A Reel 125: The Motion Picture

This month marks the 125^th anniversary of what is widely regarded as the birth of the motion picture. 

It was March of 1895. Grover Cleveland was President of a United States that was only 30 years removed from the Civil War, the Cuban War of Independence was underway, and Germany had just launched the world’s first gasoline bus route. Also in this month, French brothers Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumiere and Louis Jean filmed 17 meters, or 50 seconds of moving pictures in what would be entitled WORKERS LEAVING THE LUMIERE FACTORY. The film, which had a single scene of workers leaving a factory, did not have anything resembling a script, storyline, or characters…but that one shot would become a shot heard around the world. 

The first screening of their motion picture also took place in March, in Paris at the “Society for the Development of the National Industry”. The central focus of the conference was supposed to the developments in the photography industry, specifically color photos…but it was the moving black-and-white images that grabbed everyone’s attention. Their first public screening was a few months later, along with nine other short films of their own making, and by 1896 they were on tour exhibiting their films worldwide. 

Although the Lumiere brothers were not the first to work on techniques to create motion pictures, they are credited as among the first to create the technology for cinema as a mass medium, and were certainly the first to understand how to use it. Not unlike today, the new medium of cinema had filmmakers taking inspiration from their predecessors. In 1897 Robert W. Paul used the first rotating camera for taking panning shots, and in that same year Georges Melies built one of the first film studios on his way to making over 500 films…including A TRIP TO THE MOON in 1902. Innovations would come over the decades, including sound and color, stop-motion and puppetry, green-screen and matting…all the way up to Computer Generated Imagery (CGI)…which would create everything from environments to dinosaurs to de-aged people. 

When the Lumiere brothers first exhibited their 50-second film through a hand-cranked camera, they never could have imagined the impact cinema would have on the world; inspiring generations of new storytellers and innovators, and changing world culture forever. Ever since the dawn of man, when images were scratched on cave walls, the world had been telling stories and searching for better way to tell them. Although being told a story verbally (or through radio) enabled (or forced) us to use our imaginations to provide the visuals, the motion picture took our imaginations to new places; conveying ideas, places, characters, and stories that would inspire the imagination even more. 

Today, cinema is a zillion-dollar industry, and has permeated the sub-conscious of nearly every human being on the planet. Everyone knows something about the movies; from Kong to Thanos, from Kubrick to Spielberg, from James Bond to Luke Skywalker, and from Manhattan to the Moon…the motion picture is, and always will be an inspiration and a genuine art of self-expression that will always have us reaching beyond our grasp.