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Louis Lumiére (1864 - 1948)

The two flowing rivers of the birth of film are considered to be Thomas Edison and Louis and Auguste Lumiére. Edison was the Grand Showman, recording music hall turns inside his barnlike studio with a monstrous, cumbersome camera. The Lumiéres were Grand Documentarians, taking to the Parisian streets with their cinématographe and photographing everyday occurences, displaying a joy in movement and commonplace realities, celebrating the mundane as a lifeforce.

From the first, the Lumiéres were technicians. Their father, Antoine, was a well-known portrait painter who gave up paint for financial rewards in the business of photographic supplies. Antoine sent his sons to technical school, but because of recurring headaches, Louis left the school early and began experimenting with his father's photographic apparatus. In the process, he discovered a new process for the preparation of photographic plates and a factory was built to manufacture them. By 1895, the Lumiére factory was the leading European manufacturer of photographic products, employing over 300 workers. Like Edison, the Lumiéres had become successful inventor-businessmen.

An invitational demonstration of the Edison Kinetoscope, a parlor peephole machine, in Paris in 1894, sparked the Lumiéres' interest in motion pictures and the brothers set out to devise a machine that would combine motion picture movement with front projection. In 1895, Louis came up with such a device, and the cinématographe was patented in his name.

With the cinématographe, the emphasis of the nascent motion picture form was dramatically changed. Edison's bulky, stationary camera forced its subjects to display themselves in front of the camera as objects of a performance. The cinématographe, on the other hand, was not bulky but lightweight (about five kilograms), hand-cranked and not bound to a studio. The Lumičre camera reduced the frames-per-second (f.p.s.) speed from Edison's 48 to 16, using less film and reducing the clatter and grinding of the Edison camera. The cinématographe was also unique in that the same housing functioned as a camera, projector and printer.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, the Lumiére’s applied the principle of intermittent movement to film projection, allowing smooth-running projection through the film gate—an idea Edison had rejected as he struggled to perfect projection using continuous movement past the film gate. The Lumiéres' technical innovations allowed the motion pictures to venture into the world outside of a studio, permitting any object in reality to become a subject of interest for the camera.

From their first film, WORKERS LEAVING THE LUMIÉRE FACTORY (1895)/LA SORTIE DES USINES, the Lumiéres made everyday processes their subjects. In 1895, they recorded over 20 subjects, including L'ARRIVÉE D'UN TRAIN EN GARE/ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN, LE REPAS DE BÉBÉ/FEEDING THE BABY, L'ARROSEUR ARROSÉE/WATERING THE GARDENER, DEMOLITION D'UN MUR/THE + FALLING WALL and COURSE EN SACS/THE SACK RACE.

At first, the Lumiéres kept their invention a secret, only demonstrating the cinématographe at private screenings, first at a March 22, 1895, industrial meeting in Paris and later at a June 10 meeting of photographers at Lyon. These private exhibitions were met with great enthusiasm, and, on December 28, 1895, the Lumiéres held their first public screening at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines. The reaction was sensational and before long there were 20 showings a day to meet the tremendous public demand. The success spurred the Lumiéres to debut the cinématographe in England, Belgium, Holland, and Germany.

By 1897, the Lumiéres were a global success, training hundreds of operators and expanding their film catalog to over 750 titles. But after the Paris Exposition of 1900, during which they projected a film on a mammoth 99 x 79-foot screen, the brothers decided to curtail their film exhibitions and devote themselves to the manufacture and sale of their inventions.

As inventors and businessmen, the Lumiéres were perhaps uneasy shooting film subjects in an area that had begun to attract burgeoning film artists. While Edison stubbornly struggled to hold back the clock, forming a trust to quash up-and-coming filmmakers, the Lumiéres' withdrawal from the vanguard of filmmaking opened the door for others to advance the aesthetic side of film. 

Nevertheless, during their brief careers in production, the Lumiéres brought filmmaking to five continents, demonstrated the beauty of movement in the mundane, and forever enshrined "cinema" as the art form of the 20th century.  

Georges Méliès (1861 - 1938)

One of the visionary pioneers of the cinema, Georges Méliès was born to a boot manufacturer and passed through adolescence exhibiting two talents: for drawing and for making cardboard Punch & Judy shows. During his military service he was stationed near the home of Robert Houdin, the magician whose optical illusions had captivated Méliès as a child, and whose theater he would eventually buy after he escaped from his family job as overseer of factory machinery.

