Lumière Films
The
Lumières invented a new instrument they called the cinematograph; a hand-cranked portable machine that weighed only 16 pounds.
This allowed the Lumières to take movies in many different places.
The cinematograph had both recording and projecting modes so, the same device was used to take pictures and, with the addition of a light source, show them.
By 1900, the Lumière brothers were able to project film on a 52.5 by 69 foot screen. This is probably larger than the average current day theater.
Most of the Lumière films that I show were filmed in 1895, within a year of the Edison films. Like Edison's films, they are all very simple, one-shot affairs . However, in several ways they are all very different from the Edison films. The Edison films were shot in the Black Maria. The Lumière films were all shot outdoors. The Edison films were bits of vaudeville. Some Lumière films were also acts. However, most were little slices of life. Even though the camera was in plain sight, it's very unlikely any of the people seen on these films knew they were being filmed (they wouldn't have known what that meant). The films remain interesting since we're seeing real people and scenes of more than 120 years ago. Watching the Promenade of Ostriches really is as close as we can get to seeing something the elite of Paris did on a weekend afternoon that long ago. Finally, in a sense, there's no "art" to the Edison films...or rather, the art is wholly in the performance. The Lumières, on the other hand, knew how to take a picture! The scenes have strong compositional elements. Think about the pier jutting into the water in "Swimming in the Sea" or the way that the round boiler dominates the scene in "Loading a Boiler." Edison was getting stuff on film. The Lumieres were making art.