120 Years of Cinema: How the French Celebrated

5 minutes

A few days ago, the Institut Lumière in Lyon gathered 3,000 people to walk out of the former Lumière factory, recreating the scene of the world’s first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.

1895: the Lumière factory / 2015: the Institut Lumière

On December 28, 1895, the Lumière brothers held the first public, ticketed screening of their early silent films at the Salon Indien du Grand Café, 14 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. The day is considered the birth of cinema.

Lumière film poster

To celebrate cinema’s 120th anniversary this year, France has been celebrating from January to December, led by the Institut Lumière. Events included a retrospective, Lumière! Le cinéma inventé, at the Grand Palais in Paris and three walking tours in Paris and Lyon retracing the Lumières’ footsteps. The most meaningful centerpiece, though, was the restoration of the Lumière films and their release on Blu-ray.

The restoration cost €100,000, funded by the Total Foundation and the National Heritage Foundation. The Institut Lumière worked with several film archives and leading restoration specialists to restore 150 Lumière shorts in 4K. In September, they released a two-disc Blu-ray set, Lumière!, the first Blu-ray edition of the Lumières’ work. It contains two discs and a 44-page booklet.

The Lumière! Blu-ray set

Beyond Europe and the Americas, Lumière camera operators traveled as far as Asia and Africa, shooting more than 1,500 shorts. Of those, 1,422 survive. The first Lumière! release contains 114 shorts made between 1895 and 1905. Each runs about 50 seconds; together, they last 95 minutes.

Blu-ray menu

The negatives for Lumière! came from the Institut Lumière, the Cinémathèque française, and the French National Film Archives. They were scanned in 4K by the respected Italian restoration laboratory L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna, then restored by Eclair, a French film laboratory with a century of history.

The restored films premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Louis Lumière had chaired the first Cannes festival, making the screening a tribute to the Lumière brothers. Thierry Frémaux, director of the Institut Lumière and artistic director of Cannes, said: “The image quality is superb; it fully reveals the original beauty of Lumière’s films, their framing, and their depth of field.”

Here is a glimpse of the world 120 years ago:

Chinese opium smokers

London

Frenchmen playing billiards

Africans

Baby’s Lunch

The Eiffel Tower in 1900

The Sphinx

The main feature includes three audio tracks. The first is silent, as the films originally were; the second adds music by Camille Saint-Saëns; and the third pairs Saint-Saëns’s score with commentary by Frémaux.

Among the bonus features, you can see a “living” Auguste Lumière. There is also a 1968 conversation, filmed by Éric Rohmer, with master director Jean Renoir and film enthusiast Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque française and guardian of the Lumière negatives.

The most playful bonus brings together six contemporary directors—Pedro Almodóvar, Michael Cimino, Xavier Dolan, Jerry Schatzberg, Paolo Sorrentino, and Quentin Tarantino. Each remade Workers Leaving the Factory, and all six versions play simultaneously in a single frame. Dolan even asked every actor leaving the factory to carry a mobile phone.

A final bonus:

Here is what a restored film from 120 years ago looks like:

Running time: 1 min 12 sec

Cinema is a dangerous adventure