When the Lumiere brothers (Louis and Auguste) unveiled their Cinématographe in public on December 28, 1895, Méliès was not only present, but clearly the most affected member of the audience. Frustrated when the Lumieres would not sell him the machine, he sought out R.W. Paul and his Animatographe in London. Méliès then built his own camera-projector and was able to present his first film screening on April 4, 1896.

Méliès began by screening the films of others, mainly those made on the Edison Kinetoscope, but within months he was showing his own works; these were apparently one-reel views, usually consisting of one shot lasting sixty seconds. Although Méliès is often credited with inventing the narrative film by relating stories as opposed to simply depicting landscapes or single events, this is not strictly true; many of the Lumiere brothers' films were also much more than simple, static views. Méliès's signal contribution to the cinema was to combine his experience as a magician and theater owner with the new invention of motion pictures in order to present spectacles of a kind not possible in the live theater.

Within nine months, Méliès had increased the length of the filmed entertainment (his last film of 1896 consisted of three, three-minute reels) and was making regular use of previously unimaginable special effects, such as making performers disappear by stopping his camera in mid-shot. As the year ended he was also completing a glass-walled studio where he could make films without fear of the elements.

From 1897 to 1904 Méliès made hundreds of films, the great majority now lost. The scores of prints which survive show why his contemporaries were both initially impressed, and ultimately bored. Méliès regarded the story in his films to be a mere "thread intended to link the 'effects' … I was appealing to the spectator's eyes alone." Failing to develop any consistent ideas, his entertainments consisted only of a succession of magical tableaux peopled by Méliès (who often dressed as the conjurer or the devil) and young women recruited from the theaters of Paris, performing against flat, painted backdrops.

Méliès's own resources and interest in these films apparently began to dwindle after 1905, partly due to competition from other filmmakers and rising costs, partly because of the growing industrialization of the French film industry, and partly due to his wish to continue presenting live programs at the Théâtre Robert Houdin. By 1911 he had ceased independent distribution; by the time France entered WWI in 1914 his career as a producer-director had ended. His best-known surviving works are A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902), THE MELOMANIAC (1903), AN IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE (1904) and THE CONQUEST OF THE POLE, (1912, his last year of production).  

Léon Gaumont (1864 - 1946)

A merchant of photographic equipment, in 1895 he established the Gaumont company and in the following year began manufacturing motion picture apparatus. The commercial success of his chronotographe, a camera-projector developed by Georges Demeny, encouraged him to expand his activity into the production of films. The regular director of his films through 1907 was Alice Guy. Later directors included Louis Feuillade, Jacques Feyder, and Marcel L'Herbier. At the same time, Gaumont began experimenting with various film devices. One of his early inventions, in 1902, was the Chronophone, a sound system synchronizing motion pictures with a record player. His company expanded rapidly and soon comprised studios, labs, and a growing chain of movie theaters in Paris and other cities. After 1907 it extended its business activities into England, Germany, Russia, and even the United States. Gaumont continued with his technical research throughout the company's expansion.

In 1912 he introduced a program of "talking movies" into one of his Paris theaters, using an improved version of his Chronophone. In the same year he patented a three-color additive process, the Chronochrome, and in 1918 produced a short color film with that system. In 1928 he developed a sound system, which was used in the production of the first French talkie, EAU DE NIL. However, the system was imperfect and was soon dropped. Gaumont's retirement from the business in 1929 ended an era marked by the complete dominance of the French film industry by two pioneer giants—Léon Gaumont and Charles Pathé.  

Charles Pathé (1863 - 1957)

He was the son of a pork butcher and a cook and joined the labor force at age 12. After five years of military service, he went to Argentina hoping to make a fortune but returned to France empty-handed in 1891. He tried several occupations without success and then, in 1894, he finally hit the jackpot when he bought an Edison phonograph and began exhibiting it at fairs all over France. Business was good and within several months he was an established importer and merchant of phonographs. By 1896 he had extended his business interests to include the sale of motion picture projectors and even directed a number of simple films in imitation of Lumiére. The same year, he founded with his brothers Émile, Jacques, and Théophile, the Pathé Fréres company.

