Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory
1895 · 1m · France
Directed by Louis Lumière
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
A single fixed-camera shot captures workers streaming out of the Lumière photographic goods factory in Lyon at the end of their workday. Often cited as the first motion picture ever publicly screened, it is the founding document of cinema as a medium.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The first movie, also partially staged — cinema's original sin built right into its founding document. Forty-six seconds and we've never recovered.
The founding document of cinema deserves its place in any serious vault, even as a totem. The YouTube link is dead, but countless public-domain copies exist and the work is forty-six seconds long.
Forty-six seconds of fixed-camera observation that turns out to have been partially staged across three versions - the origin myth and the origin of artifice in one shot. YouTube has killed this URL too, which is its own historical irony.
Reviews
The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory, but a century later it can be said that film is hardly drawn to the factory and is even repelled by it.
It has endured simply because of its extreme importance to the history of cinema... It is primarily important for the technological innovations it offers, and its precedent-setting status in the story of movie-making.
Festivals
- UNESCO Memory of the World Register 2005, Inscription