Lumiere's first picture shows

Streaming video - 1898

Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, The Gardener, Arrival of a Train at La Ciot Station and many more are on display in Lumiere's First Picture Show; a collection of firsts from the filmakers that started a business of film production, exhibition and distribution. The acknowledged birth of film history was December 28, 1895 when the first paying audience gathered at the Grand Cafe on Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, for a performance of films on the Cinematographe of brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere. This program is mostly reproduced from a collection of original Lumiere films unearthed in 1972 from a basement storage area in the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. They were copied using an original Cinematographe as a prin...ter. The program includes twenty films from 1895-97 taken in France, four special films that were hand-colored one frame at a time, and thirteen films taken in Washington, Chicago and New York City during 1896-97 in the United States. more