The sale of phonographs constituted the major source of Pathé Fréres' profits until 1901. In that year Charles left the phonograph end of the business in Émile's charge (Jacques and Théophile had by then left the company) and began devoting his energies to film production, with the aid of director-producer Ferdinand Zecca. In 1902, Pathé built a studio in Vincennes and began turning out short films assembly-line style, at the rate of one or two a day. The following year he began forming foreign branches, at first in London, then in Moscow and New York. Before long Pathé branches were popping up in such other faraway places as Kiev, Budapest, Calcutta, and Singapore. By 1908, the Pathé Fréres company was an international empire, selling twice as many films in the United States as all American companies combined. It was by far the world's largest movie producer. Expanding rapidly, Pathé went into the manufacturing of raw film and motion picture equipment and virtually monopolized the business by building studios, laboratories, and motion picture theaters. The company developed a color process, Pathé-Color, and launched the world's first weekly newsreel, "Pathé-Journal," made in France as well as in other countries, including the US. With WWI shutting down some of his operations in France and causing chaotic conditions in others, Pathé came to the US at the end of 1914 and centered his efforts on solidifying the position of his American branch, the Pathé Exchange. When Pathé returned home in 1917, he found conditions profoundly changed. Production costs had soared and the local market was saturated with foreign films, mostly American. Foreign markets, on the other hand, especially the American market, were turning French exports down. In desperation he ordered his filmmakers to produce films geared specifically to the American taste, but he could not stop the trend. In 1918 he began the long and agonizing process of divesting his empire of its various branches and affiliates. In 1929 he sold his last interest in the business and retired to the Riviera.  

Film d'Art

French production company founded in 1908 to bring films of artistic merit to an elite, educated audience. The company's output, beginning with THE ASSASSINATION OF THE DUC DE GUISE (1908), featured renowned players from the Comédie Française under the direction of leading contemporary figures such as Abel Gance. Mostly static recordings of the established theatrical repertoire, these features did little to advance filmic art but nevertheless earned a new prestige for the medium.

The first Film d'Art production to reach the U.S. was QUEEN ELIZABETH (1912), starring Sarah Bernhardt. Distributed by Adolph Zukor, the film was a huge success, influencing Zukor to form his Famous Players in Famous Plays Company (which later evolved into Paramount) and proving that feature-length films could be commercially profitable. 

Louis Feuillade (1873 - 1925)

Prolific director of over 700 films, most of them short or medium-length. Feuillade began his career with Gaumont where, as well as directing his own features, he was appointed artistic director in charge of production in 1907. Feuillade's work was largely comprised of film series; his first series, begun in 1910 and numbering 15 episodes, was LE FILM ESTHÉTIQUE, a financially unsuccessful attempt at "high-brow" cinema. More popular was LIFE AS IT IS (1911-13), which moved from the costume pageantry of his earlier work to a more realistic, if somewhat melodramatic, depiction of contemporary life. Feuillade also directed scores of short films featuring the characters Bébé and Bout-de-zan.

Feuillade's most successful feature-length serials were FANTÔMAS (1913), which chronicled the diabolical exploits of the "emperor of crime," and LES VAMPIRES (1915), which trailed a criminal gang led by Irma Vep (Musidora) and was noted for its imaginative use of locations and lyrical, almost surreal style.

1913              FANTÔMAS              director, screenwriter

1913              JUVE CONTRE FANTÔMAS              director, screenwriter

1913              LE MORT QUI TUE              director, screenwriter

1914              FANTÔMAS CONTRE FANTÔMAS              director, screenwriter

1914              LE FAUX MAGISTRAT              director, screenwriter

1915              LES VAMPIRES              director, screenwriter

1916              JUDEX              director, screenwriter

1916              L'AVENTURE DES MILLIONS              director, screenwriter

1916              NOTRE PAUVRE COEUR              director, screenwriter

1916              UN MARIAGE DE RAISON              director, screenwriter

1917              LA DESERTEUSE              director, screenwriter

1917              LA NOUVELLE MISSION DE JUDEX              director, screenwriter

1917              LE PASSE DE MONIQUE              director, screenwriter

1918              LES PETITES MARIONNETTES              director, screenwriter

1918              TIH MINH              director, screenwriter

1918              VENDEMIAIRE              director, screenwriter

1919              BARRABAS              director, screenwriter

1919              L'ENGRENAGE              director, screenwriter

1919              L'HOMME SANS VISAGE              director, screenwriter

1920              LES DEUX GAMINES              director, screenwriter

1921              L'ORPHELINE              director, screenwriter

1921              PARISETTE              director, screenwriter

1922              LE FILS DU FILIBUSTIER              director, screenwriter

1923              L'ORPHELIN DE PARIS              director, screenwriter

1923              LA GOSSELINE              director, screenwriter

1923              LE GAMIN DE PARIS              director, screenwriter

1923              VINDICTA              director, screenwriter

1924              LA FILLE BIEN GARDÉE              director, screenwriter

1924              LE STIGMATE              director, screenwriter

1924              LUCETTE              director, screenwriter

1924              PIERROT, PIERRETTE              director, screenwriter

Max Linder (1883 - 1925)

