased assemblies that we not manufactured that well.
Another issue was space reduction. Its one thing to design a machine, its another to design a concept that compresses all these ideas into a smaller space. Many of the early projectors had their various parts sprawled over a table rather than fitted into a convenient box. This made the early machines rather unwieldy and heavy. Also, most of these machines depended upon power. Now that cities were electrifying, thanks to Edison and Westinghouse, the inventors chose to power their projectors with electric motors. This added even more weight to the projectors and cameras, as these motors were still quite large.
Finally, there’s the lack of lighter weight materials. These days, our designs use materials, such as plastics, because they are of lighter weight, but at that time, we were still using heavier, denser products, such as metals and wood. Eastman Kodak was already experimenting with making their cameras lighter but they, too, were having problems with this issue. The most viable lightweight product at that time was cardboard, but cameras were used outside, and water could easily damage a cardboard designed camera. Thankfully, the Lumieres addressed some of these issues.
The brothers understood mechanics and were quite aware of what others were doing in their field, simply by consulting patent information, listening to those in the know, and reading scientific journals. They set out to build a smaller camera that could also be used as a projector. Step one was to remove the motor, which ate a lot of space and created a lot of weight. They would use a hand crank to drive their cameras and projectors. Second they designed for compact size. As the mechanics of the camera and the projector were the same, they figured they could get one small box to do both jobs, while the light source was separated in a second box. With the motor removed, their small movie camera now weighed only eleven pounds.
Finally, the Lumieres created an intermittent mechanism based on an idea that Louis had devised during one of his usual bouts of insomnia. It involved “movable claws” rather than the more complicated mechanisms others had designed. The brothers took their time creating a viable product, because they had the time and money to do so. In the end, what is more surprising is that the Edison Company didn’t bother to achieve the same thing.
Once they had the machine designed, the Lumieres assigned the company mechanic to build it. Supposedly, Auguste sketched out the machine but when the concept wasn’t performing properly, he handed the project off to Louis to rework the concept.
The design and construction happened pretty quickly. Work started in late 1894, and the prototype was soon ready. Unlike Edison’s struggles to make a machine that could play both sound and pictures, the Lumieres found it easy to make a machine that would both record images and project them. Surprisingly, there was no rush to market. The brothers spent all of 1895 testing the machine, spreading the word about their cinematographe through talk and demonstrations, as well as making movies for the delight of their captive audiences.
In early 1895, the Lumieres started to test the cinematographe. This involved setting the camera at the factory exit and filming the workers as they left. This test became the first of three films known as LA SORTIE DE L’USINE LUMIERE A LYON, or as its known in English, WORKERS LEAVING THE LUMIERE FACTORY or something like that. Variations in these three films are sometimes referred to as “one horse,” “two horses,” and no “horses.” The obvious reason is that they are defined by the number of horses that leave the building at the end of the film clip. “One horse” was the first film, and besides a one horse carriage, it shows some workers wearing coats, a number of people in dark clothing and the skeletal shadow of a leafless tree in the foreground. The other two show shadows of a tree with leaves, and workers in lighter dress. “No Horses” looks as if it may have been filmed in the summer. According to Louis Lumiere “One Horse,” the first version of WORKERS LEAVING THE LUMIERE FACTORY, was shot in late summer of 1894. This would have been about six months before their first exhibition. But considering that the tree’s shadow is without leaves, this was probably much later in the year.
In late March 1895, Louis Lumiere was lecturing at a Paris meeting for the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry. There were over two hundred members of the group attending, including Leon Gaumont, who was director of Comptoir géneral de la photographie, the company that would become L. Gaumont et Cie, and the topic of discussion for the meeting concerned the development of color film. The Society’s president had invited Louis to give the lecture and he agreed. The Lumieres, along with other companies, such as Gaumont, were searching for ways to expand the concept of photography, not just by making moving images, but by developing color film, and even investigating three dimensional photography. So, the clips of moving images they brought were of secondary importance, and were meant to suggest the possibilities of using moving pictures in scientific research.
The brothers were taken by surprise when the audience of scientists and photographers gave them an ovation and gushed over the moving images of the hundred or so vacating employees at the Lumiere plant. Their surprise really shows how the Lumieres’ interests blinded them to the commercial aspects of moving pictures. This really paralleled Edison’s attitude towards his kinetoscope and the marketing of his moving pictures.
After the March meeting in Paris, the Lumieres were approached by Jules Carpentier, a camera developer who had attended the meeting. He offered his services to the brothers in order to help manufacture their machines. It wouldn’t be until very late in the year before manufacturing would start.
A month after the meeting, another opportunity arose to show the film clips to a scientific organization of great importance, when the Congres des Societes Savantes met at the Sorbonne in Paris. Again it seems to have been a limited show but it was well received.
At around this time, Louis Lumiere shot a small number of films, of which the most important were REPAS DE BEBE, also known as BABY’S MEAL, and L’ARROSEUR ARROSE, or THE WATERER WATERED. As the Lumieres’ first film clip, WORKERS LEAVING THE LUMIERE FACTORY, was supposedly filmed towards the end of 1894, you can see that both BABY’S LUNCH and THE WATERER WATERED were undoubtedly filmed during warmer weather. In both film clips, the foliage and trees have leaves, and the people in them are wearing light clothing. It was probably filmed sometime in late spring or early summer. A fair guess would be that they were made in late April or even May of 1895, as they were part of the next exhibition the Lumieres held in Lyon.
