The Night Cinema Began

Every art likes a birthday, and cinema has an unusually precise one: 28 December 1895, in a basement on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris.

The room was the Salon Indien, part of the Grand Café, and the people who paid to sit in it watched a programme of short films made by Auguste and Louis Lumière, the sons of a photographic manufacturer in Lyon. Each film lasted under a minute. Workers came out of the Lumière factory gates. A gardener was squirted with his own hose. Nothing much happened, and it was astonishing anyway, because it happened on a wall in front of a room full of strangers.

That last detail is the important one, because moving pictures were not new. Thomas Edison's laboratory, with William Kennedy Laurie Dickson doing much of the actual work, had produced the Kinetoscope, and by 1894 people were paying to use it in parlours in America and Europe. But the Kinetoscope was a cabinet. You bent over it and looked through an eyepiece, alone. The Lumière Cinématographe, a hand-cranked box that could film, print and project, threw the image outwards, and the moment an image is projected it stops being a private curiosity and becomes a show. A historian choosing a birthday is really choosing a definition, and the usual definition of cinema is a paying audience watching together in the dark.

Then there is the train.

L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat shows a locomotive drawing into a station, filmed from the platform at an angle so that the engine grows towards the camera. The story everybody knows is that the first audiences screamed, ducked or ran for the back of the room, convinced the train would burst through the screen. It appears in textbooks, documentaries and after-dinner speeches.

There is very little to support it. Contemporary reports of the Lumière screenings describe wonder, not stampedes, and the film was probably not on the programme of 28 December at all; it seems to have been shown in the weeks after. Historians who have gone looking for the panic have found it mostly in later retellings, growing more dramatic as they go. It survives because it is too good to give up: it flatters us, the sophisticated modern viewers, and it dramatises something true, which is that people had never seen anything like this. A myth can be a good summary of a feeling and a bad account of an evening.

The other famous figure in the room, by his own account, was Georges Méliès. He ran the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, a theatre of stage illusion, and he saw at once that this machine was a new kind of trick. The Lumières declined to sell him one. One version has the family telling him the invention had no future, a line also attached to Louis Lumière himself, and neither attribution is secure. Méliès got hold of a projector in London, adapted it into a camera, and started filming.

His story of the great discovery is that his camera jammed while he was filming traffic in the street. When he got it going again and projected the result, an omnibus seemed to turn into a hearse. Whether it happened exactly like that we cannot say: nobody else was there, and it is the kind of story a magician tells about his own magic. What is documented is the method it describes, the stop trick: stop the camera, change the scene, start again. Méliès used it, along with multiple exposures and painted backdrops, in hundreds of films made in a glass-walled studio at Montreuil, of which A Trip to the Moon (1902) is the one everybody has seen, with its rocket in the eye of the moon.

It became a habit of film history to describe the two as opposite poles. The Lumières pointed the camera at the world and let it record. Méliès pointed it at a stage and made the world disappear. The division is too neat, since the Lumières staged scenes too, but it names the two things the cinema has done ever since: show us what is there, and show us what never could be.

Both began, in a sense, in that basement. It is worth remembering what actually happened there, and what we added afterwards.