First public cinema screening in France held 125 years ago
The Lumière brothers organized their first public cinema screening at the Grand Café de Paris in 1895. Image: AFP
The Lumiere brothers held the first public film showing at the Grand Cafe de Paris 125 years ago, on Dec. 28, 1895.
The hand-cranked Lumiere Cinematographe, invented by Lumiere brothers Louis and Auguste, played the very first moving pictures in front of an audience that day in 1895 in the cafe’s Salon Indien.
The screening program comprised ten short films. The most well-known is “Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory.” All the films had been shot by the Lumière brothers and were no more than 40 seconds long.
The new technology was an instant hit
In the book “Histoire du cinématographe de ses origines à nos jours,” published in 1925, Georges-Michel Coissac related this event with several anecdotes from the son of the event’s organizer, Clement Maurice.
Maurice was a portrait photographer who had worked in the Lumiere factory in Lyon and later worked in the Parisian studio of the Lumiere brothers’ father, Antoine.
Antoine Lumiere and Clement Maurice agreed to organize the screenings between Christmas and New Year. They put up two posters on the door of the Grand Cafe, sent out invitations and decided to charge one franc (around €5 today, approx. $6 or P290) per showing.
Coissac explained that, at the time, Mr Volpini, owner of the Grand Cafe, leased them his basement for a year, refusing to accept the 20% of the proceeds as he had such little confidence in the success of the enterprise.
However, the Cinematographe screening was so successful that three weeks after the premiere, between 2,000 and 2,500 tickets were sold every day, all without any newspaper advertising.
The room could only fit 120 people at a time. A crowd would gather in front of the cafe to be able to attend one of the showings, each of which lasted about twenty minutes. Some spectators even came back with acquaintances they had met on the boulevard. CC
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