Both of these films inspired interest from the audiences that saw them. This interest was much greater than what was inspired by the Edison kinetoscope film clips. Its impossible to know if this interest was developed due to showing them to audiences rather than to one person at a time, or if the films themselves created that interest. It could be assumed that an audience watching BABY’S MEAL would be most delighted by the feeding of a baby, but that’s not what everyone talked about when the saw the film. Behind the heads of Auguste Lumiere, his wife, Marguerite, and their daughter, Andrée, you can see the landscape as the wind blew the leaves on the trees. The wind was not brisk, but just active enough to create some movement. It has puzzled historians why the audience would have more entertained by the wind blowing than by little Andrée. The assumption could be that while everyone had seen photographs of babies, no one had ever seen images of the wind.
As for THE WATERER WATERED, it was simply a film of a child’s prank. It was a joke suggested by Louis’ and Auguste’s younger brother, Edouard, although he was too young to perform the role of the child adequately. Instead an adolescent who worked as an apprentice in the factory’s workshop, by the name of Duval, was used as the movie’s youth. The gardener was the Lumiere’s gardener, M. Clerc.
Its been remarked by a number of historians that this film was probably pre-arranged, and that both persons in the film clip were trying hard to follow direction by staying within the cinematic space defined by the camera’s lens. That is, until the last moment. Possibly this was done by instruction from Louis. For some students of film history, this cute little prank is considered the first comedic film, or more accurately, the first attempts at humor on film. Interestingly, along with Edison’s Annabelle films, this was among the first film clips that would be imitated by other camera and film companies.
As for THE WATERER WATERED, it was simply a film of a child’s prank. It was a joke suggested by Louis’ and Auguste’s younger brother, Edouard, although he was too young to perform the role of the child adequately. Instead an adolescent who worked as an apprentice in the factory’s workshop, by the name of Duval, was used as the movie’s youth. The gardener was the Lumiere’s gardener, M. Clerc.
Its been remarked by a number of historians that this film was probably pre-arranged, and that both persons in the film clip were trying hard to follow direction by staying within the cinematic space defined by the camera’s lens. That is, until the last moment. Possibly this was done by instruction from Louis. For some students of film history, this cute little prank is considered the first comedic film, or more accurately, the first attempts at humor on film. Interestingly, along with Edison’s Annabelle films, this was among the first film clips that would be imitated by other camera and film companies.
As for THE WATERER WATERED, it was simply a film of a child’s prank. It was a joke suggested by Louis’ and Auguste’s younger brother, Edouard, although he was too young to perform the role of the child adequately. Instead an adolescent who worked as an apprentice in the factory’s workshop, by the name of Duval, was used as the movie’s youth. The gardener was the Lumiere’s gardener, M. Clerc.
Its been remarked by a number of historians that this film was probably pre-arranged, and that both persons in the film clip were trying hard to follow direction by staying within the cinematic space defined by the camera’s lens. That is, until the last moment. Possibly this was done by instruction from Louis. For some students of film history, this cute little prank is considered the first comedic film, or more accurately, the first attempts at humor on film. Interestingly, along with Edison’s Annabelle films, this was among the first film clips that would be imitated by other camera and film companies.
These two films, BABY’S LUNCH and THE WATERER WATERED now joined a slowly growing collection of film clips that Louis and Auguste would show at meetings of prestigious scientific organizations. The next group, the Congres des Photographes, also known as the Photographic Congress, were a regional photographic group that was meeting in the Lyonnaise suburb of Neuville-sur-Saone. They traveled up the Saone River by steamboat, and arrived in Neuville just in time for Louis to film the group disembarking from the boat. This was captured in the film clip LE DEBARQUEMENT DU CONGRES DU PHOTOGRAPHIE DU LYON, or THE LANDING OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CONGRESS IN LYON. Interestingly, the last man off the boat, who is carrying a box camera, is Jules Janssen. He is the first person to develop a camera that could shoot multiple images, and he was the man whom Marey consulted when he started to develop his photographic gun.
Its obvious that there is a sense of humanity in the Lumieres’ film clips that rise above the vaudeville subject matter that is portrayed in the Edison film clips. As much as Dickson did his best to find subjects that interested the clientele that viewed kinetoscopes, when it came to appeasing the public in general, a large portion of it was much more appreciative of film clips of a man’s family or of watching men leave a boat, rather than the boxers, dancers, and performers who littered the kinetoscope clips. Moving pictures were about making photography move, and for most people photography was about humanity, not about the stage performers in various guises. Moving pictures will constantly navigate between this issue of human reality and the artificiality of professional performers up until the time that professional actors start performing naturally. That’s when they first attempt to imitate a personal humanity that is distinct from their own.
The Lumieres would hold a few more private-professional showings through out 1895, one in Belgium, and another in Paris, before they held their first public showing, again in Paris, right after Christmas. These showings were probably meant to gage the interest that people had in moving images, or at least to see if people were willing to spend money on cinematographes. The Lumieres were doing what Edison was doing, selling machines, and providing a limited number of film clips to encourage the selling of their machines. But they went one step farther, they would also encourage their customers to make their own movies. To do so, those customers would have to buy film that the Lumieres conveniently sold. Neither the Lumieres nor Edison grasped that the real money would be in the films themselves, and by the time that reality suddenly dawned them both, the Lumieres had backed out of their project, and Edison started fighting for his cinematic life. He would spend the rest of his movie career fighting those who were profiting from his invention.
But that’s all in the future. In a few episodes, I’ll start discussing the projectors that would suddenly appear on the market in 1896, including the Lumiere’s cinematographe, Edison’s Vitascope, Robert Paul’s theatrograph, and even later, the Mutoscope group’s Bioscope . But first, I want to discuss who could be considered the first star of the movies, a popular dancer named Annabelle Moore, whom Edison repeatedly filmed, because her kinetoscope clips wore out so often that he had to refilm her, over and over again. That’s next time.