At 17 he left high school to study drama and soon after began an acting career on the Bordeaux stage. He moved to Paris in 1904 and started playing supporting parts in melodramas. In 1905 he embarked upon a parallel career in Pathé films. For three years he spent his days in the film studios and his evenings on the stage, using his real name in the theater and the pseudonym Max Linder on the screen. By 1908 he had given up the stage to concentrate on his increasingly successful screen career. By 1910 he was an internationally popular comedian, possibly the best-known screen comic on either side of the Atlantic in the years before WWI. Typically playing a dapper dandy of the idle class, he developed a style of slapstick silent screen comedy that anticipated Mack Sennett and Chaplin and set the premises of the genre for years to come. Ferdinand Zecca, Louis Gasnier, and Alberto Capelani were among the directors of his earliest films.

By 1910, Linder was writing and supervising, and from 1911 also directing, all his own films. His popularity was at its peak in 1914, when he was called to arms. Early in the war he was a victim of gas poisoning and suffered a serious breakdown. The injury was to have a lasting effect on his physical and mental well-being. He returned briefly to French films, but finding his popularity vanishing, he accepted a bid from Essanay and left for the US late in 1916.

Continuous ill health hampered the American phase of Linder's career from the start. In mid-1917, after only three films, he was felled by double pneumonia and spent nearly a year recovering in a Swiss sanitarium. When he returned to the US in 1921, he formed his own production unit, releasing through United Artists. But after making only three more American films, including the celebrated parody (of Fairbanks's THE THREE MUSKETEERS) THE THREE MUST-GET-THERES (1922), he returned to Europe, where he married the daughter of a Paris restaurateur in 1923. Linder made two more film appearances, one in France, the other in Austria, but realized his career was finished. In 1925 he entered a suicide pact with his wife. Their bodies were discovered side by side in a Paris hotel. He remained forgotten for years, until the 60s, when many of his old films began turning up, affording film historians an opportunity to evaluate his career and his contributions to the evolution of screen comedy.

1905              LA PREMIČRE SORTIE D'UN COLLEGIEN              performer

1906              LE POISON              performer

1908              UNE CONQUĘETE              performer

1909              LE PETIT JEUNE HOMME              performer

1909              UN MARIAGE Ŕ L'AMÉRICAIN              performer

1910              MAX AERONAUTE              performer

1910              MAX CHAMPION DE BOXE              performer

1910              MAX SE MARIE              performer

1911              MAX DANS SA FAMILLE              director, performer

1912              LE MAL DE MER              director, performer

1912              MAX ET LES FEMMES              director, performer

1913              MAX ASTHMATIQUE              director, performer

1913              MAX VIRTUOSE              director, performer

1914              MAX DANS LES AIRES              director, performer

1915              MAX ET L'ESPION              director, performer

1917              MAX COMES ACROSS              director, performer

1917              MAX IN A TAXI              director, performer

1917              MAX WANTS A DIVORCE              director, performer

1919              LE PETIT CAFÉ              director, performer

1920              LE FEU SACRÉ              performer

1921              BE MY WIFE              director, performer

1921              SEVEN YEARS BAD LUCK              director, performer

1922              THE THREE MUST-GET-THERES              director, performer

1923              AU SECOURS!              performer

1924              LE ROI DU CIRQUE/DER ZIRKUSKÖNIG/KING OF THE CIRCUS              co-director— with E. E. Violet, performer

Cecil Hepworth (1874 - 1953)

Pioneering British filmmaker who patented several inventions and published one of the first books on film, Animated Photography, or the ABC of the Cinematograph (1897). Hepworth set up a studio and laboratory and made several documentaries as well as the remarkably advanced narrative short, RESCUED BY ROVER (1905). He was a major figure in British cinema until the end of WWI, primarily as a producer.

The postwar slump that disabled the entire British film industry forced Hepworth out of business in the early 1920s. He later lectured on the history of cinema and made trailers and advertising shorts.

1899              EXPRESS TRAIN IN A RAILWAY CUTTING              producer, director, photography

1900              THE ECCENTRIC DANCER              producer, director, photography

1900              THE EXPLOSION OF A MOTOR CAR              producer, director, photography

1900              HOW IT FEELS TO BE RUN OVER              producer, director, photography

1900              THE KISS              producer, director, photography

1901              CORONATION OF KING EDWARD VII              producer, director, photography

1901              FUNERAL OF QUEEN VICTORIA              producer, director, photography

1901              THE GLUTTON'S NIGHTMARE...