In late 1895, Louis and Auguste debuted the Cinématographe at the Grand Café in Paris. Audiences were amazed at films like L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat, in which a train moves straight toward the camera point of view, set on the track. Author Rémi Fournier Lanzoni recounts most were oblivious to the movie process.
"Consequently, many of the panic-stricken audience members jumped out of their seats."
Elizabeth Ezra the author of George Méliès, wrote:
"...the social phenomenon of cinema was born."
Such was the popularity of the Cinématographe, that the daily revenue went above 2,500 francs ($10,000 in today's terms) and police were posted to maintain order in the queues. In the audience during those weeks were Léon Gaumont, Alice Guy-Blaché, Georges Demenÿ and Georges Melies. Four key players in the future of film.
Léon Gaumont's employer, a photographic supplier, had been ordered to cease trading, so he borrowed funds and bought the company. Gaumont retained the office assistant Guy-Blaché, who joined him at the Lumière's screening.
Georges Demenÿ had developed his own film equipment to help with the study of movement alongside Etienne Marey. Demenÿ had tried without success to interest the Lumières in his own projector apparatus.
Georges Méliès had bought the nearby Theatre Robert Houdini where he performed tricks and fantasy pantomime and displayed automats. He offered to buy a Cinématographe, but the Lumières declined.
The screening was successful and established the Lumières as the pre-eminent filmmakers and distributors in the world.
It had been 35 years since Sir John Herschel had offered up the idea of moving pictures.
Having already run a successful photo plate business, the Lumières were at least as commercially minded as Edison and Pathé and better placed to exploit the public's interest in cinema. The Lumières commissioned Jules Carpentier (an inventor and engineer in his own right) to build 25 Cinématographes, and the units shipped within months.
Brian Manley wrote in The History of Early Cinema:
"As the Lumières began opening theaters in New York, Brussels, London, and France, early filmgoers flocked and by early 1896, the short actualities of the Lumière Brothers were a part of popular culture."
Historian Tim Dirks explains:
"They soon became an escapist entertainment medium for the working-class masses and one could spend an evening at the cinema for a cheap entry fee."
The Lumières sent operators overseas to shoot and screen in excess of 1,000 short films and to sell the three-in-one camera-printer-projector. According to the director of Lyon’s Lumière Institut Thierry Fremaux:
"The Lumières wanted the cinema to be a witness of its time."
Another breakthrough film was screened, but not in France.
Across the English Channel, in the British city of Brighton, businessman Robert Paul, and photographer Birt Acres had teamed up to build Kinetoscope style projectors, and to create short films to project. Using film stock from Thomas Blair's London office they created Incident Outside Clovelly Cottage, Barnet; Boxing Match, the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and then something that no audience had experienced before.
Rough Sea at Dover (1895) showed waves crashing into Admiralty Pier. A journalist described the first screening at the Royal Photographic Society in London.
"Some people in the front seemed to be afraid they were going to get wet…"
The 48-second Dover film consists of two distinct shots from different locations which were spliced together. The Era newspaper reviewed the spellbinding reaction:
"...the result is little short of marvellous."
Acres patented the Kinematographic apparatus, but only in his own name, and as a result had a non-amicable parting with R.W. Paul as his business partner.
The two young American entrepreneurs who had traveled to Atlanta with their Phantoscope did likewise. After failing in Atlanta, Thomas Armat took one machine to New York and demonstrated it to Edison's representatives while Charles Jenkins returned to his full-time job and filed a patent for a refined Phantoscope projector system, though the inventor noted the shortcomings:
"...this is too slow for all films except dancing girls and similar ones"
Around this time, Alfred Clark replaced Laurie Dickson as Edison's lead director and made Kinetoscope films whose themes were linked to historical events. Clark directed The Execution of Mary Stuart (1895) where he created a jump-cut between a shot of an actor’s head on an executioner’s block and that of a mannequin head falling into a basket to portray Queen Mary’s death. Filmmaker Matt Barry observed:
"Clark may very well have been the first filmmaker to utilize this technique."
The beheading may be filmmaking’s first creative edit.
After attending the Lumière's debut at the Grand Cafe in Paris, Léon Gaumont decided he would manufacture cameras and sell photographic supplies. It was something he was well prepared for. Gaumont had previously worked as clerk in the precision engineering firm of Jules Carpentier, where he pursued an interest in photography. He was then hired by the prestigious photographic distributor, Comptoir Général de la Photographie, which had eventually been court ordered into bankruptcy.
With the company re-named Gaumont, he purchased the rights to Georges Demenÿ’s 60 mm Chronophotographe camera and Phonoscope projector patents and commissioned a former Carpentier engineer, Léopold Decaux, to adapt the design to 35 mm so he could buy standard film stock from Thomas Blair rather than the obscure 60 mm.
Gaumont then hired camera operator Anatole Thiberville to make short films that could be used to promote the company's brand. While her boss had been inspired by the Lumière's machinery, office assistant Alice Guy-Blaché was interested in the medium. She recalled years later:
"The educational and entertainment values of motion pictures seemed not to have caught his attention. I thought that one might do better than those demonstration films...Gathering my courage, I timidly proposed to Gaumont that I might write one or two little scenes and have a few friends perform in them."
Guy-Blaché did so much more.
Hoping to regain momentum and control of the industry, while confronted with falling kinetoscope sales, Edison entered into lengthy discussions with the estranged business partners Charles Jenkins and Thomas Armat. Sensing that the two men from Washington possessed superior technology but were underfunded, he offered them barely adequate compensation, renamed the system Vitascope and enforced a marketing slogan - 'the latest invention of the Wizard Edison'.
With the new projection technology in place and a new portable camera complete, Edison’s film production team began making actuality style films in Brooklyn, Niagara Falls, and Coney Island.
Jenkins re-committed himself to invention and in 1895 published a short article in the Electrical Engineer to explain.
"Transmitting Pictures by Electricity"
Television.
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